Nothing succeeds like excess
‘Why are you laughing?’ they demanded again and again, as Cheever tittered at some grindingly miserable memory from his youth, or some cruelty he’d inflicted on his children. What his keepers were pathologising was the writer’s genius to see the hilarious in the chaotic, the respectable, the insulting and the desperate. Cheever was, above all, extremely funny, and he has been served now by a marvellous biography which, through it all, manages to keep its sense of humour. Blake Bailey’s Life is alarming, truthful, scabrous, but above all absurdly funny. You feel Cheever wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. The medical professionals had never heard of Cheever — ‘he