Books: Crack in the Picture Window

THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL (185 pp.)—John Cheever—Harper ($3).

The people of John Cheever’s stories dwell among the shifting symbols of success, where the status is very seldom quo. Most of them live in Manhattan or commute to its skyscraper hives, for that is where the honey is. But somehow their lives, loves and labors leave the cuprous taste of pennies in their mouths; the middle-income bracket is their social vise. Few writers have probed the masked anxieties of the “have-not-enoughs” with the skill and authority of John (The Wapshot Chronicle) Cheever, 46. After Marquand, he is the ablest chronicler of the interior life of the organization man.

Gin & Company. The locale of these eight finely wrought stories is Shady Hill, which could pass for many a commuting community in New York or Connecticut. The lawns and hedges are faultless, but there are cracks in the picture-window lives. In 0 Youth and Beauty!, a middle-aging onetime track star enlivens the soggy butt ends of party nights by running a hurdle race over the furniture. One night he falls and breaks his leg. Shortly after that, his wife accidentally shoots him, but not before the youth cult has robbed him of the will to live. In Just Tell Me Who It Was, a happy May-December match promises never to be the same again after the young wife’s blue lace girdle turns up among the lost-and-found items of an all-night country club bacchanal. The funniest and possibly the best story in the book is called The Sorrows of Gin. Amy, a grave sub-teen-ager senses vaguely that the border between heavy social drinking and semi-alcoholism is a thin line over which her parents keep falling. A cook gives the youngster the idea that she would be doing everyone a favor by pouring an occasional bottle of liquor down the drain. This policy reaches a hilarious climax one night when Amy’s father barks at a prim, sleep-dazed old lady babysitter: “You must be stinking, Mrs. Henlein . . . You drank a full quart of gin.” When his little girl tries to run away from home, the father, who is always going off on business trips, wonders how he can teach her that home is best and blood is thicker than firewater.

Cards of Identity. Author Cheever’s plots carry his punch in the way that cotton carries chloroform. His stories are saturated with the sights and sounds of suburban life. His characters show the identity cards of the hard-pressed middle class: unpaid bills, buttonless shirts, little scraps of paper that read, “oleomargarine, frozen spinach, Kleenex, dog biscuit . . .” They believe they are “outside the realm of God’s infinite mercy,” and yet their prayer is heartfelt: “Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapes and Bloody Marys . . .”

For moments, and moments only, Cheever’s characters can be possessed by joy, reveling in the “idle splash and smell of a heavy rain” or scenting on some passing breeze “the salt air in the churches of Venice.” But guilt and remorse close in like sudden fog, a free-floating guilt that seems to swirl around some atavistic memory of the Good Life. Thus an errant wife who has drunk and danced through the night is startled by the birds of dawning: “The pristine light and the loud singing reminded her of some ideal—some simple way of life, in which she dried her hands on an apron and Will came home from the sea—that she had betrayed.”

This nostalgia for a primitive paradise lost—a paradise that of course never existed—is not confined to the far end of a commuter’s timetable.