Ramones Unpack

by Perry Meisel

Fans of the Ramones' original p--k minimalism will probably grumble about the band's new LP, End of the Century, although they should blame Phil Spector and not the Ramones for the bigger, creamier sound. Spector has been at loose ends since his glory days back in the early '60s, occasionally salvaging a major and in hindsight landmark project like Let It Be or botching Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man. With the Ramones selling poorly even after continuous touring and three original LPs, as well as the Rock and Roll High School film and soundtrack. Sire - or somebody - seems to think the mythical Spector/Ramones pairing will salvage the Ramones, or at least put them on the radio.

The staged collaboration, however, has drawbacks as well as rewards. It would be easy (and correct) to mythologize End of the Century by saying that sons meet father, minimum and maximum coincide, two eras are bridged. It would also be correct (and easy) to say that on this album the Ramones finally shlock out. But neither judgment alone is a just estimate of this puzzling yet impressive disc in which the terrorist Ramones make peace with an institution.

On one hand, the Spectorization is logical, moving, almost too good to be true. Spector interprets the Ramones as a profoundly traditional band by nestling the guitar machine quartet at the center of his legendary "wall of sound." Suddenly, the shattering rock and roll turbine doesn't stand alone in its humorous/heroic way but occupies the hub of a sound it's always implied but never really spelled out - horns, strings, lead guitar lines and a depth of field different from the flat production style the band chose on The Ramones, Ramones Leave Home, and Rocket to Russia.

The cover of Phil's old Ronettes hit, "Baby I Love You," is the most dramatic departure from the usual Ramone austerity. Yet it's also the song in which Spector and the Ramones meet at a point most natural to them both. Sure, the big blasts of staccato strings blunt the edge of Joey's super-mannered singing by out-mannering it, but they also situate his voice in the early '60s context from which his hiccupy style emerges. This may be to call Joey's bluff, though he's still a decent enough crooner to face the r & b "authenticity" represented by strings and horns. The result is a classic Ramones paradox of artful sincerity, mannered honesty, committed nihilism.

The teasing double entendre in the title hook of "I'm Affected" explores the band's signature paradox and, in the process, the paradox of rock and roll itself. What is moving, what is loaded with "affect" or emotion, is also that which is "affected" or put on. For the Ramones, rock and roll is full of affectations that can still move us (the Ramones' phony family bit is another instance of the blood-fiction paradox). And Joey's yodel-plunge vibrato exchanges/identifies affect and affectation, matter and manner.

The new and characteristic ballad original "Danny Says" also counterposes the original rock and roll that inspires the tune and the inevitable mannerism of the latecomers who sing it. Spector's production - especially the gorgeous, nostalgic glockenspiel intro - inadvertently brings the tensions to a head. "Danny Says" threatens to become the traditional ballad the Ramones never quite wanted to play. Previously, they preferred not to emote directly.

Spector leaves the band's nervy tempos as pressured as ever on the rockers, though the "Lady Madonna" horn lines on "Rock and Roll Radio," for example, blue down the shredded-can edges. But while this civilizing process sounds good here, it risks resolving the Ramones tension between honesty and hyperbole.

What is impressive about Spector's production is also what turns out to be the trouble with it. Spector's overt traditionalizing of the Ramones shows how fine a line divides nostalgia-rock from innovative rock and roll that has fully digested its sources. In its lyrics, "Rock and Roll Radio" is too fond a glance backward ("Do you remember Hullaballoo/Upbeat, Shindig, and Ed Sullivan, too?"), low on the irony with which the Ramones usually fracture such a dumb/wholesome pose. Besides, the phony eschatology doesn't jive with the Ramones in practice ("Rock's just part of the past/'Cause lately it all sounds the same . . . /It's the end, the end of the '70s/ . . . the end of the century"). Shame on them for making like they wish they could go back when we already know how much they dig being inheritors.

Yet the music of "Rock and Roll Radio" is the regular Ramones with a vengeance, once you bracket the studio ornamentation and just listen to the central tracks. The fat here, as elsewhere, isn't the Ramones' anyway - it's Spector's. In fact, only a few of the tunes besides the ballads use the full Spector apparatus ("Rock and Roll Radio" and "I'm Affected"). Most of the others are VI-chord belly-shots, bone-and-hammer Ramones - more riff-mad than ever on "This Ain't Havana" and "Jackie and Judy" - with a rinse of gloss and guitar leads dubbed in by what sounds like an unnamed accomplice. Those detailed, precise guitar licks are literal--minded where the Ramones themselves are allusive.

