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THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL by John Cheever

THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL

by John Cheever

Pub Date: June 15th, 1958
ISBN: 0523123183
Publisher: HarperCollins

Seven stories provide wall to wall suburbia-cum-nightmare for this collection — 1953-1958 from The New Yorker — which offs the best as did his earlier short stories and his award winner The Wapshot Chronicle. The title story sees a desperate man becoming a burglar to save himself and his family but getting a chance to bounce back; a die-hard athlete signs his own death warrant; a father finds a hierarchy of love in the baby sitter and somehow retrieves a wobbling marriage; another household's cook imbues the daughter with anti-alcoholic activities; a commuter to Shady Hill tries to shake a pusillanimously discharged employee; a lately married husband battles, to a finish, his distrust of his young wife; a wife's indiscretion rebounds — on her children, her husband..... A world to be viewed with alarm is presented crisply, economically and with telling dispatch for its own self contained and contorted backlash of terrible humor, its pity for those imprisoned. Watch and ward for the touch-me-nots.