SOURCE: “Change is Always for the Worse,” in The Critical Response to John Cheever, edited by Francis J. Bosha, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 83-4.

In the following essay, originally published in Commonweal in 1964, Segal traces the themes of the progression of magic and the transitory nature of material possessions in Cheever's collection of stories, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow.

When I was a boy I read a story that terrified me. It was about a child who declared that he needed the help of no living creature. That night the sheep came and took from him everything woolen, the tree came and took everything wooden, and so on until he was naked and cold under the sky. I remembered this fairy tale while reading The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, a collection of the short stories John Cheever has written over the last ten years. My children's story...