Hence the weird scenario of a band moving forward along its customary lines while the veneer of production and lyrics seems to pull it backward, make it regressive and nostalgic. But the Ramones are famous for subtraction, not for the kind of multiplication that Spector imposes on End of the Century. The effect is to compromise - however slightly, and with real though ironic rewards - the Ramones' hard-won economy. Few rock bands have packed so much history into so few gestures played at such breakneck speed with so much residual funk and twang; been so affecting at so high a level of affectation.

Let's face it: Spector's is an older technology confronting a more evolved one. The Ramones, after all, don't just inherit Spector directly; they also inherit him via his (silent) presence in big-metal rock. Truth is, those droning thwacking Zep/Who guitars are already a transistorization, a microminiaturization, a "chip" of Spector's (largely) acoustic, "naturally" produced walls of sound.

The Ramones have already transistorized the transistors and so stand at two removes from Spector himself, who forces them to unpack, to undress; to decompress their influences and stand with the old relations for a family picture, to accept the kinship they ordinarily - and miraculously - escape. To go too far in this direction would mean nostalgia, repeating the past rather than reinventing it. Spector pushes the Ramones to the brink of nostalgia, but the center holds. The Ramones will likely stay the Ramones whether they sell (out) or not.

Originally published in The Village Voice, February 18, 1980.

Sample view:

Neon Dream, Rock Reality

by Perry Meisel

Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. Edited by Greil Marcus. Knopf. $12.95, $5.95 paper.

Up and Down With the Rolling Stones. By Tony Sanchez. Morrow. $17.95, $8.95 paper.

Far from celebrating rock and roll's vaunted - and wholly artful - primitivism, these two new books are remarkable instead for the (largely unconscious) ease with which each celebrates the surprisingly conventional nature of rock and roll culture. Not that the guts have gone out of the backbeat, mind you; I don't mean for a moment to suggest, even sardonically, that a rhetoric of crisis or a lament for authenticity intrudes in either book. No, what links Tony Sanchez's Up and Down with the Rolling Stones with Greil Marcus's collection of original essays by 20 of the country's best pop critics - and what separates both books from outmoded raps about rock's ties to the '60s and its precarious status in an age of conformity - is a sense of rock and roll and its allied technologies as regular, coherent, even lawful. A good thing, too, since today the music is in unprecedented health, and only a style of criticism that looks beyond the ideology of the Waste Land has any chance of apprehending rock as it moves into the 1980s.

Sanchez's gonzo memoir of life with the Rolling Stones is a stone riot, a trifle lightweight at first glance, but ultimately riveting for anyone who loves rock and roll. Ornery reviewers may have a case when they complain, as some have, about Sanchez's lack of attention to the Stones's music (his memory of Brian Jones's love for Elmore James early in the book is the only real exception). But what fascinates Sanchez is the same backstage life that fascinates any Stones fan; his book is a fiesta for rock-and-roll yentas.

A gofer for the Stones since their early days, Sanchez seems to have satisfied most of his ambitions through his intimacy with Keith, Mick, and, as he reminds us more than once, Marianne Faithfull; it's a satisfaction that apparently survives the humiliating errands and other services he had to perform for Keith-steady Anita Pallenberg as well as the head Stones themselves. The suicide scandal in Anita's bedroom last July had its plain roots in 12 years of cheap thrills that Sanchez helped orchestrate, and orchestrates again as he rewrites the past from the tranquility of post-addiction care.

Interestingly enough, however, Sanchez's persona exudes an uncanny integrity throughout the decidedly foul proceedings and seems to owe its credibility, both for Sanchez and for us, to his early history and enduring self-image as a hardboiled nightclub man. In fact, Sanchez's style of identity is little more than a rock-and-roll variation on the professional journeyman we know from, say, Howard Hawks or Raymond Chandler. Such implicit mythologies inform Sanchez's notion of himself from the start, and just as compellingly as the more central myth of the rock star proper informs the grander and more troubled characters of Jagger and the rest, not only from an outsider's point of view, but even, one is forced to conclude, from within.

