Nothing succeeds like excess

‘Why are you laughing?’ they demanded again and again, as Cheever tittered at some grindingly miserable memory from his youth, or some cruelty he’d inflicted on his children.

What his keepers were pathologising was the writer’s genius to see the hilarious in the chaotic, the respectable, the insulting and the desperate. Cheever was, above all, extremely funny, and he has been served now by a marvellous biography which, through it all, manages to keep its sense of humour. Blake Bailey’s Life is alarming, truthful, scabrous, but above all absurdly funny. You feel Cheever wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

The medical professionals had never heard of Cheever — ‘he insists [his novels] have been very successful’, his surviving medical notes sceptically record — and by now, he seems to be a specialist taste. He is, I suppose, to American literature much what Henry Green is to English. His body of work amounts to a substantial number of short stories, many of which were written for the New Yorker. The best, written between the mid 1940s and the mid 1960s, epitomise that magazine’s legendary lucid elegance of style and obliqueness of treatment. (The stories after the classic ‘The Swimmer’ of 1963, which was turned into a hallucinogenic cult movie later in the decade, are much weaker than his best). There are five novels, of which three — The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park and Falconer — are masterpieces of the first rank. His fiction is centred on boozing, adultery, family tensions and community eccentricity, often in upper-middle class New England; it is telling about his habitual vision of the wealthy of Connecticut that, in Falconer, his manner needed hardly any adjustment to deal with the inside of a men’s prison.