Crabgrass in Eden

By Melvin Maddocks

THE WORLD OF APPLES byJOHN CHEEVER 174 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $5.95.

Timeless as a myth, the Cheever hero steps off his Grand Central commuter train into his enchanting white New England village. Outdoors in winter, smoke curls from chimneys. Indoors, candlelight will cast a glow over the faces of his children, while lending a golden patina to the dining-room table he has acquired from his own or somebody else's Boston ancestors.

All this, a Cheever hero well knows, is what the American Dream is all about. And yet Something is Wrong, and that something will send him, in antic middle age, on manic quests. He will cross the county via backyard swimming pools, for instance, or take to robbing his neighbors' seemly homes (The Housebreaker of Shady Hill).

Cheever has spun his rankling myth of crabgrass in Eden to novel length, in The Wapshol Chronicles, in Bullet Park. But his sentences, polished, often lyrical, are almost too good to sustain. Above all, he is a perceiver, a man given to visions. The short story is Cheever's form, and he is at the very top of it in the ten stories that make up The World of Apples.

Cheever country does not look better to its creator as he and it grow older (he is now 60). The marriages that once cracked as exquisitely as Steuben glass now are already fractured at the beginning of a story. The family chronicles, once so romping, so rich in WASP eccentricity, now seem dominated by death and madness (The Jewels of the Cabots).

Cheever women, charming even at boredom, eat in French restaurants and desperately dream of phantom lovers. Cheever men sit on the edge of their bathtubs and talk to imaginary girls named Olga. Cheever country is a lonelier and lonelier place, and its inhabitants are getting in an awfully bad way. But rather than turning sour, the author, if anything, seems more resilient, more demanding of "tenderness, love, loving, good cheer -- all the splendid and decent things I know to be possible in the world."

Cheever country is too tidy, too domesticated to contain, even as an irony, the satyrs and nymphs Cheever people metamorphose into now. These maddened lovers, these wild death haters can no longer be accommodated to suburbia. So Cheever appears to be reaching deeper into his imagination, exploring new and more perilous provinces.

In The World of Apples he writes about an 82-year-old New England poet, living as an expatriate south of Rome. Asa Bascomb is a poet of rain winds, of a cleansed universe. Unaccountably, he is attacked by demons. Pornographic fantasies begin to beset him. Scatology streams from his pen. But old Asa performs his rites, baptizes himself in a mountain waterfall, and lo and behold, he is reborn. Purged of his nightmares, he dreams again of Paradise Lost -- of a world of apples. Some thing like the same small miracle, praise be, seems to keep happening to John Cheever. *Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.