by Manuel Gonzales

It has been some time since I wrote a book review. It has been so long, in fact, that I find myself out of practice, floundering among styles and stories and poorly written sentences (my own, of course), but I will try to make this bearable. Furthermore, since I have lost book support, I am purging my own library for stories to review, and though my library is fair, most titles are older titles, and so the reviews may not be as timely as, say, The New York Times or The New Yorker reviews, but hopefully, better written than, say, The Austin American-Statesman reviews.

Maybe, maybe not. And so, this month, I have chosen to review John Cheever's The Swimmer and Hemingway's A Movable Feast.

First, let me bore you with my theory on Hemingway's work. Hemingway was a short story writer. He mastered the style, wrote clean, crisp, excellent short stories that can take your breath away, make you stop dead in your tracks and say, "Whoa." Just like that. "Whoa." His novels tended to be longer (as novels tend to be) and at times, long-winded. His style a little forced, and his words not as crisp. For the most part, his novels weren't bad, and some of them are excellent works of literature, but they do not compare to the short stories. And then we look to his nonfiction. If you are a staunch fan of Hemingway, you might find and read and even buy the book, Dateline-Toronto, which chronicles the articles written by Hemingway for the Toronto Star while an expatriate in France. These articles are examples of well-written journalism. At times funny, and for the most part, intelligent and insightful, etc. But all in all, they are newspaper articles. Then there are the bullfighting books: Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer. Dangerous Summer I have not read, so I cannot voice any opinion. Death in the Afternoon, however, I read while in Mexico. The book is probably his best novel, if you consider a novel novel because it's novel. It is definitely his most experimental work, is well worth reading and is one of my personal favorites. Which brings me to the conclusion that I enjoy his short stories best and then his nonfiction above his novels. So, if Hemingway were to find a way to combine his short story writing with his nonfiction writing, we would be in for some kind of funky treat.

Which brings us to A Movable Feast, published posthumously and written towards the end of Hemingway's career. Written, in fact, after many had written off his career, after his talent had turned cold and his writing over-sentimental, and just before he shot himself. A Movable Feast is a nonfiction account of his time in Paris, when he first met Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When he was young and making his first real attempts at writing short fiction. When, married to his first wife, he decided that he would write one story about each thing he knew, and he would cut from his work the scroll work and the ornate descriptions and begin with the first true declarative sentence he knew. When the world was, as he makes it sound, a much happier, if poorer and hungrier, place. The work is made of 20 sections, each relatively short and which could be considered chapters, but which stand better alone, as if they were short stories. In this book, there are more glimpses of Hemingway's power of voice and style than you can find in his last four novels, including The Old Man and the Sea, for which he won the Nobel Prize. His descriptions of France and Paris in the '20s are beautifully and simply written. Intimately written. But not all of it is beautiful. Not all of it is good. His writing suffers with age and alcoholism, surely, but bitterness affects his writing more than anything else. The Paris of A Movable Feast was, to him, Eden. Perfection. Where hunger was good discipline and, "[w]hen spring came ...there were no problems except where to be happiest." But, as in Eden, something or someone(s) ruined Paris for Hemingway as Eden was ruined for Adam and Eve. And those who ruined Paris for Hemingway are dealt with harshly and in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But rather than dwell on the bad, let's leave A Movable Feast with this, Hemingway's introduction to the chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald, that describes, like no other, Fitzgerald himself:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

If you enjoy the American Short Story (enjoy it enough, even, to capitalize each word in an article) and you have not bought The Stories of John Cheever, have not even read John Cheever, and might not know John Cheever from Adam except for the Seinfeld episode, then please, put down the magazine, head to the bookstore or library, buy, check out, steal the book, and read the stories. You may start with The Swimmer if you want, or any other story in the collection (there are 60 to choose from). I first read "The Country Husband" in a short story class at UT. Excellent story. They are all excellent short stories. Well-crafted works of fiction that sneak up on you while you read, hit you with phrases and words, that, when used by any other writer, would feel over-used and simple and rote, but when used by Cheever, feel necessary.

The Swimmer begins as a lark. A man at a pool party one Sunday afternoon decides to swim the eight miles to his house, hopping from friend's pool to friend's pool. How he creates such an elegant and clean story out of this I will never understand. The story, however, cannot be better told than by Cheever, and, therefore, though this may seem lame, you have to read the damn thing yourself to find out what happens.