Some People, Places, And Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel

A beautiful duchess, a lush, a pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby game, a lowboy, a hill town and a mountain pass are a few of the people, places, and things that Mr. Cheever hopes to exorcise from his subsequent work by describing their lives, their triumphs and shortcomings. "In order to become readable again," says Mr. Cheever, "to say nothing of recouping some of its lost importance, fiction can no longer operate as a sixth-rate boardinghouse. And in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive -- where even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night -- the process of eviction, of selecting characters of stature, can be as interesting as the final cast." In a sense, then, these libelous and compassionate stories are a series of envoys to people and situations whose claim on our attention is intense but not (Mr. Cheever hopes) final.