John Cheever has been publishing his short stories for over 30 years now, and he has gradually spread before us a landscape so solid and believable that the average American reader could almost draw a map of Shady Hill, Bullet Park, or St. Botolphs. We know intimately the Cheever hero—an unassuming man whose innocence and optimism often give him the appearance of someone much younger. And we know the basis of most Cheever plots: a subtle tension between what Cheever calls the "facts" (the moral ugliness, or at best the irrationality, of the real world) and the "truth," which is the underlying goodness and order in which the hero places an abiding faith.

But we tend to remember only this second, gentler side, when recalling Cheever's stories from a distance…. We have an impression of a sort of tapestry, richly woven, stylized, eerily still—if you can imagine...