Of all our major American writers, John Cheever seems to me the most spontaneous. Because that word has been so much abused I'll say that I take it to refer to a talent that appears to be involuntary, that enables Mr. Cheever to see poetic connections where the rest of us would not have, that causes his mind to teem with radical but always concrete images, that keeps his language in a state of excitement.

While Saul Bellow uses a wider frame of reference and John Updike has a firmer control of his effects, John Cheever seethes with literature. He seems drunk with it, as if life itself, as well as the wish to write about it, made him happy. He is perhaps our most sophisticated optimist.

In a typical Cheever story or novel, he sends a worldly man out into the world looking for love, beauty, continuity...