SOURCE: "Drinking and Society in the Fiction of John Cheever," in Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 62-80.

In the following essay Gilmore describes John Cheever's portrayal of alcoholism in his short fiction, both for comic effect and as a social critique of the upper-middle class.

John Cheever may be the American writer who shows the most thorough and diversified familiarity with drinking in modern American society. At times the familiarity relaxes into comedy. As Cheever sketches the suburban milieu for his novel Bullet Park, he introduces the reader to the Wickwires, at first glance an unexceptionably attractive couple but for the arresting fact that "they were always falling downstairs, bumping into sharp-edged furniture and driving their cars into ditches." Their vulner-ability to accident is sufficiently explained by an intimate look at the detritus of their Monday mornings. Mr. Wickwire...