If a tinge of melancholy haunts the cocktail hour, if a croquet mallet left derelict on the lawn evokes a broken merriment, if the bar car of a commuter train gives off a stale whiff of failed promise and bitter alimony, pause and pay homage to John Cheever. Light a bug candle on the patio in his honor. For Cheever—novelist, master of the short story, prolific diarist—is the patron saint of Eastern Seaboard pathos and redemption, the Edward Hopper of suburban ennui, preserving minor epiphanies in amber. Despite his patrician patina, Cheever was no saint in his personal life and not quite one of nature’s noblemen. The publication in 1991 of The Journals of John Cheever put a permanent wrinkle in that façade, publicizing Cheever’s previously cloaked bisexual appetites and polecat propensities, along with a lesser host of miseries, vanities, and maunderings that left an oily residue. A greater smirch on Cheever’s name recognition was inflicted a year later, on an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza (Jason Alexander) discovered that his prospective future father-in-law was a former lover of Cheever’s, hoarding a secret stash of letters from the dear man. Millions of viewers who may never have read a single story of Cheever’s now had his identity branded into their brains as a gay punch line.

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But if some of the mahogany richness has worn off of Cheever’s individual reputation following his death, in 1982, the influence of his imagination and sensibility has swum ever deeper into the cultural bloodstream, its unique formula of magical elixir and embalming fluid winding its way through everything from Ordinary People to The Ice Storm to American Beauty to Far from Heaven to Revolutionary Road to TV’s Mad Men. Nearly every stylized retro examination of the hidden tooth decay of the American Dream owes Cheever symbolic royalties (see also “Rethinking the American Dream,” by David Kamp). As this country edges into the prospect of losing so much of what it once had, a vast devaluing of everything it took for granted, the bittersweet pang of Cheever’s nostalgia and the bleak apprehension underlying idle chitchat have never been more apropos—perfect timing for the publication of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf), a biography of monumental heft and picky asides that certifies Cheever’s enduring relevance while smacking his wrist with a nun’s ruler. After one of Cheever’s typical lyrical effusions, his biographer chides, “Perhaps, but the fact remained that he was impotent, and often drunk before lunch.” Even when you’re dead, you can’t get away with anything.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city’s boundaries like enemy territory, and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place-name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun. —John Cheever, Esquire, July 1960.

In the halo’d circles where the craft of fiction is a devotional calling, Cheever is held up as an exemplar of a writer’s writer, tending to his tiny plot of fallen paradise. First published at the age of 18, with an account in The New Republic of being expelled from Thayer Academy (a private school), Cheever had the good fortune to land under the aegis of *The New Yorker’*s fiction editor William Maxwell, whose solicitude and self-effacement were the stuff of Vatican legend. In 1938, Cheever, who had published a few stories in the magazine under Katharine White’s editorial wand, was lateraled off to Maxwell. “Maxwell’s attentiveness was all the more flattering—and his editorial advice valuable—because he himself was already, at age thirty, the author of two well-regarded novels, Bright Center of Heaven and They Came Like Swallows,” Bailey writes. “For most of his career, though, his own reputation would be eclipsed by the greater fame of the writers he edited: Nabokov, Salinger, Welty, and (as Maxwell put it) ‘three wonderful writers all named John’—O’Hara, Updike, and Cheever.” Under Maxwell’s tutelage, Cheever produced a basket of golden eggs, stories that by the late 40s—“miraculous years for Cheever”—placed him near the top tier of the fiction writers at The New Yorker, an exclusive fraternity that included O’Hara, Nabokov, Salinger, and Irwin Shaw. But literary cachet didn’t stock the pantry or cover the dry cleaning, especially during dry spells. “In his journal Cheever wrote, ‘We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat.… We have many bills.’ Determined to write ‘a story a week,’ he was rejected four times in a row by The New Yorker, which meant he wouldn’t be receiving a yearly bonus either. Faced with dire poverty, and forced into writing ‘lifeless and detestable’ fiction, Cheever chided himself for entertaining an ‘unreasonable’ degree of petulance.”