John Cheever revisited

the long version

The St. Botolphs of Cheever's early stories and the upscale, Westchester-like towns - Shady Hill, Proxmire Manor, and Bullet Park - of his later work find their complex companions in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and John Updike's Rabbit's world. Cheever laid out the parameters of this creative world in his very first published story, "Expelled," which appeared in the New Republic in 1930 when Cheever was only 18. The young protagonist of this autobiographical story would be the first of many Cheever heroes to fall from what Meanor describes as "a condition of Edenic happiness and childlike innocence into the chaos and pain of adult knowledge." Moses Wapshot of Cheever's first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle (1958), Neddy Merrill of the critically acclaimed short story "The Swimmer" (1964), and even Zeke Farragut of Cheever's novel of redemption, Falconer (1977), struggle to reclaim some remnant of an earlier, lost happiness.