Marito In Citta by John Cheever, 1964
The magic trick:
Radically changing the plot simply by altering the protagonist’s perception of the story’s events
Yesterday, we looked at Cheever’s story, “The Country Husband.” Ten years later, he published “Marito In Citta,” a story with similar themes and even similar plot elements.
Just as we saw in “The Country Husband,” our protagonist here is made to look a fool to the reader early and often. He is a childish adult, barely capable of maintaining a regular daily life cycle now that his wife and children have gone on vacation and leaving him home. His profile doesn’t improve in our eyes when, midway through the story, he sleeps with a local seamstress.
Cheever does something here that works very well. He writes the scenes of this burgeoning romance very much from the man’s point of view; a man whose pride is restored by looking at himself through the eyes of this woman he imagines is very taken with him. It’s flowery. It’s heavily romanticized. It’s hilariously loaded with male ego and pride.
Then the bottom falls out.
And not because something happens in the plot to change things. Not really. The change is in the man’s mind. The next day, he begins to see the situation for what it really is. He sees himself for who he is. He sees the woman for who she is. The romance is gone. It’s all brilliantly done and painfully realistic. This is a story about a man at war with himself in his mind.
And that’s quite a trick on Cheever’s part.
The selection:
The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be. On the next night, he practiced the two-part inventions until eleven. On the night after that, he got out his telescope. He had been unable to solve the problem of feeding himself, and in the space of a week had lost more than fifteen pounds. His trousers, when he belted them in around his middle, gathered in folds like a skirt.
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