ABSTRACT
According to Cheever's biographer, Blake Bailey, "Cheever recorded every day of his adult life from 1940 on. Every day!" Journal entry after journal entry seeks to give each day some form of shapeliness, whatever the disappointments, rows, financial anxieties, physical ailments and the stubborn dreariness of the suburbs in which he lived. Like Antonia White, Cheever maintained, against all the evidence, a determined faith in his own resolutions. In comparison with the "continuous present" perspective that structures White's diaries, the perspective Cheever gives his journal entries is closer to the "past perfect" of a piece of fiction. The Chambers Concise Dictionary defines the detail in curiously evaluative terms, as "a minor or unimportant part; too much attention to particulars". A particular tension between detail and some larger interpretative framework for the detail is a marked feature of all Cheever's writing.
