When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever

Cheever, the daughter of novelist and short story writer John Cheever (1912–1982), blends literary analysis and memoir in this transcendent look at her father’s most influential works. Married with three children, John was a closeted gay man who battled alcoholism for most of his life. Despite his prolific output—he published more than 100 stories in the New Yorker between 1935 and 1982, plus three mid-career novels—his family was burdened by financial worries until the success of the novel Falconer in 1977 and his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Stories of John Cheever, in 1978. Those stories, though celebrated, plundered the family’s personal lives and frequently savaged their neighbors and friends; Cheever writes that her father was “a wise man on the page and an idiot at the dinner table,” never quite able to extend the empathy he showed his characters to the people in his life. John’s emotional struggles, meanwhile, went unexamined within the family, “but what was left unsaid... often leaked out into the pages of the New Yorker.” Simultaneously a tribute to her father and an exposé of his failings, Cheever’s narrative offers bittersweet grace to a man whose life was a kind of fiction and whose fiction drew mercilessly from his life. It’s equal parts wrenching and edifying. Agents: Andrew Wylie and Rebecca Nagel, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)