"a wandering people with a passion for gigantic bedsteads and massive refrigerators"

I went to one of my local second-hand bookstores (Welch's on St. Viateur near Jeanne-Mance) a few days ago with my sister. I wanted to buy five new books so I'd be stocked for a little while, but Rachel got impatient to go after I'd only chosen one, so I picked up two more books and contended myself with three instead of five.

One of the two semi-randomly chosen books is John Cheever's Oh What a Paradise it Seems. I had never read any Cheever before. I was looking for more recent fiction, which this wasn't -- it was published in 1982. But I like a short book and this was an even hundred pages.

As I started the book I was reminded of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, which starts:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax.

It goes on that way for several pages, and then returns to the second person metafiction for every other chapter throughout the book. Oh What a Paradise it Seems begins,

This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses -- Dombey and Trey -- can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyound the orchard.

The fact of the horses being named and insisted on and then never referred to again even obliquely also reminded me of the Calvino book. And Cheever's third chapter starts off with the narrator telling us he wishes he were writing a war novel. They're overall very different books with different emotional content, but there was some kind of echo for me. If on a winter's night was published in Italian in 1979 so maybe they share some ineffable worldwide feeling of an era, too.

Oh What a Paradise is about an old man, we aren't told how old but his age is insisted upon, who has an affair with a beautiful woman (she is appraised by the old man as between 35 and 40), has a rebound affair with her doorman, and mounts a campaign to save a skating pond. I have a long-standing distaste for fiction about old, undistinguished men who wander around effortlessly seducing young and beautiful women. Actually old is just an exacerbating characteristic, the genre bugs me when the men are undistinguished and middle-aged, too. In this case it's beautiful women and men, which is a bit of a twist, but doesn't lessen my irritation which is something to do with male writers who think that they're the best thing ever and think that everyone else thinks it too. But I told myself that this book wasn't exactly aiming at realism, and on that basis I calmed myself (not entirely successfully, you might think).

What is it aiming at? I would not want to assert that every novel has an overarching theme or moral, but this one seemed to. Something about the sadness of industrialization and a plea to reverse the destruction of natural oases, and (as a corollary?) the sadness of growing old and possibly losing those movie-perfect romantic moments one had in one's youth. It was published the year Cheever died, and more than six months after he was diagnosed with cancer, so the nostalgic tone has good claim to being genuine. The New York Times Book Review called it "perfect Cheever" (and added "it is perfect") but on the other hand Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source of information, says it wasn't one of his best and was charitably reviewed because they all knew he was dying. I guess I'll have to read something else of his before weighing on that. The book has some great lines (like the one I quoted part of in this post's title), but I didn't finish it wishing it was more than its 100 pages.