Suburban Apples and Neon

SOUTH JERSEY SUBURBS, which I'm familiar with, are different from the ones John Cheever writes about. Where I come from, the landscape is already second-generation neon, and the politics are set by whether the last influx from Philadelphia was middle-or upper-class. There are no pretensions of communality, no historic town squares now hidden: high-rise apartments take their proud and random places next to split-level housing developments and an occasional patch of barren land. Over the last eight years, a "right side of the tracks" has developed, established by the construction of "wooded estates" on old farmland. Most of the drug-use takes place over there, as well as the horseback-riding and country club affairs. Otherwise, there's no culture except for what the high schools give out, and the only social hang-outs which are well-attended are the swingers bars for adults and the shopping malls and diner parking lots for kids. It's living death, all right, except for the diners. If, as is possible, everyone in Cherry Hill flushed their toilets at once, and it sank into the Delaware (the escalating sewage routes have not been clearly tracked down), few people without family ties would mourn the loss of the town.

Both more and less goes on in the Cheever villages of The World of Apples. His characters are indelibly New Englanders: reserved, though-tridden, hoping to act both well and right. They are much easier to get a handle on than the passionately self-indulgent and upwardly-mobile citizens of my fair suburb. And. in Cheever, there is still an air of sanctity to the towns themselves: his people still cherish the idea of community, even if all the familiar points of reference, the town halls and the churches, are flying off in pinwheel motion. Cheever is still writing about all the problems that began to plague suburban literature in the 50s: psychic and spiritual dislocation, the retreat from outward chaos into inward fantasy. Cheever doesn't even try to confront the new social dynamics caused by plastic cities and media zombieism (as another New Yorker John, Mr. Updike, always does).

One fragment of a story does concentrate on the perils caused by widening a highway by a small town, but the subject there is arbitrariness, not tension; another makes some peripheral play about in-flight motion pictures. But because Cheever and his creations are mainly so tradition-bound, his chronicles of disorder and lack of faith make the needs for faith and order cry out even louder. And Cheever is such a consistently honest and witty writer, carefully building up his characters through dialogue and their own partial vision of the world, and then thrusting them up against unexpected circumstance, that it is impossible to read his stories without admiration for his craft and appreciation for the truths he does uncover.

CHEEVER'S STORIES are packed with detail and cross-current. They all end up saying more than a swift reading of the action would deliver. "The Four Alarms"--the first story in the book, and one of the cleverest--tells about a fairly young suburban housewife who tires of teaching and goes into theatrics, and winds up acting in a circa '69 nude play (Ozamanides II). "Oh, I'm so happy," she says when she gets the part. "Oh, how wonderful and rich and strange life can be when you stop playing out the roles that your parents wrote out for you." But there is more than a bemused, detached, exact satire of the middle-class matron who kicks her restraining habits for culturally rationalized thrills. At the story's center is the husband, upset and bewildered, who only regains a sense of dignity because of those small things which remain with him when he strips himself:

The voices of the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors. I held my valuables in my right hand, my literal identification. None of it was irreplaceable, but to cast it off would threaten my essence, the shadow of myself that I could see on the floor, my name.

And so it is with all of Cheever's good guys. Threatened by pressures that only vaguely understand, cut off by their work and upbringing from what their wives must feel, they fall back on a meshing of school dictums and artifacts, and, if possible, love. These fail to make life coherent, but they do help make it bearable. Cheever is a master ironist, and always filters wit through his pain.

THE BEST STORY of the lot, and the one which encompasses most of what Cheever has to say, is a straightforward narrative, "Artemis, The Honest Well-Digger." Artemis is the inarticulate American hero. He is naive, well-meaning and strong. He likes sex, and loves his work. Wells bring him close to water, which he sees as the stuff of life. "Water was man. Water was love. Water was water." As Artemis nears 30, complications ensue. He wants to marry the girl on oleomargarine packages, but he can't find her in real life. While digging wells for wasteful rich people, he finds himself pursued by bored and hungry wives. For a rest, he vacations in Russia. He falls in love there in a scant three minutes in a pretty interpreter's office. But his visa is cancelled. He and his love correspond. Their letters are intercepted by a pair of State Departments. Artemis is called to Washington, is questioned about passing information, and gives up hope. He waits for his spring jobs, and the healing power of water.

Even Cherry Hill now and then produced an Artemis. There was, for example, the football coach's wonder boy, who quarterbacked hard, studied hard, gentlemanly bedded down the cheerier cheerleaders, and won a football scholarship to Columbia. I visited him once after I left school. He was still living with his elderly parents in a small apartment, and he was having trouble. He told me that Woodstock had changed his life--he didn't pick fights anymore, and he talked to people, but he hated Cherry Hill. Jim couldn't really express what he was going through; he had always lived according to the dictates of better rock music, and I didn't know how deep his malaise ran. When last I was in Cherry Hill, rumors had it that he had freaked out in NYC. Cheever's story probably won't help Jim any, if he ever reads it. But it did jog my own memory of him and that itself is important.