The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. Loren Baritz. Knopf, $19.95. Probably the best way to get to know a place quickly is to read the fiction that is set there. When my family moved to Westchester County, New York, a couple of years ago, I turned to the work of John Cheever, the "Chekhov of Westchester," for help in understanding our new home. Cheever's publicity during the last few years of his life (he died in 1982), in which he was always portrayed as a contented suburban squire, had given me the expectation that his work would be a celebration of the life of the bourgeois, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant commuter. Actually reading it for the first time was a shock-Cheever's vision is an unrelievedly dark one, in which almost all characters are profoundly alone, unable to find a rewarding connection either to the society or to other people. And now we know, thanks to the recent publication of Cheever's letters, his biography, and a memoir by his daughter, that his life was as melancholic as his work.

Cheever surprised me sociological ly as well as temperamentally. We now have a picture of the suburbs in the fifties, Cheever's best-known setting, as having been prosperous and optimistic, if marred by excessive conformity, racism, and sexism. Yet the great economic theme of his work is downward mobility. A few peripheral characters are participating fully in the post-war boom, but most of the fully drawn, empathetic figures can't maintain the standard of living (Manhattan apartments, summer houses, private schools, servants) in which they were raisad. The men have vague, unsuccessful careers. The women are oppressed by the burden of housework that their mothers didn't have to do. Bills go unpaid. Heirlooms are sold off. There is too much drinking.

Several of Cheever's stories have endings in which die protagonist, after having journeyed to the lower depths of despair, has a redeeming vision of the beauty and goodness of life in Westchester. These endings are supposed to demonstrate that Cheever's outlook was not entirely bleak-that he found it possible to make one's peace after all-but I find this theory unconvincing. For one thing, happy endings in Cheever always seem tacked-on and inconsistent with the body of the story. For another, consolation usually comes from the beauty of nature, rather than from the human world. In "The Country Hus"The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it...