Short Take: "The Five Forty-Eight," John Cheever

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

One may feel John Cheever is writing beneath himself in his 1954 short story, “The Five-Forty-Eight.” Or, one might think the story is brilliantly structured and paced. One’s reaction hinges on one’s attitude towards the use of melodramatic suspense. Cheever’s protagonist is a New York businessman who finds himself stalked by a former employee. The story’s first half recounts his efforts to elude her on the city streets. The second depicts the employee confronting him at gunpoint on his train home. The protagonist is typical of Cheever: a selfish, misanthropic personality masked by the trappings of success. Cheever’s incomparable eye for social detail is also very much present. But Cheever doesn’t build the narrative through ironies or characterization. He strings the reader along through dread. In the first half, one’s attention is held by the question of whether the protagonist is in danger. In the second, it’s whether he will get shot. Cheever makes it explicit that the employee is psychologically unstable, so the possibility is always there. One will either feel the suspense story is enriched by the social-realist surface, or the social realism is cheapened by the suspense. As far as the writer of this review is concerned, it’s the latter. The detail intended to confer gravitas seems pretentious; it’s decorative rather than integral, and the effect in this context is nasty. The most distasteful aspect is the depiction of the employee as mentally ill. It perpetuates ugly (and false) stereotypes of mentally ill people as inherently dangerous to others. (The character, who clearly suffers from a depression disorder, isn’t likely to be a threat to anyone but herself.) The depiction is not mitigated by the story’s clear judgment that the protagonist deserves some kind of comeuppance. A figure of pathos is still turned into a bogeyman, and the context offers no hint of irony. There’s no sense that one should take this portrayal with a grain of salt. This just promotes the bogeyman view of people with mental illness in real life. That’s deeply offensive. The story first appeared in the April 10, 1954 issue of The New Yorker. It is included in The Stories of John Cheever collection.

Short Take: "The Country Husband," John Cheever

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

John Cheever’s “The Country Husband” is a compelling study in suburban alienation. While it is not his most famous short story, it may be his best. The story opens with an amusing comic situation: the protagonist survives a plane crash unharmed, and he can’t find anyone who cares. When he comes home, his wife and children are preoccupied with their own petty concerns. They ignore his attempts to talk about the crash, and when he mentions it along with complaints about their other conduct, they only hear the latter. In the scenes that follow, his thoughts turn to a vaguely misanthropic negativity. It’s impossible not to be disturbed by his musings about the fate of a pesky neighborhood dog, or his alleged memories of the humiliating past of a neighbor’s maid. The protagonist then launches into a pattern of aggressively obnoxious and even self-destructive behavior. This includes, among other things, coming on to the family’s teenage babysitter, antagonizing the neighbor at the center of the town’s social scene, and ruining the job prospects of a local boy with already thwarted ambitions. Before long, the man’s wife begins to seriously entertain the prospect of leaving him, and she doesn’t even know about the babysitter. Cheever takes the opening comic scenario, and he turns it inside out into a skewed metaphor for the man’s life. The fellow survives the crash at the story’s start, but will he survive his compulsion to crash the life he’s built for himself, as well as destroy his self-respect as a decent person? Like all of Cheever’s fiction, the story is sleekly written and beautifully paced. His capacity for constructing tropes from the details of the story’s milieu remains remarkable. What sets it apart is that Cheever’s mordant humor has never been sharper or more subtle. The story is funny, shocking, and even sinister by turns, and it feels all of a piece. Cheever first published the story in the November 20, 1954 issue of The New Yorker, and it is featured in The Stories of John Cheever collection.