Paradise Questioned

IT'S FUNNY the way things get jumbled up. Funny when people who one thought were inconsequential prove otherwise, funny when ideas and ways of thinking one thought were extinct except for the analytic books and professors who discuss them surface again unexpectedly, even potently. And it's funny and strange and more then a little wonderful when a writer who has shown talent and yet been a disappointment in the past--and whom seemingly every-one else has lauded to the ends of the earth-creates something genuinely entertaining and even a bit enlightening. John Cheever's new novella. Oh What A Paradise It Seems, is a small package of this kind of eye-opening, pleasant strangeness. Perhaps because it rings more honest than many of his earlier efforts, the work pulses in a way much of Cheever's other work does not. Most important, Paradise given the palpable impression that Cheever has, like some literary athelete, raised the quality of his thinking and sensitivity a bit closer to the remarkable aural quality of his prose. He could already skate; now he shows he can score too.

Interestingly, the success of Oh What a Paradise It Seems results not from Cheever's discarding his old tactics but from loosening them Cheever has long been called America's preeminent "storyteller" by many diverse critics and colleagues as well as eager book jacket hacks because he clearly has some kind of talent, and "storyteller" is the category of last resort. When you're not a novelist of ideas, a spelunker of the soul, or failing that, a lister of the lusts, you are defacto a storyteller Unfortunately, that is not quite the appropriate term For Cheever has, over his career, penned more arabesques than stories. Moorish in their conspicuous lack of breathing things, these works give the feeling that their "characters" are really the pointed little white spots that move in geometrically predestined directions across an oversized etch-a-sketch board. The spots, typically upper middle class suburban or uptown New York spots, meander, speedup and decelerate as they course ineluctably through the turns Ultimately, the design ties itself off with a sudden bizarre crook--a child gets shredded by a ski lift, a husband is shot by his wife in a race around the living room or a fatal car crash occurs. Sometimes things turn out well. The sum is an impoverished literary Calvinism of the two car garage.

Paradise is also an arabesque. But this time a bit of wonder seeps into the pattern. The chief spot in Paradise,Lemuel Sears, is a man technically old and clearly spry Primarily through his agency, the author takes his readers on a minor odyssey through the pattern, and this time we get to look closely at the marvelous decorations instead of just careening toward a hairpin turn.

MARVELLOUS THEY ARE. Ostensibly, the plot concerns the time Scars spends trying to save a beloved elbow-shaped lake from being turned into a landfill. Both Cheever and his protagonist believe there is a close affinity between the beauties of clean fresh water and the splendors of love. And so, not surprisingly, the sporadic affair Scars has with the curvaceous blond he accosts in a bank queue provides the occasion for plenty of libidinous raptures and a good deal of bewilderment. The novella shuttles, thee, back and forth between a blasted landscape that aches for renewal-the highways stretch out against the country like corroded veins and the lakes are acid pools-and an aging man who fears similar, personal deterioration.

The handling is deft-by turns serious and piquant. Concerned that his years of "erotic acrobatics" are drawing to a close, the silver-maned Sears reflects: "When in the movies he saw a man and woman kiss ardently he would wonder if this was a country tomorrow or the day after he would be expected to leave." Then, a mere few weeks later. Sears finds himself leaving for work in the morning--he is a computer company executive--without his boxer shorts for the sake of reaching nakedness in record time for an afternoon frolic. On another occasion Sears ruminates on the temptress Renee's remark "that male discharges were, in her experience the most restorative face cream." Shortly afterward, Sears finds himself lilted--out on his ear without explanation. Distraught, he winds up in the basement of the apartment and has a very unexpected homosexual encounter with the building's elevator man. The world, it seems, is many for Lemuel.

Love has its own secrets, but the "water" sub-plot of this forked work has a complexity too. In fact, it gives Cheever an ideal playground for assembling one of his patented concatenations of weird events. A down and out barber shoots his dog in full sight of his neighbors, two women wrestle in a supermarket, a baby is mistakenly abandoned. Also, Cheever cannot was quite to eloquent nor so humorous about the country side as he can about sex. But he succeeds in constructing his labyrinth of characters and circumstances more significantly and puts forth a well-crafted threnody for a landscape he holds dear.

The rest is all more of what Cheever has done well for years. His Sentences remain gently illuminated gems of language, uncomplicated by any wordplay and unfailingly rhythmic. He controls the pace masterfully, whether guiding the action over a cascade of toxic wastes or through a freshet of afternoon passion. And he can toss in a wisecrack at any moment. Running into his friend Eduardo the elevator man sometime subsequent to their tryst. Sears remarks. "We've got to find something else we can do together...Do you like to fish' Would you like to go fishing?"

Paradise may not be a masterpiece. Cheever's characters, after all, are thin, doll-like creations next to those of his colleagues Updike and Bellow. And even though the novella has a broader vision than one might otherwise expect from Cheever, it still lacks the acute moral curiosity one expects from a greater writer. He still yields to the impulse to pattern events, to make a sort of literary bon-bon although this one is finely textured and eminently palatable.

Yet, it is a well-told tale, lyrical, funny and moving. Finally, it has one more extra-literary quality. Possibly it is just sentimental to say so, but there is a satisfaction, indeed a reassurance in seeing this achievement when the author is himself pushing 70. Athletes usually hang up their cleats by 35, theoretical scientists rarely stay fecund into their 40s and most writers turn out their best stuff before 50 Cheever's publication of Oh What a Paradise It Seems, and the broadening of vision it demonstrates, is an act with all the beauty of a well-broken rule.