There's a certain smug, elitist assumption in most of the highbrow fiction of the 50s, 60s & 70s that American suburbia is sort of a Potemkin Village--a pretty facade disguising lives of quiet desperation. This attitude was particularly evident in the pages of The New Yorker, in the stories of folks like John O'Hara, John Updike and John Cheever. You know the type of story--Dad works in the aerospace industry; Mom's a real estate broker; there are three kids, barbecues every weekend, bridge clubs, bowling leagues, etc., etc., etc., but no one really finds their life fulfilling so they secretly escape into sex, drugs and alcohol, yadda, yadda, yadda...
Perhaps the most famous example of the genre is Cheever's famous story The Swimmer. On a brilliant summer day Neddy Merrill decides to swim home from cocktails at his neighbors via the swimming pools that virtually everyone has in their backyard. As he starts out he seems to be virtually a child:
He was a slender man--he seemed to have the especial
slenderness of youth--and while he was far
from young he had slid down his banister that morning
and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite
on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the
smell of coffee in his dining room. He might
have been compared to a summer's day, particularly
the last hours of one, and while he lacked a
tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely
one of youth, sport, and clement weather.
But as he progresses from pool to pool, he seems to age and even the weather seems to transition from Summer to Fall. His optimism and satisfaction with life is gradually replaced by intimations that he may be blocking out his actual situation, that his life may in fact be a mess. Finally, as he arrives at his own house, he finds:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had
all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the
Westerhazys' for supper? Had the girls joined her
there or gone someplace else?... The house was
locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the
stupid maid must have locked the place up until
he remembered that it had been some time since they
had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted,
pounded on the door, tried to force it with his
shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw
that the place was empty.
Regardless of whether Neddy's journey is meant to symbolize his entire life or his earlier optimism is meant to be mere self delusion, at the heart of the story lies the message that things are not as they seem in this happy upper middle class burgh, that lurking just beneath the surface is the looming specter of financial and emotional ruin.
Much of this disdain for Middle America is simply political. The suburbs were populated by fairly conservative businessmen, white collar workers and skilled employees. Those little pink houses contained traditional families, churchgoers, Elks Club members, etc. This was the Silent Majority that Nixon talked about. The institutional Left meanwhile is fairly urban, more morally permissive and, prior to the advent of the new Market, not very familiar with or concerned about business. The antipathy between the two, sort of a large scale Town & Gown rivalry, is natural. It is only exacerbated by the fact that the intelligentsia tend to be fairly miserable and bitterly resented the bucolic lives of those who had fled the city. Add to these general motives the fact that Cheever was the product of a domineering mother and an unsuccessful father, was alcoholic and a closeted homosexual, and was a social climber humiliated by his own lack of formal education, and it is not hard to see why he would tend to assume the worst about the happy lives of others. Buried deep behind the false front he put up, it's inevitable that he suspected that others were presenting false selves too.
The best story in this collection captures his own doubt about this supposition. In The Worm in the Apple, the narrator presents to us The Crutchmans--a typical Cheeveresque family, of whom the narrator says:
The Crutchmans were so very, very happy and so temperate
in all their habits and so pleased with
everything that came their way that one was bound
to suspect a worm in their rosy apple and that
the extraordinary rosiness of the fruit was only
meant to conceal the gravity and depth of the
infection.
In the ensuing pages we are treated to a guided tour of their complacent middle class lives, all the while expecting the hammer to fall and the worm to be exposed. But at the end of the story they still seem to be exactly what they originally appeared to be, a boring happy family:
With their own dear children gone away the Crutchmans
might be expected to suffer the celebrated
spiritual destitution of their age and their kind--the
worm in the apple would at last be laid
bare--although watching this charming couple as
they entertained their friends or read the books
they enjoyed one might wonder if the worm was not
in the eye of the observer who, through
timidity or moral cowardice, could not embrace the
broad range of their natural enthusiasms and
would not grant that, while Larry played neither
Bach nor football very well, his pleasure in both
was genuine. You might at least expect to
see in them the usual destructiveness of time, but either
through luck or as a result of their temperate and
healthy lives they has lost neither their teeth nor
their hair. The touchstone of their euphoria
remained potent, and while Larry gave up the fire
truck he could still be seen at the communion rail,
the fifty-yard line, the 8:03, and the Chamber
Music Club, and through the prudence and shrewdness
of Helen's broker they got richer and richer
and richer and lived happily, happily, happily,
happily.
I realize that by the time you get to the fourth successive "happily"
there, you're inclined to assume he's being facetious. If so, he
really is asking us to look at these mundane but happy lives and be repelled
by them, as if the "normal" or "run of the mill" existence were something
horrifying and our guide is Mr. Kurtz (see Orrin's
review of Heart of Darkness). This just strikes me as too monstrously
condescending on his part, not to mention extravagantly wrongheaded.
The more charitable reading is that he's expressing genuine doubt about
his own inclination to assume there's a worm. In that sense the story
really works to subvert the message of the rest of his oeuvre and much
of the fiction and the attitudes of his peers. For me, this one story
makes the collection worthwhile, while also mitigating strongly against
any chance of my hacking my way through the other 800 pages of the book.
(Reviewed:10-May-00)
Grade: (C+)
