Cheever Reads The Swimmer

Pages: 12
Published: 1994
Language: English

This recording captures John Cheever reading "The Swimmer," his best-known short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1964 and later collected in The Stories of John Cheever.

On a bright midsummer day, Neddy Merrill, relaxing at a friend's pool in suburban Westchester County, decides on a whim to "swim" the eight miles home by way of the string of neighbors' pools that lie between him and his house, naming the chain of pools the "Lucinda River" after his wife. What begins as a lighthearted, faintly absurd adventure among the country-club set gradually darkens, as the weather turns and the welcomes he receives grow colder, charting a quiet unraveling that has made the story a fixture of American literature curricula.

Hearing Cheever read the story himself adds a layer of authorial voice to a text often studied for its precise, deceptively simple prose and its slow accumulation of dread.

Prose complexity: 7/10

Melancholic Atmospheric Tense Dark

Short Stories Literary Fiction

John Cheever

John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included The Enormous Radio, Goodbye, My Brother, The Five-Forty-Eight, The Country Husband, and...