Writing style from Cheever to Dahl

         The kettle was whistling on the hob and the waft of cake met Howard as he stared at the empty wall on the other side of the room. He had decided to put up some shelving units to give the room a little something. If not just for storage then Howard would know if he could accomplish something at his age.

         Mary came through with a cup of tea.

         “I know that look,” she said, handing him his mug and taking a precarious sip of her overly-full tea. “What is going through your head?”

         So he told her and took a large gulp of his brew. It was delightfully refreshing to his throat. He thought that maybe his voice was going.

         “I’m going to take a hammer and start in a minute.”

         In half an hour, Howard found himself rummaging for supplies in the garage. There was plenty of old bits and pieces of debris, for the garage had lost its initial purpose and was instead serving as a basis for where items go to die. The toolbox was readily accessible, had been for years, and Howard armed himself with a hammer. Like being reunited with an old friend, it was comfortable in his hand.

         Back in the living room, Mary had moved the furniture to the other side of the room. She helped to bring Howard items from the garage as he needed them. The hammer proved effective as together they constructed the shelves. The overall slant was somehow endearing.

                                                    

                                                                                                                                      

I wrote these few paragraphs based upon John Cheever’s writing style that we looked at in class. Having to choose a main character and an item, a setting, an objective, something that went both right and wrong and an overall theme, we started free-writing our way on this little episode.

Such a style is indicative of Cheever and it was said that he has been described as “uniquely American”, although what I found was quite the comparison to Roald Dahl’s short stories. In particular, ‘The Way up to Heaven’, where the religiously punctual Mrs. Foster leaves her husband stuck in their home lift for six weeks.

‘her whole body arrested right in the middle of all this hurry to turn the key and get into the house, and she waited--five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten seconds, she waited. The way she was standing there, with her head in the air and the body so tense, it seemed as though she were listening for the repetition of some sound that she had heard a moment before from a place far away inside the house. Yes--quite obviously she was listening.’

Here she is listening out for her husband, making sure she has a chance to escape from him because she can hear he is trapped in the lift.

The character of Mrs. Foster reminded me very much of Irene in Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’. Her fixation upon the radio, even though she describes it as ‘“. . . so horrible . . . so dreadful . . .”’ when she can hear other families and their imperfections serves as one of the underlying messages for the short story. In my own version, I decided to have a sense of hope running through it in the form of the companionship and teamwork that Mary and Howard have for one another. Even though their shelving units don’t end up exactly perfect, there is still that element of hope that they have achieved something and maybe will achieve more together.