Cheever: A Life
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2009: In Blake Bailey's monumental, masterful, and, at nearly 800 pages, mammoth biography,Cheever: A Life, the author ofA Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yatesturns his attention to the "the Chekhov of the suburbs" and his storied, celebrated, and deeply tortured life.  Written with compassion and the full cooperation of Cheever's widow, Mary, and their three children,Cheeveris rich with detail and chronicles the mournful arc of a lifetime struggling with a core duplicity that ached throughout his writing life--despite a 41-year marriage, Cheever was a closeted bisexual who simmered with self-loathing. Bailey covers the author's childhood, his time in the army, his life as a writer and his literary rivals (Salinger, in particular, seemed to irritate him), his alcoholism (he would struggle against taking that first "scoop" of gin from the pantry every morning while he was writing), and his struggle to play the role of suburban family man. The book is peppered with literary cameos: Updike, Bellow, and Roth are there, along with his Iowa Writers' Workshop students T.C. Boyle, Ron Hansen, and Allan Gurganus. (While at Iowa Cheever made it a weekly ritual to watchMonday Night Footballand eat homemade pasta with fellow instructor John Irving.) Bailey also edited two Library of America editions of Cheever'sstoriesandnovelspublished to coincide with his biography. This literary hat trick will no doubt spark a well-deserved Cheever renaissance honoring his legacy as an American master.--Brad Thomas Parsons