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“... In 1964, Time published a profile of John Cheever which, in a sub-heading, described him as ‘The Monogamist’. Subsequent events have proved that not to have been the fact-checkers’ finest hour. In 1984, two years after his death, Susan Cheever published Home before Dark, a memoir which portrayed her father, whose public image was that of an impeccably upper-middle-class monogamist suburban WASP, as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic ...”

“... stipend she’d given him. One evening in 1958 he turned up at the private girls’ school that Susan Cheever attended in Dobbs Ferry, about an hour’s drive up the Hudson from New York City. Her father, John Cheever, drove her to the school. ‘Joey!’ Cummings shouted when he spotted ...”

“... on lavatory walls. This seems to be the message of ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Up-harsin’, one of John Cheever’s loopy, luminescent, triumphant later stories. The narrator, returning to America after a long absence, enters a stall in the men’s room at Grand Central Station, and there, etched into the marble partition (‘it might have been a giallo antico, but ...”

“... The fairies have spoiled all that.’ One does not think immediately of Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever as having much in common, but the more closely one scrutinises the lives and works of these two writers, the more alike they look. Like Fitzgerald, Cheever watched his father fail in business, saw his family come down ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... literary analysis of memoirists – among them, Beauvoir, Barthes, Philip Roth, Carolyn Steedman, Susan Cheever, Art Spiegelman and Blake Morrison. But she is primarily concerned with the childless child. ‘What happens to our idea of self,’ Miller asks in her prologue, ‘when there is no generation to follow, when we are childless? What happens to ...”

“... between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs,’ Father and Son begins.) Susan Cheever says she once had another title for her memoir, Treetops; it was ‘Three Great Men and the Women They Destroyed’. Yet the first book she wrote about her father, Home before Dark, left her reeling at the variety of her discoveries. ‘I ...”

“... two great ‘thinking Americans’, as Fuller hoped they would be remembered.A recent book by Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury, makes much of the erotic undercurrents that no doubt played their part in the Concord circle; besides Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau, the band of free-thinking rustics included Nathaniel Hawthorne and his artist wife, Sophia ...”

“... of these powerful stories justify the comparisons made by his admirers: most pertinently, to John Cheever and Raymond Carver (Yates falls somewhere in between). But when Yates’s stories are encountered en masse – this new edition brings together his two collections and nine previously uncollected pieces – the uniformity of experience described begins to ...”

“... has become John O’Hara with a cell phone. No, a disciple of Barthelme conquers the territory of Cheever and Updike – it’s stunning. ‘Another Manhattan’, from 2008, the longest and most wrenching of these pieces, begins as if it’s going to be a simple farce or melodrama of adultery. Jim is married to Kate, who’s sleeping with Elliot, who’s ...”

“... honouring creation and the American plenty. He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather. Apparent lack of inner struggle and purring efficiency made it possible to take him for granted. ‘No one has ever sat around worrying about Updike, the way one apparently ...”

“... Kate Bornstein’s image of gender as a matter of personal choice from a constantly revolving lazy-Susan – I would have said a lazy-Sam-and-Susan – of sexual orientations.) This polymorphous permissiveness, with barriers dropping as fast as knickers, is precisely what inspires most people’s resistance to ...”