John Cheever and John Updike
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John Cheever and John Updike have both been cited as writers of American suburbia, and indeed they do delve into that area of American life in their works. The writers are very different in their style, tone, and the subject matter they tackle, however, and should not be mistaken for one another by any careful reader. They come from different generations as well, and yet Cheever's suburbia, holds the promise of a new form of the American dream, but, is treated by the author as the thing that destroys it. Updike's suburbia is treated more as a simple fact of modern life, although his characters find it difficult living up to the expectations of suburban life. An examination of several stories by each writer can show some of the ways each approaches their subject matter, their stylistic concerns, and their differences as writers. Cheever's "The Death of Justina" has as its narrator an advertising man who lives in suburbia and who commutes to New York each day. His name is Moses. Justina is a cousin of his wife, and while she is visiting, she dies suddenly. The story has a certain wildly humorous tone that derives from the anger of the narrator as he details how he is refused permission to hold the funeral at his house because of zoning laws, and how he threatens the mayor that if he is not given permission to hold the funeral at the house, he will bury Justina in the garden. The mood of the story is evident from the opening passage:
. . .
ere her son resides. The story is not about the mother-son relationship, however, but about the rivalry between the narrator and his brother. The rivalry involves a phobia--the brother is afraid of heights, probably for the same reason that the mother is afraid of airplanes. The narrator develops a phobia about bridges so that he is afraid to cross a bridge. This is a severe handicap in New York, a city surrounded by bridges.
The narrator of this story is not a suburban dweller, though his brother is, but the sensibility in the story is that of a suburbanite who suddenly begins to fear the nature of the city. The George Washington Bridge is where his phobia develops as he is returning from his brother's home in New Jersey. When he is in Los Angeles, he thinks about his phobia and decides that it is indeed a manifestation of his greater hatred of much about the modern world in which he lives, the modern world that his other hates:
Looking at Sunset Boulevard at three in the morning, I felt that my terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what is becoming of the world (Cheever 584).
When the angel of the bridge, the folksinger, sings him out of his fear and leads him across the bridge he could
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Approximate Word count = 1419
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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