by John Cheever
First published 1985
In suburbia's manicured landscapes, Cheever's characters move through lives of comfortable desperation. A businessman catches the 5:19 train home while dreaming of escape. A housewife tends her garden and remembers the lover who promised her everything. These men and women possess material comfort but wrestle with deeper hungers. They inhabit a world of cocktail parties and country clubs, yet find themselves isolated within their own families. Each story captures a moment when ordinary people confront the gap between their public faces and private longings. The characters reach toward connection, toward meaning, toward something beyond their carefully constructed existences. Their struggles reveal the tender spaces between what we want and what we have, between the people we are and the people we hoped to become. In these moments of recognition, sadness transforms into something approaching grace.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: character-study, ordinary-people
Setting: Suburbia
Period: 20th-Century
819 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Ballantine Books