The Chronicles of Westchester

"Cheever, though, seems prematurely shortchanged. Because he originally published most of his stories in The New Yorker, he was typecast even during his lifetime as a 'New Yorker writer,' someone who wrote blandly for and about middle-class suburbanites, and the label, though far from accurate, has calcified over the years. (The same stamp has attached itself to John Updike, with whom Cheever is sometimes compared, but to a lesser degree, because Updike’s career was so large and various and his reputation doesn’t rest so exclusively on short stories.) In Cheever’s case, what this means, most damagingly, is that though he may be in the Library of America, he is for the most part not on the syllabus, which is where a writer’s name gets burnished now and what keeps his books in print. That he is still taught occasionally in M.F.A. writing classes merely testifies to the considerable gap between literary practice and literary studies. The problem, perhaps, is that Cheever comes out of nowhere—shaped by myriad writers but not in a way you can exactly put your finger on—and he doesn’t lead anywhere either; he’s not an 'influence,' except possibly on a writer like Rick Moody."

In The New York Times, Charles McGrath assesses John Cheever.