Politics & Power Quote by John Cheever

Cheever tilts the knife at a certain kind of literary self-importance: the tasteful, rain-streaked adultery scene that signals seriousness by shrinking human drama to a private tremor. He’s not arguing that interior life is fake; he’s arguing that American interior life is often staged against a louder, brasher public religion. The foul ball matters because it’s democracy in reflexive motion: hundreds of strangers unified for half a second by desire, luck, and physics, all of it happening under manufactured light like a secular cathedral.

The line works because it smuggles a manifesto into a put-down. “Misgivings” is a particularly acid word here, a dig at the preciousness of upscale guilt, the kind of emotion that can be rendered elegantly and consumed politely. Set against it, “four hundred people…reaching” is pure kinetic social realism: bodies, appetite, competition, the small violence of wanting the same object at the same time. Cheever calls it “ceremony” to elevate what the highbrow novel might dismiss as mere spectacle. Baseball becomes a ritual that Americans actually attend, repeat, and understand without needing to be instructed on its symbolism.

Contextually, this is Cheever the suburban chronicler refusing the European model of literary gravitas. Postwar America is not only cocktail shakers and marital dread; it’s crowds, broadcast lights, mass leisure, and communal scripts. His subtext is a dare to writers: stop auditioning for refinement. Write the congregation you can’t ignore.