Edge of Darkness

THE BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW by John Cheever. 275 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Lazing beside the Westerhazys' green pool one Sunday afternoon, Neddy Merrill decides to swim home. It pleases him to imagine that his neighbors' swimming pools form the course of a broad river winding through fertile fields to the grounds of his own fine house. He names the river after his wife Lucinda and sets out at a choppy crawl. At the Grahams' he is given a drink, and at the Bunkers', where a pool party is going on, he gets another. "Oh, how bonny and lush were the banks of the Lucinda River! Prosperous men and women gathered by the sapphire-colored waters, while caterers' men in white coats passed them cold gin."

But the afternoon turns cold, Neddy tires, and beyond the difficult portage of Route 424 he begins to see odd un-familiarities that are not on his mental map. The lawns of friends are weed-grown; for-sale signs appear. There is another pool party, but the hostess, who is a social inferior, snubs him. Someone offers a word of sympathy for Neddy's financial troubles, and Neddy, vaguely uneasy, cannot recall that he has any. Chilled, and more tired than seems reasonable, he doggedly swims the last leg of his trip and hurries home to his wife and four tennis-playing daughters. They are gone: the house is locked and empty, and it is obvious that no one has lived there for a long time.

Real Edges. The story is typical of one preoccupation of John Cheever (TIME cover, March 27): the prosperous suburbanite who turns an unsuspected corner and falls off the edge of things into outer darkness. In synopsis, the occult shading of these stories can seem affected, but Cheever is persuasive. His edges are real, and the corners that one turns to reach them seem very near.

Kafka evokes the terror of a citizen forced by a faceless and brutalizing state to stand trial for an unspecified crime. Cheever writes of a subtler terror: that of citizens richly and pointlessly rewarded by an equally faceless society. Unsupported by arrogance of family or formal rank, equipped with no irreplaceable skill, the well-to-do suburbanite wonders vaguely and passionately why he deserves the country clubs, the trips to Bermuda and the swimming pools. More sharply, he wonders how long it will last. Will the money stop? Will the unpredictable demons of alimony or Internal Revenue turn treacherous? The sickness unto death is not the artisan's fear that his arm will go lame; the suburbanite arm could not earn him the price of his quinine water. It is a less specific and less bearable fear: there are gods to be appeased, and the suburbanite has forgotten even their names.

On Classic Lines. The gods were more elaborately and profoundly explored in Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle. These stories are in his lesser mode. In fact, the stratagem of treating suburbia as if it were a sacred grove, with every flowering tree an imprisoned nymph, works best when it is worked least. One story, for instance, begins: "Larry Actaeon was built along classical lines . . ." and the reader, with the help of a mythological dictionary, recalls that Actaeon observed Diana at her bath and was punished by being turned into a stag and torn apart by hounds. All too patly, Larry Actaeon sees a lady partner in his investment-banking firm naked in the office of an associate and later that day is killed by his own savage dogs. But the precision with which the story follows the outlandish myth obscures its point, which is that there are edges over which even investment bankers may tumble.

The mode is much more successful in the last, and best, story in the Metamorphoses series, when Cheever keeps only the mood of magical transformation. Goaded by the Surgeon General's report, Mr. Bradish gives up tobacco and his sanity. "Late in the party, a young woman wearing a light sack or tube-shaped dress, her long hair the color of Virginia tobacco, came in at the door. In his ardor to reach her, he knocked over a table and several glasses. It was, or had been up to that point, a decorous party, but the noise of broken glass, followed by the screaming of the stranger when he wrapped his legs around her and buried his nose in her tobacco-colored hair, were barbarous."

It has been a long time since anyone fell off such an edge or wrote a story so funny.

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