"Suburban Suffering" from NYT by GEOFFREY WOLFF

And here comes Blake Bailey’s stunningly detailed biography, exploring step by stumbling step the crooked path that Cheever followed, disclosing the addicted urges and bawling self-pity (“What did I ever do to deserve this”) to which he submitted himself and those within his household. Following a prologue, Bailey’s account is chronological, beginning in the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. To be descended from American settlers was not necessarily to be from a distinguished family, and by the time Cheever was born (to the manner but not to the manor) in 1912 on Boston’s South Shore in Quincy, the “accursed” Cheever history was already one of financial ruin, fecklessness, alcoholism, solitude, madness and suicide. John’s father, a traveling shoe salesman, liked to remind his sons to remember, “at all times, that I was a CHEEVAH.” Literary grandiosity was a family indulgence: Cheevah’s “despised” Uncle Hamlet was named in deference to Grandfather Aaron’s well-thumbed set of Shakespeare, with, Cheever said, “most of the speeches on human ingratitude . . . underscored.” Cheever’s grandfather died of “alcohol & opium” delirium tremens, alone in “squalid lodgings” in a Boston neighborhood of “shabby immigrant” tenements.

Read the full NYT piece here. See also: The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings (Library of America, No. 188), Falconer, The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)