ABSTRACT
Robinson Poems In a 1943 review of The Way Some People Live by John Cheever, Weldon Kees commented on the limitations of the fiction published in The New Yorker. "Its writers must frequently entertain themselves," Kees wrote, "by concentrating on the merely decorative qualities of a scene, a restriction brought on by an understandable hesitancy to explore their material deeply." Although he expressed qualified admiration for Cheever's "acid accounts of pathos in the suburbs," Kees wished that these stories-New Yorker fiction to a fault-would more often "work for something more than episodic notation and minor perceptive effects."
