Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)) [Paperback]

Susan Cheever (Author)

Book Description

Series: Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press) | Publication Date: January 1, 1999

In Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever, daughter of the famously talented writer John Cheever, uses previously unpublished letters, journals, and her own precious memories to create a candid and insightful tribute to her father. While producing some of the most beloved and celebrated American literature of this century, John Cheever wrestled with personal demons that deeply affected his family life as well as his career. In this poignant memoir of a man driven by boundless genius and ambition, Susan Cheever writes with heartwrenching honesty of family life with the father, the writer, and the remarkable man she loved.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Newsweek A fine, very brave book...one of the best portraits of an American writer.

The New York Times Book Review Intimate, deeply felt, and often harrowing.

John Updike Whatever biographers and literary historians of the future make of John Cheever, their ur-text, their indespensible place of beginning will have to be Susan Cheever's beautiful book about her father.

The Washington Post Book World One of the most moving and intimate books I have read in years.

The Wall Street Journal A restrained and haunting elegy.

The New York Times Book Review Home Before Dark clearly demanded more from its author, more courage and force of heart than will be required of any biographer of John Cheever.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner Out of the pain of real life Susan Cheever has created a document that is ultimately a paean to family love, as humane and bittersweet as the best of her father's work, and as completely believable....her depictions of a family, albeit an extraordinary one, in extremis reads like the best fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates A powerful book -- beautifully written....I don't know when I have read anything that absorbed me more.

Chicago Tribune Book World An act of love, a compassionate, well-written account not just of the father, or the writer, but of the whole man -- his exhilerations and his darker impulses.

About the Author

Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of thirteen previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671028502
• ISBN-13: 978-0671028503
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,040,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in New York City and have lived here on and off my entire life--in fact I went to nursery school a few blocks from where I write this. It took me a long time to admit I was a writer--I had a career as a teacher and I loved it. When I was married I couldn't get a teaching job so by an amazing stroke of luck I went to work for my local small town newspaper. After a long time as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I took off to write a novel when I was 35 and I haven't looked back.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific Book, December 6, 2003

By 

Charles Slack (CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)) (Paperback)

Home Before Dark is a beautifully written, moving book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it. It helps that Susan Cheever's subject, her father, was (and remains long after his death) one of the finest fiction writers in the history of American literature. What distinguishes John Cheever's stories, outside of his magical touch with words, is the passion and love he brings to illuminating his small corner of the world -- life in the New York suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. Most writers who explore the suburbs do so with an arm's length superiority -- taking pains to distance themselves politically, emotionally, and intellectually from their characters. What makes Cheever's stories such a joy it that he loves the world he writes about -- even as he recognizes its banalities and limitations. In Cheever's hand, the commuter life becomes a sad, beautiful symphony of lost hopes and desires. The 5:45 train, the clinking of cocktail glasses, the smell of meat cooking on an outdoor grill are not just dull routines of modern life, but thrilling and exotic elements of that peculiarly American optimism and quest for success that flowered after World War II -- all the more alluring because the quest is so often doomed.
In the same way, Susan Cheever brings passion and honesty to the telling of her father's life. In her hands, John Cheever's own outwardly unremarkable search for the suburban dream life of wife, kids, dog and station wagon in Ossining, New York becomes a dark romantic quest of longing, passion, success and disappointment. She is thoroughly honest (sometimes brutally so) in detailing Cheever's alcoholism, philandering, phobias and parental shortcomings -- so it is all the more remarkable that the final portrait of Cheever that emerges is so rich and full of love.
This book is the perfect companion piece for Cheever's indispensible Collected Stories (with that famous red cover). Think of Home Before Dark as a sort of lexicon to John Cheever's world. I keep both books on a special bookshelf -- easily accessible -- containing the books I come back to again and again, like old friends.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cheever Still An Enigma, June 10, 2000

By 

Ted Ficklen (Saint Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)) (Paperback)

As a memoir of a daughter's relationship with her father, this is very touching, but there is little here that sheds much light on John Cheever, the writer. Given the various levels of family dysfunction and unhappiness in Cheever's stories and novels, it is gratifying that his daughter found so much to love in her father. For a more abrasive, but still admiring view of the man, you might also enjoy reading Benjamin Cheever's novel, The Plagiarist.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Susan is a better writer than John, March 1, 2007

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press)) (Paperback)

This is a very interesting look at the demons of the father, from alcoholism to a confused sexuality that wreaked havoc on his family. John Cheever forged a career writing about his own issues, tales of disillusion and disintegration in suburbia, all to alcoholic excess and in search of meaning. Susan, his daughter, is an absolutely excellent writer and explains what he was like as she grew up, so it is not a straight biography but mixed with memoire. Some of it is shocking, such as the way John periodically left to be with men, only to come back to a wife he clearly loved enduringly. But there is also a lot of redemption, of striving to be better though the pain is ever present. Oddly, I have never liked his writing much, finding his personal problems more of a spectacle and indeed more absorbing to learn about. Susan, I think, is the true writing talent in the family - her style is clear and unflinchingly honest, almost exhibitionistic. Few expose themselves so evenhandedly. Indeed, her moments are unforgettably vivid: such as her sitting in the lap of a drunken guest writer, in a tweed jacket reeking of cigarette smoke, saying to herself that she would marry that kind of man; or watching her father, after a few hours of writing and overcoming a hangover, pruning his lawn with ritual energy.

Truly a beautiful, often tormented, book. Warmly recommended.