This July, I’ve been slowly reading The Stories of John Cheever. He published short fiction in The New Yorker for half a century and won the Pulitzer for this 1978 collection.
A line from his introduction has stuck with me (emphasis added):
These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like ‘The Cleveland Chicken,’ sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.
His stories follow people of all social strata, relationship type, age, gender, etc. They are set in every decade from the 30s through the 70s. The most delightful to me, thus far, are the those that portray the dry rot of the generationally wealthy as expressed in torpid summers in the Adirondacks or on the Vineyard. These people I grew up near and hoped to become.
The most resonant theme is that these bygone people worried about money, power, status, love, lust, children, health, and the vagaries of growing old. They thought their whole world would collapse because it was oriented towards their parents generations and wouldn’t survive theirs. These people of old New York had little in common with me: they wore hats, smoked, etc. But their gods were as ancient as yours and mine, because these old New Yorkers were human beings.
I tend to think that our generation’s short fiction may not hold up the way Cheever’s did. For the reading today, I have a few links that may help show why auto-fiction is realer and right-now, yet shallower and narrower, and thus less resonant.
Newsworthy
I've Always Suspected "Cat Person" Was Based on My Life. Now I Know It Was.
Since I first read Kristen Roupenian’s viral story, I’ve wondered: How did she know about me?
Technopoly
Our Autofiction Fixation
Why do we assume that a work of literary fiction must be based on its author’s life?
Simplicity
Who owns a story?
Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise,” Louisa Hall’s “Trinity,” and the question of appropriating other people’s lives as fiction.