John Cheever

In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime. Can Sears thwart the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save his beloved village? Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution of the ice-skate.

Oh What A Paradise It Seems

Zeke Taylor

Now Betsy would have noticed the music that played while she looked for Flotilla only, perhaps, if it had been music that she had danced to or music that reminded her of the pleasures of dancing. Betsy was of that generation for whom the air was, oftener than not, filled with music. She heard music everywhere; she sometimes heard music on the telephone while she waited for her call to be completed. In some ways this had left her imperceptive. She would never have noticed that morning that the air of Buy Brite was filled with some of the greatest music of the eighteenth century.

This music had been chosen by a nephew of one of the majority stockholders, who seemed to think that there would be some enjoyable irony between eighteenth-century music and the tumult of a contemporary shopping center. He was, spiritually speaking, a frail young man who would amount to nothing, and the irony he so enjoyed would be discontinued and forgotten in a month or so. There is no irony, of course. The capital of Brandenburg was a market village and on a summer's day when the doors of the cathedral stood open the great concertos must have been heard by the grocers and merchants. Betsy pushed her cart toward the express lane to the music that has contributed more, perhaps, than any other voice to our concept of nobility. Betsy pushed her cart toward lane 9 — the express lane.

How long it had been since Sears [an elderly man] had ducked his head into a basin of water and combed his hair with the hope of appearing attractive.

Two twenty-four was a convergence of six- and eight-lane highways that made her think with longing of the simplicity of their day on the beach, when there was nothing more difficult to comprehend than blue sky and salt water. All the converging highways and the gathering whiplike noise of traffic made her wonder — foolishly, she well knew — if modern life with its emphasis on highways had not robbed men and women of some intrinsic beauty that the world possessed. She well knew that they couldn't have got to Chelmsford Beach if it hadn't been for the highways that seemed so alien. She was tired, very tired, and while she hated to wake up Henry she felt when they approached the intersection that it wouldn't have been safe for her to continue driving. There was a wide, safe shoulder a mile or two before the intersection and she pulled off onto this…[story continues past the reflection this quote covers]

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