This is surely to romanticize Sanchez and the whole sleazy business of the Stones' supposedly private lives. But romance, after all, is a precondition of the genre and should remind us that rock and roll's very allure lies in the overt mythmaking that is essential to its speech. Hence Sanchez's book turns on a joke that is precisely - and maybe not unwittingly - the point. For there is, after all, no "inside story" to speak of (despite the subtitle) since the "inside" is no more than the story of a story, just as regulated by manners and conventions as the music is. Does it have to be argued that the Stones have been fashioned by the same conventions that fashion their fans? Sanchez's book is less the revelation of things hitherto unknown than it is the calculated filling in of particular details, names, and places in the mythic structure of Stones life as we already imagine it.

Like the music and the scene, rock criticism is a pensee sauvage, funky on the surface but girded underneath by ineluctable regularities. In fact, it's even more disingenuous about its own powerful determinations than the music is, perhaps because its determinations are even more tangled. After all, the criticism, as everyone knows with varying degrees of pleasure, is drenched not only in the music and hip culture, but also in the academic languages that have trained most rock critics to one degree or another. The defensive custom that accompanies the training, however, is the obligatory put-down of analysis itself - a denigration that closes many of the essays in Greil Marcus's Stranded collection, and turns out to be just as conventional as the intellection it (polemically) abjures.

One reason for the primitive pose, of course, is that it's a strategy that allows rock criticism to rip off the vocabulary of high culture in the act of challenging it. In so doing, however, rock criticism also - and ironically - reproduces the very ideology of the high culture from which it supposedly flees. After all, the notion that the authority of rock and roll - and of literature, for that matter, in the high-culture version - issues from its privileged access to a plenitude of natural, spontaneous, quasi-divine energy ignores the real sources of its energy, which in both cases is social. This confusion persists despite rock criticism's particular - and heavily compromised - mission to valorize the achievements of mass culture instead.

Of course, the separation of high and pop cultures is untenable in any case, since the domain of high culture is, in practice, no more elitist in its critical or creative procedures than rock and roll. What blinds us to the continuity is that high culture (like a good deal of rock criticism) customarily mystifies and idealizes the humble tinkerings of the poet, painter, or critic in order to keep his priesthood and its divinity somehow segregated from the mass, a project it pursued with the greatest (because overcompensatory) energy in its "modernist" moment.

Marcus more than grazed the problem of rock and roll ideology in his 1975 Mystery Train, and it turns out to have focused his new book around similar concerns (how consciously at the outset it is hard to tell) by asking his writers to choose a single rock and roll LP for sustenance on the proverbial desert island. But as Marcus himself implies in his preface, the conceit is more interesting as a symptom than as a pure act of imagination perhaps because the resonant figure of exile that underlies it gives away the peculiar need the desert-island routine is designed to fill - the need to maintain rock culture as a graphic culture apart, and so endow it with a whole mythology of modernist isolation (remember Martin Decoud on his desert island in Nostromo?) that makes it not just adversary but also - and alas - solipsistic.

This is the usual contradiction, since the modernist and high-culture stance of the exiled, isolated, privileged individual is especially incommensurate with the qualities of mass culture that rock criticism means to celebrate as a form. (Antagonism to the dominant culture has, of course, its political roots as well, although here, too, we're thrown back on an ideological, hence rhetorical, paradox of "vanguardism" in the service of the mass - Marxism, too, as symptomatic modernism - as well as a misreading of Anglo-American High Modernism in particular, in which technical revolution has been mistakenly supplemented in some quarters, e.g. Joni Mitchell, with an impossible political counterpart).

In many ways, rock itself forgot all this in the '60s, and then progressively recovered from the lapse as the '70s proceeded. In the criticism, however, the split remains largely intact, as it were, a rifted enterprise whose contours emerge in Marcus's title and persist throughout the book in a rather strict way, despite the apparent disarray created by his critics' wide choice of eras and artists. (Bands and artists range, by the way, from early rock-and-roll groups like the Ronettes and the Five Royales to seminal p--ks like the Velvets, the New York Dolls, and the Ramones, with stops in between at Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, the Eagles, Jackosn Browne, and the Kinks.)

John Rockwell's essay on Linda Ronstadt displays the kind of tension that gives almost all the essays their peculiar energy and shared ground; it oscillates violently between a profoundly technical and a profoundly personal assessment of Ronstadt's singing. Now a musicologist, now just a pal, Rockwell even tends to rediscover the structure of his own argument in the structure of his subject - for like his prose, Ronstadt's music also "embraces strongly articulated alternatives." The rhetoric that organizes the book is thus regular in its irregularity, the modernist appeal to personal authenticity and direct feeling alternating with a postmodern appeal to contingency, preconditions, context.

