John Cheever was born in 1912 and died in 1982 at age 70. He was best known for his short stories but he did write a few novels. Most of his stories take place in the area he was familiar with—New York’s Upper East Side and Massachusetts.

My introduction to Cheever was through the short story “The Swimmer” in which a man decides to swim his way home from a party, pool by pool in his wealthy neighbors’ back yards. That story made a lasting impression on me because of a tiny sprinkling of the surreal. When the man finally reaches home, the house is abandoned and dilapidated. The tale, which seemed a straightforward narrative about a guy swimming and chatting with neighbors, becomes a commentary on lifestyle and finding meaning in life. But the reader doesn’t notice the switch until almost the very last paragraph.

I enjoy short stories that mix a little bit of the strange and a little bit of social commentary with a simple story. I became a fan of John Cheever for this reason, as well as Flannery O’Connor. I’ve not spent much time writing short stories, but I suppose if I ever do I would use these two writers, along with Anton Chekov and Franz Kafka, as my models.

Whoever wrote up this paragraph of the Wikipedia article about Cheever did a very nice job describing his writing:

His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both—light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.

On a recent bike trip to Barnes & Noble in East Lansing, I picked up a recent printing of a 1979 collection of the short stories of John Cheever. This collection won the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published. The stories are arranged chronologically according to when Cheever wrote them and he says in the preface that he wished they weren’t because it put his most immature work at the beginning. He said that he felt the first two stories were almost embarrassingly immature to him. After reading them, I agreed that they were not what I was hoping for. But it was obvious that from the very beginning Cheever was interested in commenting on the differences between public and private lives and personalities that are opposed to one another. In the third story, “The Enormous Radio,” Cheever starts to hit his stride.

In “The Enormous Radio,” a couple gets a new, very ugly radio to replace their old, unreliable one. This new radio picks up interference around the apartment building, so they call someone to repair it. After that, the couple cannot hear any real radio stations . . . but they can tune into different apartments in their building. What starts as an amusing bit of entertainment spying on their neighbors soon turns ugly as the wife in the story becomes obsessed with listening in and encounters the less than pretty private sides of people. She and her husband are then forced to confront their own underlying issues.

If this story isn’t regularly assigned today it absolutely should be, not just in English classes but in sociology classes. It’s a fascinating study of what we choose to show to one another and what we choose to hide. This is a lively debate today as the Internet and social media are changing the way we think about these issues. The days of being able to maintain distinctly different personas for different people and situations in our lives (home, friends, school, work, those younger than us, those older than us, church, etc.) are fading away as all of the various people involved in our lives are allowed to see us as we present ourselves on Facebook. It’s harder to develop separate and finely-tuned personas for these disparate groups.

For instance, my friends on Facebook include my parents, sister, cousins, and in-laws; coworkers and authors we publish; friends from high school, some of whom are in life situations like mine and others who still spend most of their free time in bars and haven’t settled into a family life or career; church members; former students; former professors; and miscellaneous people with whom I’ve made some sort of connection over the years but who don’t fall neatly into any of these categories. Normally, even if it isn’t intentional, we would act and talk slightly differently with different people. We might change our vocabulary, our tone, our level of sarcasm, discussion subjects, the number of curse words we use, etc. This is usually something we do without thinking about it.

So when our various personas are no longer separate, when our many public and private selves are, to an extent, forced to meld together, it takes us further away from the world depicted in “The Enormous Radio.” This could be a very good thing, keeping us from destructive behaviors we would be ashamed for the world to know about. But it can also cause problems, like the stories you hear of bosses firing employees because of things they say online to disparage their work, or employers checking up on prospective employees to see what they are like online. Some people keep separate Facebook profiles, one for work and one for “real” friends, to avoid the “worlds colliding” problem.

What do you think? Do you think social media is good or bad for society? Why? Do you think we should be completely transparent to each other? Or do you think maintaining a bit of fiction in our lives is healthy?