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Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey | Book review

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 08, 2009

Summary

Adam Mars-Jones finds much to relish in Blake Bailey's life of John Cheever – a writer who had an immense capacity for joy but none for happiness

Blake Bailey seems to specialise in writing the lives of self-destructive American writers – first Richard Yates, now John Cheever. He may have a full biographical career ahead of him. Cheever breaks the general pattern by virtue of a late recovery after stupendous alcoholic wallowing. He stopped drinking in 1975 and ended his life in a blaze of literary glory. His 1977 novel, Falconer, was hailed as a masterpiece, though previous attempts at long-form fiction had been oddly inconsequential. His collected stories won major prizes and sold exceptionally strongly the next year.

Susan Cheever published a memoir, Home Before Dark, in 1984, only two years after her father's death; this drew on the immense wealth of his journals (more than 4,000 pages, typed and single-spaced) and showed the repetitive agonies behind the sunlit public image. It was bad luck as well as talent that made Cheever an exemplary figure, the bad lu

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