Cheever is sometimes discussed as a sociologist of the suburbs, but in fact a gold dust of fantasy touches everything he writes. Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, once said that fiction should be a combination of fairy tale and newspaper report. But every time he begins to write something new it comes out as an obscene scrawl, a banal but offensive piece of pornography: "Filth was his destiny, his best self, and he began with relish a long ballad called The Fart That Saved Athens." Later he's onto "The Favorite of Tiberio" and "The Confessions of a Public School Headmaster" and "The Baseball Player's Honeymoon." An aging expatriate poet, laden with honors, lives in the Italian countryside.
In one of his stories, "The World of Apples," he dramatized the struggle between his licentiousness and his acute moralizing. Italy is a theater in which Cheever could stage his inner conflicts. Many of his stories and much of "The Wapshot Scandal," his second novel, are set in Italy depending on their mood his American characters are bewildered by the language and the crowding and the thieving criminality of the Italians, or they are seduced by the Italians' beauty and pagan amorality, or they are beset by homesickness and long for hamburgers and baseball. Living in Italy for extended periods was the great geographical adventure of Cheever's life and a foil to his obsession with American exurbia.
0 kommentar(er)
