Torch Song by John Cheever, 1947
The magic trick:
Stealthily approaching the protagonist’s true conflict – and the story’s true themes – to the point of misleading the reader along the way
I can’t recall ever not enjoying a John Cheever story I read.
But “Torch Song” stands out for me even among those enjoyable reading experiences. I felt like it was one of the best stories I’d read in a long, long time. It’s a stunner.
It has a weird feel from the start. It’s clearly based in straight realism, yet the reader notices some oddities. We’re moving quickly through our protagonist’s life with surprising choices. We keep getting paragraph after paragraph about his friendship with this certain woman. Meanwhile, major life events like new jobs and how he met his wife or that they got married flash by in mere sentences.
So, we think, this isn’t necessarily a biography of him; it’s more a biography of the long-term friendship with this woman. OK, that makes sense.
But that’s not quite right either.
The story isn’t exploring what any of these incidents – times when he runs into this woman on the street; memories of attending parties at her house – mean or add up to in his life. We just keep getting scene after scene.
Finally, it becomes clear in the end, what the story is getting at. And maybe I should’ve seen it all along. Maybe I’m just dense, but it floored me.
This isn’t a story about a friendship at all. This is a story about a lifestyle. This is a story about an inability to navigate post-war life. This is a story about an inability to manage the domestic life that is expected of the newly victorious American white man.
There’s just so much here. In many ways, it’s the perfect bookend to “The Swimmer,” which showed up in Cheever’s oeuvre 17 years later.
Brilliant stuff.
And that’s quite a trick on Cheever’s part.
The selection:
He saw Joan again later that summer, when he was having dinner in a Village restaurant. He was with a new girl, a Southerner. There were many Southern girls in the city that year. Jack and his belle had wandered into the restaurant because it was convenient, but the food was terrible and the place was lighted with candles. Halfway through dinner, Jack noticed Joan on the other side of the room, and when he had finished eating, he crossed the room and spoke to her. She was with a tall man who was wearing a monocle. He stood, bowed stiffly from the waist, and said to Jack, “We are very pleased to meet you.” Then he excused himself and headed for the toilet. “He’s a count, he’s a Swedish count,” Joan said. “He’s on the radio, Friday afternoons at four-fifteen. Isn’t it exciting?” She seemed to be delighted with the count and the terrible restaurant.
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