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4.
 
Middle-class representatives in the novels of John Cheever, John Updike 
 
John Cheeve
r (1912–82). 
The Wapshot Chronicle
 
(1957), for example, his most famous work, is an account at once wistful and 
comic of a wealthy but declining Massachusetts family. 
The Stories of John Cheever
 
(1978) contains many pieces that ask the question why, as Cheever himself puts 
it, ‘in this most prosperous, equitable, and accomplished world – where even the 
cleaning women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time – everyone 
should seem to be disappointed’. In turn, his last book, 
Oh What a Paradise It
 
Seems 
(1982), continues the theme of the American dream, and the mystery of its 
unfulfilment. But this time, by focusing on an ageing man who is rejuvenated by 
an unusual romance, Cheever informs his usual vein of comic melancholy with a 
feeling of hope, some promise for the future. The comic note is stronger in the 
work of Peter De Vries (1910 –93), many of whose works, like 
The Mackerel Plaza
 
(1958), expose the superficiality of the American suburbs. Richard Condon (1915 – 
96) is more coolly clinical in his analysis of Cold War paranoia (
The Manchurian
 
Candidate 
[1960] ), the technique of mass murder (
An Infinity of Mirrors 
[1966] ), 
the greed of American big business (
Mile High 
[1969] ), the corruptions of American politics (
The 
Vertical Smile 
[1971] ) and the arrogance of American empire 
(
The Star-Spangled Crunch 
[1974] ). Nelson Algren (1908 –81) and William Gaddis 
(1922–98) offer another severe contrast, a further illustration of the different formal possibilities for 
rewriting contemporary America. In novels like 
The Man With
 
the Golden Arm 
(1948) and 
A Walk on the Wild Side 
(1956), Algren uses a hardbitten 
prose style to narrate the lives of an American underclass, a world of dealers and 
dope, poker and prostitution. Gaddis, on the other hand, employs a richly parodic 
idiom, a protean narrative manner that insists on its own fictiveness, to play with 
such themes as art and illusion (
The Recognitions 
[1955]), the hypocrisies of corporate empire (
J R 
[1975] 
), ambition, loss and the hunger for apocalypse in a world of 
competition (
Carpenter’s Gothic 
[1985] ) and the complex figurations that make up 
the maze of American law (
A Frolic of His Own 
[1994] ).