After a run of reading exclusively best-sellers in the previous weeks, I decided to step into the other timeline that I've been tracking for each year: winners of Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The main reason I chose this path for '78 was because the top-selling book of the year was Chesapeake by James Michener and, as much as I had enjoyed reading Centennial, I'd rather spread the wealth and read a different author's work.
This week, I read just a handful of selected stories from Cheever's collection and approached the book the way I've been taking in highlight episodes of a TV series. I can happily say, though, that I look forward to returning to the book to read everything else.
Cheever's cheekiness and ability to turn his own short tale on its head was a lot of fun to read. There's both a bit of shock value and of economy that suits the format when his characters speak or act in a duplicitous manner and, at least from the few stories that I read, he's not preaching about people getting their comeuppance, but rather presenting the notion that people, good or bad, well-meaning or otherwise, can turn their life or the lives of those around them upside down with a flash decision.
Only the tale of The Enormous Radio struck me as particularly plot-heavy (and maybe The Swimmer, which read like a Twilight Zone story), whereas the others (The Country Husband, Goodbye, My Brother, The Five-Forty-Eight) had plots that played supporting roles to a character's actions. Again, there weren't any easy summations of the story, no author's voice wrapping things up to offer a point or purpose, but just a lot of room to think and wonder.
Writing this now, I think I'll sneak in some more stories whenever I can before I have to return the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment