Volume 20, Number 8 · May 17, 1973
Surprise, Surprise
By Thomas R. Edwards
The World of Apples
by John Cheever
Knopf, 174 pp., $5.95
People Will Always Be Kind
by Wilfrid Sheed
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 374 pp., $7.95
Points for a Compass Rose
by Evan S. Connell Jr.
Knopf, 240 pp., $6.95
For some two centuries fiction has been telling us that unpleasant surprises may be coming at any moment, that the expectations of the settled life get treacherous treatment from nature and man. Yet the art of personal apocalypse persists. 'He' in the passage above is a character of John Cheever's, a somewhat Frost-like old New England poet driven to goatish pornographic imaginings by a glimpse of copulating lovers in an Italian wood. The story 'The World of Apples' seems to me virtually flawless, standing out in an otherwise uneven and rather tired collection, and reminding us that Cheever at his best is a remarkable writer. Asa Bascomb, rich in honors but lacking the Nobel Prize he covets and almost deserves, is living out his life in the orderly quiet of a hill town south of Rome. Appalled and disgusted by his susceptibility to erotic shock, he struggles to believe that the obscene scribblings it drives him to are as 'candid and innocent' as what he finds in Petronius and Juvenal, that something 'innocent, factual, and merry' is being falsified by anxiety and shame.
Review, 3070 words
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