If M. Mark, for example, argues in her essay on Van Morrison that he sings "about the pursuit of direct emotional response" and about "recovering innocence," she insists at the same time that he sings with a voice tutored in sources, burdened by forms. This latter quality would seem to deny Mark's former contention, since quest for immediacy is, strictly speaking, doomed in a world that is largely inherited. And yet the energy of Mark's self-divided argument is never dissipated by the contradiction, even when she attempts to resolve the differences by claiming that Morrison does so himself. Indeed, the discovery of Morrison's source packs a relish all its own, especially when Mark cites "Mustang Sally" as the resolving text for the "huh's" in Van's phrasing. And just as in Rockwell's essay, the split in Mark's prose between a rhetoric of natural feeling and a rhetoric that acknowledges the pressures of craft and history is replicated in the split between images of ripe nature and images of (even hot) circuitry in Morrison's own lyrics.

Simon Frith's essay (the only one by a British critic) helps to focus and magnify the defining split or contradiction in Mark and Rockwell by identifying the central preoccupation of the Stones' Beggars Banquet according to the customary terms. What Frith calls the Stones' "acute, almost contemptuous grasp of their own paradoxes" is best expressed in their album's title, which Frith reads as an oxymoron that poises isolation against community - natural self against society - only a little less exactly than Exile on Main Street will a few years later on.

Hence, too, the opposites that structure Jim Miller's image of Phil Spector. Spector's "aesthetic of excess," Miller argues, allows us to "unpack . . . the litter of his imagination," that grabbag of American odds and ends gathered all the way from Harlem to the Brill Building. But despite its public contents, the net effect of Spector's art is "an obsessive - and unlikely - solipsism." Miller's definition of the thrill of rock and roll listening - "the first time, again" - dramatizes in a single phrase the impossibility of modernist immediacy in the face of repetitions, copies, imitations, all those manifest characteristics of pop culture that stand against the privileged individual and put him in question. Ariel Swartley even chooses a favorite deconstructive figure of speech (wittingly?) to describe the unevenness of these discordant mythologies as they appear in Bruce Springsteen, and so provides us with an exact image for the rhetoric of rock criticism, too. "It's not like the songs lay out in neatly knitted metaphors," says Swartley. "One tug and they're unravelled."

Not everybody, of course, is so balanced or even in the oscillations between rhetorical alternatives. Paul Nelson oohs and aahs about Jackson Browne on the basis of some murky personal logic that doubles (and deserves) Browne's own, while Grace Lichtenstein's essay on the Eagles is almost entirely dependent on a notion of rock and roll as a record of one's personal associations to particular songs and singers. Langdon Winner, by contrast, leans the other way in a resolute attempt to find music that is utterly devoid of public or social references (his choice of artist, fittingly enough, is the wacked Captain Beefheart), whose only real referents are other texts. Although a modernist/isolationist wish-fulfillment to begin with, Winner's discussion of Beefheart's desire "to disconnect and reorder things" actually magnifies rock and roll's thoroughly public musical heritage as well as its "inherited store of fantasies" that together cancel any possibility of "authentic voice."

Ellen Willis's essay on Lou Reed is more bifurcated than either Rockwell's or Miller's. Reed, says Willis, once again (re)discovering the ideology of rock criticism in its subject, embodies "a fateful connection between two seemingly disparate ideas - the rock-and-roller as self-conscious aesthete and the rock-and-roller as self-conscious punk." By implication magnifying the disparity already at work between high culture solipsism and mass culture sociability, Reed's "use of a mass art form," as Willis puts it, "to express his aesthetic and social alienation" brings the paradox to a pointed head.

But while Willis seems willing to live with the contradictory ideal of the aesthete-punk, she suddenly decides that the uneven pose is "a metaphor for transcendence" as though there really were a telos or end to interpretation that would resolve, unify, centralize Reed's requisite oppositions after all. Indeed, in an astonishing lapse into existential trivializing, Willis touts Reed's "nakedness" and the "glimmer of redemption" it provides, even though both contradict her earlier ironic notion of Reed's identity as an odd and uneasy ensemble of gears and different parts - a set of differences that are definitive rather than dialectical.

