A Cheever Summer
The literary antidote to all this heat-induced malaise.
This summer has been so sultry and suffocating and languorous that to walk your dog seems more akin to abuse than canine care. A native East Coaster, I should be used to the three months of every year that sequester me inside between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. Always, without fail, they arrive and land on my chest with a resounding thud.
During those unavoidable indoor hours, I read. And thinking of the connection between summer and literature, my mind floats to John Cheever.
I'm a sucker for upper-middle-class, suburban malaise. In fiction, it is my choice of drug. And if there is one person who has produced this opium in tons, it is Cheever—the “Chekhov of the suburbs.”
Every Cheever story is about peeling away the surface, revealing the darkness that lurks beneath. Nothing is ever as good as it seems. If it is, then it’s Cheever’s job to find and exploit the holes. Mostly, it’s a matter of status. Those of a certain New Yorker, upper-middle class who throw dinner parties for their erudite friends and drink on the patios of their vast estates. It is these people who find themselves upended at the conclusion of a Cheever story.
Even if you don’t know John Cheever, you know “The Swimmer.” A story in which a man gets the idea of swimming home, lapping across the pools of his suburban neighbors. “The Swimmer” begins on a glorious summer day. Lounging around a pool of brilliant blue water, drinking gin, languishing in the heavy sun. He has a beautiful wife and four beautiful daughters. He is happy.
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’” In some ways, this first sentence establishes the haze of hangover through which you follow along on Neddy’s journey. By reading the story, you are entering a world where the air and the water are heavy with gin.
As Neddy progresses through his pilgrimage, Cheever starts to chip away at the veneer. There are hints of uncertainty, that something is awry. Neddy is unsure of how much time has passed, when he last saw his friends the Welchers, what “misfortunes” of his Mrs. Halloran referred to. There are cumulus clouds in the distance. The temperatures creep down, the water turns cold, Neddy grows tired and thinner.
Beyond the hedge, he pulled on his trunks and fastened them. They were loose, and he wondered if during the space of an afternoon he could have lost some weight. He was cold, and he was tired, and the naked Hallorans and their dark water had depressed him. The swim was too much for his strength, but how could he have guessed this, sliding down the banister that morning and sitting in the Westerhazys’ sun? His arms were lame. His legs felt rubbery and ached at the joints. The worst of it was the cold in his bones, and the feeling that he might never be warm again. Leaves were falling around him and he smelled woodsmoke on the wind. Who would be burning wood in the fireplace at this time of year?
After swimming his second-to-last pool—the pool of his mistress—he smells “chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance on the night air, strong as gas.”
He continues. Only one more pool left. Exhausted and weak, he manages to get across the Gilmartins’ pool. Finally, he returns home. Except everything is dark. The doors are locked and the handles are rusted over.
“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.”
At the start of “The Swimmer,” Ned Merrill has everything. By the end, he has nothing.
My favorite story of all, the story that made me fall in love with Cheever, is “Goodbye, My Brother.”
Like “The Swimmer,” “Goodbye, My Brother” has an opening line that is etched into my memory:
“We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.”
The first time I read “Goodbye, My Brother” was in a fiction workshop during my final semester of college. Every week, my professor assigned us a handful of stories and a slew of optional ones. I made it a point to read all the pieces, in case I missed something juicy, something that would take my breath away. One of those weeks, “Goodbye, My Brother” was on the optional list, all alone at the bottom. I like to think this was an instance of fate. I had many opportunities to retreat, to surrender to mental fatigue, which would have meant never reaching “Goodbye, My Brother.” But I kept reading and soon, I arrived at that entrancing first sentence: “We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.”
Half-an-hour after I finished reading it, I hurried to the Strand and bought myself a copy of The Stories of John Cheever. That hallowed red book, the Bible for fiction writers. The moment I returned to my studio in the Village, I splayed across the bed and started to read.
As I neared the end of that opening paragraph, I knew that the Pommeroys had their hooks in me.
Published in the New Yorker on August 25, 1951, as another blistering summer rounded its final lap, “Goodbye, My Brother” does not read like its 73 years (!). It seems timeless—a story that could have been published in 1878 as much as in 2024. Human nature doesn’t change. Family conflict, skewed perception, memory, and morality are everlasting themes, and they flourish in “Goodbye, My Brother.”
Lawrence—the estranged member of the Pommeroys—comes over on the ferry to Laud’s Head to visit his family: his widowed mother, his two brothers Chaddy and the unnamed narrator, and his sister Diana. Spouses and kids are all there, though the central dynamic is that between Lawrence and the narrator. From his first interaction with the family, Lawrence is established, purportedly, as the black sheep; while everyone is engaged in drinking, he is indifferent and causes tension. Such instances of misanthropic behavior continue and escalate throughout the narrative. The reader is left to determine where Lawrence is a thorn in the side of the Pommeroys or if he’s the only rational, well-adjusted character in the story.
In “Goodbye, My Brother,” the veneer is literally crumbling. The house in Laud’s Head is built on a cracked sea wall; though the house is only 22-years-old, it is covered with “lichened and weather-beaten” shingles that are two hundred years old to “make it look venerable”; and the door to the terrace is artificially weathered and scored to give the appearance of age.
Lawrence says, “Imagine wanting to live so much in the past that you’ll pay men carpenters’ wages to disfigure your front door.”
That introduces another point of contention between Lawrence and the rest of the Pommeroy clan: past v. present and future. While the narrator, his wife Helen, and his mother are all content with living in the years of memory, Lawrence is the only one changing, evolving. When the narrator and Helen attend the costume party at the boat club—where everyone is meant to come “as you wish you were”—he wears his old football uniform and she her wedding dress. In fact, at the dance, there are ten more brides and at least four other football players. Everyone at Laud’s Head, except for Lawrence, seems to want to turn back the clock.
“Goodbye, My Brother,” as electrifying as it is in your first encounter, grows only more rewarding with every read. I could write dozens of pages about it, and I’m sure some scholars already have. I’ve only dipped a toe into the ocean of meaning and metaphor that exists within the story. The only way to truly appreciate it is to dive into it yourself.
The suburban melancholy of Cheever’s stories is the ideal cure for all this draining summer heat. More than anything, “The Swimmer” and “Goodbye, My Brother” are anti-summer stories. Leaves swirl around the cool air and the frothy, chilly sea waves break against a graying shore. These two stories herald in that autumnal fragrance, not stubborn or as strong as gas, but filled with the crispness of a new season, of rebirth.