‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever

Thinking about this story now having just written about The Emigrants, I’m seeing odd resonances between the two: in wildly different scenarios, both examine the disintegration of the self. I found this story particularly powerful because of the circumstances in which I read it. Few people will need to be reminded how strange summer 2020 was. With the sudden disappearance during the spring lockdown of so many of the usual reference points – professional identity, social interaction with friends and strangers – by which we define ourselves, many of us were left disorientated and dislocated, questioning what remained of us without the usual structure to our lives. The exact chronology escapes me now but there was a period when it was deemed permissible to sit in isolation for a while in an open space and, during that time, on a bench in Waterloo Park a few minutes’ walk from my home in Norwich, I belatedly discovered the brilliance of John Cheever. I haven’t yet read all of the works in the 900pp Collected Stories but of those I’ve read, this tale is my favourite at a push, along with ‘Goodbye, My Brother’. I’m choosing ‘The Swimmer’ because of its strangeness, the luminosity of Cheever’s sentences, how it evokes the empty luxury of American suburbia where every home has a swimming pool and an assortment of residents who are sad and numb and drink too much, and its gradual revelation of Neddy Merill’s psychological collapse – disturbing enough at the best of times, but which shook me with unnerving power during the pandemic.

First published in The New Yorker, 1964, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Harper & Row, 1964, and The Stories of John Cheever, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978; now Collected Stories, Vintage Classics, 2010