Dipsomania up pristine driveways

Book club choice No one beats John Cheever for tales of the unexpected, says Orlando Bird

If there was a time when people thought American suburbia was all smiling families and sun-kissed barbecues, it was before John Cheever started writing. For 40 years, Cheever (1912-82) cast an unflinching eye over the jealousy, alienation and attendant dipsomania lurking at the top of those pristine driveways. As well as writing five novels, he penned hundreds of short stories – many of them set on his home turf of Westchester County, New York – chronicling a post-war world of commuter trains and country clubs in wry, limpid prose. His Collected Stories are the place to begin.

There’s “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill”, in which a floundering businessman starts burgling his richer pals from the cocktail party circuit. In “The Ocean”, a man is convinced that his wife is trying to poison him. “The extraordinary fact,” he says, “seemed to be that after 20 years of marriage I didn’t know Cora well enough to know whether or not she intended to murder me.” There’s a similar mix of tragic and absurd in “The Swimmer”, one of Cheever’s most powerful tales, in which the Waspish protagonist decides to swim home via his neighbours’ pools – only for this fratboy stunt to destroy his sense of self.

Yet Cheever is also an acutely humane writer, and in his fallen paradise there are moments of redemption. As with Philip Larkin, another laureate of the benighted, the clarity of his vision allows him to give life and dignity to “the blunderers, the bored… all of those thousands who stand at the windows of the city and watch the afternoon go down”.

Today, Cheever isn’t read as widely as he should be, but he’s deeply embedded in American culture. Mad

Men, American Beauty, even The Girl on the Train – all draw on his vignettes of suburban life, its discontents and snatched epiphanies. And still no one does it better than him.