Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [383]
And so the dumping ends, just like that, and Sears is left with the ecstatic task of restoring his skating pond to purity. What this means in metaphorical terms is neatly spelled out for us: “[Sears] had found some sameness in the search for love and the search for potable water. The clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured his consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination.” This passage appears on page 99, at which point the reader may indeed be wondering what will happen (with only a page remaining) to the criminals who murdered Chisholm and poisoned the pond. For that matter, what of Renée, who has been missing since the middle of the book? And Eduardo? After that curious tryst in the room off the lobby, he and Sears went on to take a cheerful (and for the most part manly) fishing trip together, after which it was implied that Eduardo would return to his wife and Sears to his pond project, never to meet again, yet mutually refreshed by their harmless encounter. And what, finally, is one to make of the revelation (on page 24) that the book's narrator is a personage from the distant future, lying near a mint-scented stream, “concealed with [his] rifle, waiting to assassinate a pretender who is expected to come here, fishing for trout”? Nothing further is made of this, though one might surmise that the future will be more pastoral (and feudal?) than the blighted, nomadic present, or something like that. But never mind—”this is just a story meant to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night”—and perhaps Cheever does well to stress the fairy-tale aspect of things. In a fairy tale, elements of conventional narrative can be safely abandoned: women can be bizarrely capricious (whether hot or cold); elevator operators can spontaneously offer release from certain “modes of loneliness” before fading back into blessed anonymity, without a trace of the complicated anguish that so-called real life tends to entail. That said, fairy-tale evasions rarely result in good art.
The valedictory themes of the novel were inherently poignant, though, and Cheever addressed them with feeling and an undiminished prose style, such that many reviewers were able to praise Oh What a Paradise It Seems with a clear conscience. By the time it was published, in March, Cheever's illness was well known and newspapers were already preparing obituaries. John Leonard, for one, gladly volunteered to write a gentle front-page notice for the Times Book Review: Cheever's “very short and often lovely novel,” he said, was a relief after “the heroin addiction, homosexuality and convenient miracles of ‘Falconer’ [a relief from the heroin addiction anyway]. … Certainly, ‘Oh What a Paradise It Seems’ is minor art, although many of us will never grow up to achieve it.” Similarly, in the daily Times, Anatole Broyard (who'd been invited to the Cheevers’ famous 1969 dinner dance, less than two months after his mixed review of Bullet Park) conceded that he wasn't really “comfortable” with the novel's abrupt ending, but then, as he diffidently pointed out, Cheever was the “most spontaneous” of major American writers and doubtless knew what he was doing (“I gave up some time ago the notion that art was a comfortable affair”). Updike, more aware than most of Cheever's recent suffering, wrote perhaps the most elegant tribute of all for The New Yorker: “The book is too darting, too gaudy in its deployment of artifice and aside, too disarmingly personal in its voice, to be saddled with the label of novel or novella; it is a parable and a tall tale. … [A]ll is fancy, praise, and rue, seamlessly.” “Seamlessly” is a long (if heartfelt) stretch, but the opposite view was taken only by a few marginal cranks.