Disturbia
Long before it was cool—even before Spielberg—John Cheever was writing stories about the dark side of suburbia. Essential to remember when reading these stories is that Cheever was writing at a time when suburbia was still a new and innovative concept. Prior to the post-WWII economic boom Americans basically lived in one of three different kinds of regions: the big city, the small town and the boondocks and whichever one they lived in was also the one they worked in. Suburbs changed all that: suddenly millions of people who worked in the big city were now returning to what looked like a small town, but wasn’t really. The sense of cohesion, history and shared culture that define a small town hadn’t had time to develop and so this manner of a work life and a home life essentially being two different places disconnected suburbanites and created a sense of alienation both at work and at home. Into these gaps Cheever fills anxiety, moral bankruptcy, domestic stress and psychological dislocation to tell stories about common, ordinary people confronting the dark side of suburbia through the sudden manifestation of extraordinary events.
The Source of Denial
This confrontation with the dark side is not limited just to characters in the suburbs. Throughout the collection can be found characters who have been living in denial finally reaching a point at which that defense mechanism no longer works. The confrontation with a truth which can no longer be avoided may be as direct as Mr. Blake looking down the barrel of Miss Dent’s gun or as metaphorical the odyssey through past and present faced by “The Swimmer.” Time and time again, however, characters arrive at a point in their lives they have always known was waiting for them, but successfully suppressed as neurotic fear.
Moral Ambiguity
Cheever does not force his characters into a confrontation with the source of denial in order to present a moral at the end. Also often fabulist in nature, the intrusion of the extraordinary into the lives of these ordinary people is not done for the purpose of creating a fable. The conflicts present in his tales almost always reveal certain truths about the characters, but stubbornly resist suggesting that truth leads to change. The truth is not necessarily a revelation; more often than it is merely an acknowledgement. And the acknowledgment of moral bankruptcy, domestic stress and psychological dislocation is just simply not enough to stimulate active change. A great many of Cheever’s stories conclude with characters admitting either to each other or themselves painful truths they have been denying, but rare is the Cheever story which indicates that any character is actually on the verge of undergoing significant change.
