‘The Seaside Houses’ by John Cheever

The Seaside Houses by John Cheever, 1961

The magic trick:

No sharp edges; just smooth control

“The Seaside Houses” foretells two related – and, frankly, better and more polished – Cheever stories in 1962’s “Reunion” and 1964’s “The Swimmer.”

It’s like “Houses” finds him working out some of the same ideas in a more raw form. Readers get here the same fatalism attached to alcoholism that they would soon see in “Reunion.” They also get the same haunted surrealism they would see in “The Swimmer.”

And I’m not sure it all works. The connections to the house and its absent owner are a bit overwrought in my opinion. The coda at the end, crucial to the story’s desire to show decline over a period of time, strikes me as tacked on.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed and admire this story. I think it’s brilliant. It’s just interesting to see its strengths and weaknesses as a way of Cheever working through some of the key themes from his 1960s “late golden age” era.

The thing that I most love about this is the thing that Cheever does that I can barely describe, let alone dissect. Whereas so many writers are very blatant with their decisions to use certain devices, Cheever is seamless. A lot of stories might be very self-consciously “Hey, here is a very realistic story about an American family but it’s also a ghost story!” Others might very self-consciously “Hey, here is a very realistic story about an American family, but look out, there is also this one magic realism element that will subvert everything you thought you understood!”

And those are often great stories.

But Cheever is so smooth. He’s so much more indirect with those things – or certainly he was by 1961. His story, yes, does begin as “Hey, here is a very realistic story about an American family.” And his story, yes, does end someplace a bit stranger and more mysterious. But the in between doesn’t rely on a single device to get there. He incorporates a more subtle and gradual drift into weirdness. The result is something that doesn’t feel tragic. The edges aren’t that sharp. Instead, it’s the feeling of melancholy, which somehow is far deeper and sadder.

And that’s quite a trick on Cheever’s part.

The selection:

Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea and drive there in the first of the summer—with the dog and cat, the children, and the cook—arriving at a strange place a little before dark. The journey to the sea has its ceremonious excitements, it has gone on for so many years now, and there is the sense that we are, as in our dreams we have always known ourselves to be, migrants and wanderers—travellers, at least, with a traveller’s acuteness of feeling. I never investigate the houses that we rent, and so the wooden castle with a tower, the pile, the Staffordshire cottage covered with roses, and the Southern mansion all loom up in the last of the sea light with the enormous appeal of the unknown. You get the sea-rusted keys from the house next door. You unfasten the lock and step into a dark or a light hallway, about to begin a vacation—a month that promises to have no worries of any kind. But as strong as or stronger than this pleasant sense of beginnings is the sense of having stepped into the midst of someone else’s life.

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