HOME BEFORE DARK

Rating:
Summary: Cheever Still An Enigma
Review: As a memoir of a daughter's relationship with her father, this is very touching, but there is little here that sheds much light on John Cheever, the writer. Given the various levels of family dysfunction and unhappiness in Cheever's stories and novels, it is gratifying that his daughter found so much to love in her father. For a more abrasive, but still admiring view of the man, you might also enjoy reading Benjamin Cheever's novel, The Plagiarist.

Rating:
Summary: Cheever Still An Enigma
Review: As a memoir of a daughter's relationship with her father, this is very touching, but there is little here that sheds much light on John Cheever, the writer. Given the various levels of family dysfunction and unhappiness in Cheever's stories and novels, it is gratifying that his daughter found so much to love in her father. For a more abrasive, but still admiring view of the man, you might also enjoy reading Benjamin Cheever's novel, The Plagiarist.

Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Book
Review: Home Before Dark is a beautifully written, moving book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. It helps that Susan Cheever's subject, her father, was (and remains long after his death) one of the finest fiction writers in the history of American literature. What distinguishes John Cheever's stories, outside of his magical touch with words, is the passion and love he brings to illuminating his small corner of the world -- life in the New York suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. Most writers who explore the suburbs do so with an arm's length superiority -- taking pains to distance themselves politically, emotionally, and intellectually from their characters. What makes Cheever's stories such a joy it that he loves the world he writes about -- even as he recognizes its banalities and limitations. In Cheever's hand, the commuter life becomes a sad, beautiful symphony of lost hopes and desires. The 5:45 train, the clinking of cocktail glasses, the smell of meat cooking on an outdoor grill are not just dull routines of modern life, but thrilling and exotic elements of that peculiarly American optimism and quest for success that flowered after World War II -- all the more alluring because the quest is so often doomed.
In the same way, Susan Cheever brings passion and honesty to the telling of her father's life. In her hands, John Cheever's own outwardly unremarkable search for the suburban dream life of wife, kids, dog and station wagon in Ossining, New York becomes a dark romantic quest of longing, passion, success and disappointment. She is thoroughly honest (sometimes brutally so) in detailing Cheever's alcoholism, philandering, phobias and parental shortcomings -- so it is all the more remarkable that the final portrait of Cheever that emerges is so rich and full of love.
This book is the perfect companion piece for Cheever's indispensible Collected Stories (with that famous red cover). Think of Home Before Dark as a sort of lexicon to John Cheever's world. I keep both books on a special bookshelf -- easily accessible -- containing the books I come back to again and again, like old friends.

Rating:
Summary: More John Cheever please; less Susan Cheever
Review: This would have been a better book if Susan Cheever had more to write about. For example, she could have delved more into the business of his writing, how much money he made, or his friendships with other writers. A little bit of research wouldn't have hurt. This is a very slight book. Also, I could care to know less about Susan Cheever; i.e. how she had been the source of some of John's stories....