Asked why he wrote fiction, John Cheever used to answer that it was what he could do best, his craft, his usefulness. But he also wrote, he said, to "make sense of my life." The process was not so private as it sounds, for by attempting to make sense of his life Cheever provided his readers with insights into their own lives, their own times. What he wrote about, almost always, was the present, and it was a present he shared with his audience. No one else, as Joan Didion remarked in 1964, tells us so much about "the way we live now," and she did not mean as a social realist alone. What is remarkable about Cheever's attitude toward the world he confronted is how much it changed in the course of his career. There are many excellent writers, Saul Bellow has observed, who do not develop or expand. But, he added, "John Cheever was a writer of a different sort, altogether," one who went through a dramatic metamorphosis.

In The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), his first novel, Cheever contrasted a somewhat idealized and unrecapturable past with a less hospitable but not intolerable present. His tone ranged from genial to satirical without becoming bitter. Then, in his dark period of the 1960's, and particularly in The Wapshot Scandal (1964) and Bullet Park (1969), he adopted the narrative stance of a visiting anthropologist who, despite his apparent objectivity—"at the time of which I'm writing," the narrative voice would remark—regarded the ills of modernity with something verging on despair. Finally, in his last two novels—Falconer (1977) and Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982)—this dismayed observer struggled toward acceptance of the deeply flawed universe, and even toward affirmation. Miracles could happen.