Volume 29, Number 7 · April 29, 1982
Chance-taker
By Robert M. Adams
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
by John Cheever
Knopf, 100 pp., $10.00
Whether John Cheever consciously set himself the problem of making a small piece of fiction feel like a big one, that is the most impressive thing he's accomplished in Oh What a Paradise It Seems. The book is what Henry James delighted to call (without ever condescending to define the word) a nouvelle; and it would almost seem that the old master had Mr. Cheever in his mind's eye when he wrote of 'the only compactness that has a charm, the only spareness that has a force, the only simplicity that has a grace—those, in each order, that produce the rich effect.' Though the canvas is small in this new novel, it is not miniature work; it is broad, impressionistic, at its best a poetic narrative.
Review, 1137 words
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