SOURCE: “Literate, Witty, Civilized,” in Critical Essays on John Cheever, edited by R. G. Collins, G. K. Hall & Company, 1982, pp. 28-32.

In the following essay, originally published in the New Republic in 1982, Wain applauds Cheever's The World of Apples for being witty and intelligent while depicting characters that behave decently as people “generally do in real life.”

I don't know what goes on in the minds of very young people, but to most of us grown-ups there comes a sense, very often, of having started our lives amid the outlines of a civilization and having watched them melt away, leaving a featureless desert; quite a suitable environment for prayer and meditation, and also for nameless crimes, but very unfavorable for the practice of ordinary virtues such as tolerance or unselfishness. Goodness knows, the crumbling away of values has been going on for 200 years, but anyone born, as I...