John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer” (1964) is about Neddy Merrill, an aging suburban Narcissus who, on a hot and boozy afternoon at a couple’s house in Westchester County, New York, decides to swim back home, eight miles away, through the pools of various friends and neighbors. Though Merrill vigorously and obliviously begins his odyssey in summer, it takes him into the bitter chill of autumn, the journey is marked by tales of his own haplessness and failures. The body and psyche of this prototypical “red-blooded American male” weaken with each successive revelation. A surreal blend of Greek tragedy and middle-class malaise, Cheever’s parable is an epitaph for the postwar party years, reflecting the growing anxieties of the 1960s.
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