It is above all the Ramones who have opened up the post-modern arena of ironic edge that the music itself now occupies and Tom Carson maps the terrain with considerable lucidity in his essay on the Ramones' Rocket to Russia: "More than any other band they had defined the music in its purest terms, a return to the basics which was both deliberately primitive and revisionist at the same time, a musical and lyrical bluntness of approach which concealed a wealth of complex, disengaging ironies underneath." Carson's sense of irony well summarizes what is often only implicit in the volume's other essays, and well summarizes the ironies that define rock and roll itself.

Originally published in The Village Voice, January 21, 1980

The World of Wasp

by Perry Meisel

The Stories of John Cheever. Alfred A. Knopf. $15.

The deceptively modest self-portrait that John Cheever fashions in the preface to his newly collected Stories ("Naive, provincial . . . almost always clumsy") well accords with our customary sense of Cheever as a natural, as a self-reliant and largely homespun historian of the manners and morals of the upper middle class. Despite the elegant contrivances and highly figured language that have always called plain attention to Cheever's exertions as a stylist in both his novels and his shorter pieces, Cheever's image of himself as the innocent realist is a tempting one to maintain.

One principal advantage is that it allows us to suspend our moral exasperation with Cheever's dreamy and passive characters by shifting the blame for their indecision and frustration away from the author. We assign it instead to the world of WASP custom that Cheever renders with such sympathy and exactitude in his early portraits of prewar Manhattan, and, later on, in his sketches of the disguised Westchester suburb known in his fiction as Shady Hill. More abused than abusive, the usual Cheever hero tends to be, like Ralph Whittemore in "The Pot of Gold," a "prisoner of his schemes and expectations"; the unsuspecting and ironic casualty of his single decisive conviction in life, "an uncompromising loyalty," as Cheever puts it, "to the gentle manners of the middle class."

As a result, we can attribute the loneliness of the Cheever hero to a world of conventions no longer adequate to experience but still impossible to break away from (a "rigid script," as Cheever calls it in "Metamorphoses"). Such a reading shores up our sense of the Cheever hero as the hapless or pathetic victim, different in tone from the victim in Jewish fiction perhaps, but still consistent with the approved modernist hero at odds, like Conrad's isolates, with a world of received customs and beliefs.

The first real attempt to canonize Cheever came with the publication of Falconer in 1977, for Falconer seemed, on the face of it at least, to place Cheever securely in the kind of modern tradition that justifies inaction as an indictment of society; that exploits the familiar figure of the prison to express the way culture captures and confines the self. But if Falconer prison was the key to Cheever's triumph, it was not so much because it served a vision of modern life as a life of imprisonment and isolation, but because Cheever used it to measure confinement as our ruling notion about ourselves. A metaphor about a metaphor rather than a metaphor about life, Cheever's prison suggested that the real function of confinement was to produce, as its necessary yield and support, the notion of freedom.

If we inquire into the arguments and architecture of the Stories, here, too, we will find a very different kind of drama from the Christian and modernist one that supposedly liberates and resurrects Farragut as he emerges from a shroud outside Falconer's walls. There is, after all, no overwhelming burden or hypocrisy in the confinements that the quotidian world places on Cheever's characters in the Stories (imagine Ned Merrill in "The Swimmer" making his neighborly rounds without the obligatory drinks he takes at each house along his way), for it is a drama of accommodation to the duties of daily life that is being played out.

It is probably even inaccurate to say that character in itself is Cheever's particular focus. For all the richness of incident, each affair, each frustration, each hero is a variation on another. Sometimes whole dramatic situations are virtual contractions or extensions of one another, as in "The Music Teacher" and "The Country Husband"; sometimes mirror images, as in "The Cure" and "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill." In fact, character and scene alike are memorable less for themselves than for the particular angle of vision they provide on a world they behold in common.

The moral corollary, of course, is that Cheever's characters are the decided instruments of circumstance, unable and unwilling not only to act but even to react, whether to a pathetic rival in "The Season of Divorce," or to the regular provocation of a burned dinner and a sour wife in "The Music Teacher." One of the most irritating examples in all of the Stories comes at the start of "The Country Husband," when Francis Weed returns to Shady Hill dazed and battered by a near-calamitous crash-landing on a flight home to Idlewild from a business trip. When the exhausted Weed tries to tell his brawling kids and distracted wife about it, no one even hears him - the husband and father, alas, victimized by the very household he has created. But what looks like a refusal to engage moral questions by retreating into the fantastic turns out to be an attempt to determine what is decisive in the formation of character and what is not.

