Tag: John Cheever

Writer’s Desk: Lie Well

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

When being interviewed by The Paris Review (as all the greats were, once upon a time), John Cheever was asked about how to be true to reality in fiction. His response:

It seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked or taken. Nabokov is a master at this. The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life…

Make things up. That is fiction. But you can, and should, base your fictions in truth.

Writer’s Desk: Find the Time

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

John Cheever had a fairly simple formula for writing. He explained it once when meeting a wonderstruck Michael Chabon:

Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became and the more books you produced. Excellence plus productivity, that was the formula for sustained success, and time was the coefficient of both. 

For Cheever, though, this meant there was little room for anything else. Children? Cheever called them “notorious thieves of time.”

Of course, Chabon went on to father four children and publish 14 books, including masterpieces like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Wonder Boys. So he must have figured out some way to budget his time.

In Books: ‘The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

book-triptoechospring-olivialaing-cvr-200Late last year, the British writer Olivia Laing published The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking. It’s a rambling and discursive but smart portrait of a half-dozen writers and their struggles with the devil’s brew (Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald). Laing takes her title from a line in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and indulges in more than a few Williams-ian flights of writerly fancy along the way. Given her twinned love of these writers’ work and her impatience with the romanticism of the drunk author, it’s well earned.

My essay on the book and the author-alcohol phenomenon, “The Drowning Pool,” is at PopMatters:

More than anything else, this is a book of pain and beauty, the former constant and the latter fleeting. It’s awash in water and the attendant metaphors, from the lapping waters of Carver’s rough-and-tumble Pacific Northwest towns to the rivers of glorious and damning booze all of her subjects sluiced down their throats. Laing stabs at and occasionally hits the subject that lies behind it all: Why write and read, after all? Reading the passages left behind in a notebook that lies by Carver’s modest grave, she is awed and lets the reader be awed by “All these anonymous suffering strangers… putting their faith in stories, in the capacity of literature to somehow salve a sense of soreness, to make one feel less flinchingly alone”…

You can read an excerpt from The Trip to Echo Springs here.