[The size of The Stories of John Cheever]—sixty-one stories, seven hundred pages—necessarily obscures the excellences of individual pieces, as their edges run together; Cheever's obsessively adulterous suburbanites and alcoholic expatriates eventually parody one another, and the complexities of their descriptions are levelled by repetition. On the other hand—and this is true of any writer's collected works—as our attention strays from the plots and characters, it fastens on the author himself, developing as an artist behind the subdued voices of his narrators…. A collection may have as clearly defined a plot as any of its constituent stories, and Cheever advises us [in his preface] that the plot of this collection is the "naked history" of his development as a writer. It is not, however, quite the dramatic formative struggle that he would have us find; the development is indeed a process of self-education, but for...