Books, Arts & Manners: No Place Like Kansas

Oh What a Paradise It Seems By John Cheever

Knopf, 100 pp., $10 It happened about 1979, when his collected stories won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. John Cheever became a “figure.” People started talking of him as a “national treasure” and so forth. This occurrence is bad for any writer, and bad for his audience: it generally leads to a slackening of invention in the former and a supine gullibility in the latter.

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Thomas Mallon

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Oh What a Paradise It Seems By John Cheever

Knopf, 100 pp., $10 It happened about 1979, when his collected stories won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. John Cheever became a “figure.” People started talking of him as a “national treasure” and so forth. This occurrence is bad for any writer, and bad for his audience: it generally leads to a slackening of invention in the former and a supine gullibility in the latter.