About the Book
This luminous biography reveals, for the first time, the full and unforgettable life of a writer of timeless fiction. Drawing on unprecedented access to essential sources, Blake Bailey shows us a soul in conflict: a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen; a proud Yankee who flaunted his lineage while deploring the provincialism of his Quincy, Massachusetts, family circle; a pioneer of suburban-realist fiction who continually pushed the boundaries of realism; a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer; a secret bisexual who struggled with a revolving door of self-loathing and hedonism. Concealing his anxieties behind the mask of the genial Westchester squire, Cheever earned fame and glamorous company with his groundbreaking work, yet the joy of creation could never wholly offset his desperate loneliness.
About the Author :
Blake Bailey is the author of award-winning biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth. His articles and reviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Slate, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Malcolm Hillgartner is an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. Named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013 and the recipient of several Earphones Awards, he has narrated over 175 audiobooks.
Review :
"The most exquisite, compelling and heartbreaking life I've yet encountered. Blake Bailey doesn't merely write like an angel, he is an angel--he seamlessly resuscitates the past to make it live and breathe in the present, and he writes with all the power and authority of our finest novelists."
-- "T. C. Boyle, author of The Tortilla Curtain"
"[An] always entertaining biography, composed with a novelist's eye...[Cheever] has probably yet to find a definitive position in American letters among academicians. This thoroughly researched and heartfelt biography may help redress that situation."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"[Cheever's] story here is told by a narrator of unusually subtle gifts. Bailey's book is as lively (and squalid) as his subject but quite dense, an attribute Malcolm Hillgartner overcomes with wondrous pacing and inflection. So in command is he that with the merest pause, he clearly indicates the beginning and ending of quotations or a shift in perspective. And his unfaltering impression of Cheever's Brahmin accent--wholly invented by the writer--rings with acerbity, humor, or pathos. Cheever is very much alive in this reading."
-- "AudioFile"
"A comprehensive treatment of the tormented but artful life of one of fiction's modern masters...Bailey plunges deeply into the murky, sometimes fetid stew of John Cheever's life...Superb work that shows Cheever wrestling with dark angels, but wresting from these encounters some celestial prose."
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
"An extraordinary book. Bailey captures the man inside the man, perhaps the hardest thing to do. John Cheever lives in this book--the whole complicated, bottomless mess of lonely good cheer and the pain of him. Even, perhaps especially, the character that Cheever (as writer) made out of the tortured, inviolable hardwood of himself. And the larger story is here too, that of the terrible price one pays for one's art. It both sustained Cheever and destroyed him. I stayed up all night reading this biography. I couldn't put it down."
-- "Philip Schultz, author of Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry"
"Fascinating...Mr. Bailey meticulously demonstrates that Cheever was an artist who worked from life...drawing on unprecedented access to Cheever's papers and family, Mr. Bailey approaches his subject like a concerned parole officer...countering both his subject's soaring enthusiasms and paranoid forebodings with clear-eyed judgment."
-- "Wall Street Journal"
"Having read the book twice, I just downloaded your prompt recording. I've listened to less than five minutes now, but you've clearly made another brilliant choice. Malcolm Hillgartner does a splendid--and outstanding--job of it. I thank you. My mother thanks you. My sister thanks you. My father thanks you."
-- "Benjamin Cheever"
"John Cheever was a shopkeeper's son and self-styled aristocrat, a bisexual suburban dad, a legendary drunk, and one of the greatest short-story writers of all time. Blake Bailey's masterful and poignant biography reveals the connection between the tormented, perpetually disappointed man and the brilliant, intuitive artist who illuminated the terrors and yearnings lurking beneath the prosperous surface of Cold War America. Here is Cheever in all his complicated, heartbreaking glory."
-- "Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children"
"Like Bailey's fine biography of Richard Yates, Cheever is full of intelligence, clarity, and kindliness toward its subject, without losing an ounce of judiciousness. It is also deeply and utterly readable, even eloquent. It honors its subject with grace and candor and subtle understanding. A richly rewarding treatment of one of our very best."
-- "Richard Bausch, author of Peace "
"Monumental, masterful...rich with detail...This literary hat trick will no doubt spark a well-deserved Cheever renaissance honoring his legacy as an American master."
-- "Amazon.com Review, Best Books of 2009"
"One of the best and most eloquent literary biographies I have ever read and every inch the record that Cheever deserves...This combination of sparkling writing and stirring subject makes the long biography almost mesmerizing, and gives us remarkable access to one of the greatest writers of his time."
-- "O magazine"
"Perhaps a Cheever renaissance of sorts will result from this magnificently understanding and understandable biography based on copious research and destined to be the definitive life treatment...Riveting from page one, this is the literary biography of the season and will be talked about for years to come; it will also, it is hoped, guide readers once again to his distinctive fiction, especially his short stories."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"Stunningly detailed...so wise and serious, so human an account...both arresting and disturbing...Even more eloquent and resourceful than Bailey's celebrated biography of Richard Yates. [Bailey] seems to me as good an interpreter of Cheever's stories and novels as I have read...His sketches of dozens of characters who were touched by Cheever are short stories in themselves, and he sometimes bores right to the center of complex relationships, revealing their essence in a sentence."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Surely definitive.
-- "Boston Globe"
"Sympathetic and deeply engaging...Bailey dramatizes Cheever's resolute self-creation and its considerable psychic costs through the use of adroitly interwoven narrative strands...This book is also a portrait of the twentieth century."
-- "San Francisco Chronicle"
"This is pitch-perfect biography--merciless and deeply compassionate in equal parts, psychologically and literarily acute to the 'nth degree, and beautifully written, without a whiff of cant or pretension. Like its subject, it's by turns heartrending and laugh-out-loud funny, and while it renders his every foible with Chuck Close-like precision, it never for a second undercuts his goddamn nobility--a quantity that's in miserably short supply in these wretched times."
-- "James Kaplan, author of Two Guys from Verona"
