Matt’s Reviews > The Stories of John Cheever > Status Update

How's this holding up so far? What sparked my interest in him was watching the movie The Swimmer (1968).

Not bad! Not great either...

Same here, watching The Swimmer made me think that Cheever might tell a pretty good story. I have to be honest and say that so far the collection falls flat for me, and I've found it kind of hard to stick with it, with so many other enticing options on my to-read list.

I'm gonna keep it up, though, over time, holding out hope that it gets better. I think I recall that the stories are in order of publication, so I can still hope that Cheever got better over time. (The Swimmer is late in the collection, which bodes somewhat well, given that the movie was rad.)

Hopefully I'll have something more enthusiastic to say later on! At the very least, I think there's going to be something worth taking away from the collection, from sort of an academic point of view. I'm kind of interested in getting acquainted with the big short story writers of 20th-century USA (e.g., Cheever, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor... Salinger!), I think it'll be interesting to see what it all says about that time and place.