John Cheever: A Biography. - book reviews

National Review, Jan 27, 1989 by Jeff Giles

John Cheever A Biography, by Scott Donaldson (Random House, 359 pp., $22.50)

SCOTT DONALDSON'S biography of John Cheever is a competent, if overly cautious, account of a writer who careened both in life and in fiction between light and dark, grace and sin, elegance and pathos. Cheever never set out to prove that "a writer could have a family, a job, and even live in a suburb." But somewhere along the way, things just got too complicated. There were the paralyzing lows in self-esteem, the affairs with both men and women, and, of course, the drinking. Cheever was always "the brightest person in the room," one acquaintance observes, "until ten o'clock when he fell over drunk." John Cheever was a poor student, and at the age of 18 he was thrown out of the Thayer Academy. Shortly thereafter he wrote a story, called "Expelled," which was printed in The New Republic. Cheever moved to New York and spent tbe rest of his life there: shuttling back and forth between the city, his home in Ossining, and the upstate writers' colony Yaddo. Although an acknowledged master of his craft, Cheever usually received mixed reviews. He was nagged at for being "a New Yorker writer"; his collections were perceived as uneven; and he never managed to write a novel that made everybody happy. In 1984, Susan Cheever published an exceptional memoir of her father, called Home before Dark. Donaldson's work is a more precise and reliable account, but it is written with none of the force or candor of Miss Cheever's. She quotes extensively from her father's journals and letters; Donaldson often bogs down in lengthy biographical readings of various novels and stories. For Donaldson, John Cheever is a man starved for love and recognition. He watches while his friends Updike and Bellow bound up the literary ladder; he is terrified of becoming "the lonely man eating in a Chinese restaurant." Ultimately, Donaldson's biography reads like a generic parable of the disillusioned writer. Donaldson charges Cheever with uncertainty, excess, and infidelity, but in the end he equivocates: "John's good deeds surely outweigh his transgressions." Ideally, John Cheever.- A Biography should be read alongside The Stories of John Cheever, lest Donaldson's flat-footed prose make one forget that his subject is a writer whose stories are graceful, hilarious, and terrifying. As Donaldson puts it, John Cheever was, if nothing else, a man "constitutionally unable to write a mediocre line."