The Distractions of John Cheever

This chapter considers John Cheever's Rolex advertisement, which can be read as the writer's comment, poised between self mockery and self congratulation, on his lifelong tussle with the marketplace and the conditions of magazine publication, considering Cheever's engagement with The New Yorker. While this was an affiliation from which Cheever frequently benefited, it was also one increasingly marked by financial frustration, creative limitation, and personal discord with the editors with whom he was most closely associated. More damagingly, Cheever's reputation, both during his lifetime and in subsequent decades, was perceived as so deeply entangled with that of the magazine that the association undoubtedly hindered, and may continue to unsettle, a just evaluation of his work.