By Alexander Nazaryan
... In 1964, Time magazine called Cheever “Ovid in Ossining,” because he saw what he called in one story
“the pain and sweetness of life” as fully as the Roman poet had two
millennia before him. Ovid, of course, spent the last decade of his
exile from Rome in the desolation of Tomis (today, Romania). Cheever
exiled himself, leaving Manhattan in 1951 for Westchester County and
never returning. That journey into the manicured countryside beyond the
Bronx would define his career more than his impoverished Massachusetts
childhood or posh Sutton Place, where he lived while becoming famous for
his New Yorker stories.
... Unlike his brother, Fred, who succumbed to alcoholism, Cheever quit
drinking in 1975, devoting himself seriously to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Two years later, he published Falconer, based on his experience
teaching at the nearby prison (he had started doing so in 1971, after
deciding that he’d “exhausted his old landscapes”). Joan Didion called
the novel “extraordinary” in The New York Times. This magazine put Cheever on the cover, calling Falconer a “great American novel.” Five years later, Cheever died of cancer.
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