Jessica Laser at The Paris Review:
When I read the story, I was convalescing from an affair with a married person. I did love him back, and he didn’t change his life for me, and since you can’t heal at home from a heartbreak nobody knows about, I had gone abroad. Nothing in my life seemed to be working, and I must have searched up Cheever as part of my attempt to try the opposite of everything I had been doing. I had to admit that in the mirror “The Country Husband” held up to me, I appeared a little less broken than I felt. Writing from Francis Weed’s point of view, Cheever had, at a time when I really needed it, validated my experience of how powerful and real and obliterating extramarital love can be—even and especially for the married party. This, by the way, was years before the ubiquity of open marriages made moot the need for affairs, the way de Tocqueville has described the democratic election’s quelling the need for violent revolution. But the impulse to escape, resist, defy; the flirting with destruction, complete overhaul, change—this doesn’t go away just because one container for it has gone licit.
Cheever lived with his wife and children in the real Westchester, during a time when, as Susan Cheever’s new memoir reminds us, you could pay for your daughter’s braces by publishing a short story.
more here.
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