Even "The Enormous Radio" holds a more problematic meaning than its rather weak moral patina suggests. Though Jim and Irene Wescott have bought a new radio for the pleasure of listening to music, the mysterious machine forces them instead to listen in on the sad and sometimes brutal private lives of their neighbors, and appears to jolt them both into the discovery of passions and pains of their own. What is shocking about the story's final scene, however, is not the substance of Irene's sudden moral attack on her husband for his past sins, but that the imperturbable and virtually blank Irene (at the start of the tale she has "a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written") has suddenly acquired the abusive rhetoric of intimacy from overhearing the lives of others.

Hence the energy of a plot in a Cheever story lies less with what we think of as the customary driving force of short fiction - the moral dilemma, the emotional tension of a conflict to be pressured or resolved - and more with engaging the reader in a wish to uncoil the enigmatic structure of motivation and desire, to track down the origins of identity through the names and images that determine it. This is the privileged obsession of Charlie Mallory in "The Geometry of Love," an engineer whose marital squabbles and "lost . . . sense of reality" impel him to "decipher," for each significant moment in his life, "the chain of contingencies that had detonated the scene," and thus to express in miniature Cheever's own enterprise in the Stories at large.

So in a single strategy that combines his lyric gift for the particular with his visionary inclination for what is abstract and paradigmatic, Cheever focuses not on character as a thing in itself, but on what he calls in "The Sorrows of Gin" "the literal symbols of life" - a familiar object or a scene from the past - by which a particular character finds his own relation to life concentrated in a particular image or situation. "The Lowboy" is a prime example of how an object allows Cheever both to evoke a world and take apart its mechanisms in a single stroke. Like those haunting summer houses in the more familiar stories in the volume, the old and once-forgotten piece of family furniture that gives "The Lowboy" its title raises powerful memories of childhood and primitive rivalry in two brothers, memories deriving from a scene or object like those of Proust's madeleine or like the symptoms of Freud's hysterics. The Stories might even be arranged in terms of the "symbols" or situations that locate and define the self from tale to tale - the allure of Broadway for Evarts Malloy in "O City of Broken Dreams"; the ancestral summer place in "Goodbye, My Brother" or "The Summer Farmer"; the moving van that becomes an icon of humiliation and flight in "The Scarlet Moving Van"; even a particular day in a family's history like the one that gives "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well" its title, and that allows a fractured and embittered collection of relatives to reaffirm its stamina as a unit by recalling, from various points of view, the circumstances that surround the decisive event.

If there is melancholy and hesitation in Cheever's world, there is, however, no anxiety in our recognizably modern or Jewish sense, no struggle for self-mastery or coherence because life is already coherent as it is. The inability of Cheever's characters to take action or even to feel anxiety or rage about their circumstances is not, then, so much a moral vision with problems as it is a moral problem beyond or apart from the moral as we normally conceive it. For Cheever, culture precedes the individual and subordinates him to it - makes him possible in the first place - through the constitutive power of the "symbols" it supplies (thus Victor and Theresa Mackenzie in "The Children," who wander from situation to situation with no identities apart from those they can assume by attaching themselves, for love and money alike, to a wealthy family or an ailing estate). The Cheever of the Stories has a less coherent nostalgia for the natural than the pastoral Cheever of the Wapshot novels, and so a less coherent notion of culture itself as evil. Indeed, the "moral chain of being" that Cheever identifies in the preface as one of the "constants" he meant to find in life is most profitably understood as a notion of the "chain" of "mores" that links the moments of life to one another, and that provides whatever sense life may hold for Cheever's characters. Rather than rail against the "chain" as though it represses nature and desire, Cheever prefers instead to analyze the way the "chain" of culture produces what thoughts and feelings we have. To characterize Cheever's project in this way not only suggests his links with James and Hawthorne before him, but also his less manifest links with postmodernist contemporaries like Borges or Pynchon. Despite its realist premises, after all, Cheever's art, too, is in search of a means to represent, not life itself, but the representations that structure and determine our experience of life. By remaining at the same time resolute in its obligation to render that experience in the sympathetic terms of the particular individual and his relation to the quotidian, however, Cheever's fiction wins for itself the additional distinction of maintaining two apparently antithetical modes - one realist, one antirealist or surfictional - in an equilibrium that would collapse in less knowing hands.

Originally published in Partisan Review 3, 1980