SOURCE: “Cheever Country, 1994,” in New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 10, June, 1994, pp. 58–65.

In the following excerpt, Allen offers a favorable evaluation of The Ice Storm, which she places in the tradition of American WASP novels and contrasts with the fiction of John Updike and John Cheever.

The landscape is much the same as it was a generation ago. American suburbia has changed remarkably little, despite the advent of malls and bypasses, guns and drugs. Suburbia is a landscape of the mind, a utopian experiment. Its failures may be obvious: the protected model communities have proved no safe haven from divorce, alcoholism, suicide and violence. But the suburban ideal, a planned combination of community and privacy, is still resonant in America's fantasy about itself.

Cheever's and Updike's suburbanites married early. They produced children in the Fifties and spent the next ten or fifteen years moving steadily ahead. Then along came the...