Few swan-songs from any important writer of fiction can have been as well-tuned as [Oh What a Paradise It Seems]. In these 100 pages, John Cheever … with perfectly pleasurable art provides us with an epitaph to his working life, and the theme that stoked it for 40 years. He once described it as 'the terrible beauty of the world, and the pain of those who reach after it as it disappears'….

The polluting spread of urban greed, and of arid metropolitan attitudes to love and the modes of happiness, was a constant preoccupation of his.

But, lest this should sound portentous and moralising in intent, one must add that Cheever's chief quality in his writing is a distanced irony. He has the sharp eye of a naturalist, and a Jamesian view of manners—the conventional overcoat for surging desires and affections buttoned inside.

This valedictory story has the proportions that...