"The Swimmer" by John Cheever in One Sentence
How to turn us into a living ghost and bend the natural world to our journey
Today’s post is the first in a two-part series about the emotional superstructures of one of 2023’s buzziest novels — The Guest by Emma Cline — and the 1964 New Yorker short story that inspired it, “The Swimmer” by John Cheever.
Speaking with Louise Bonnet for Interview Magazine, Cline explains:
With this book, I knew where I wanted it to end. It’s very loosely inspired by “The Swimmer,” this John Cheever short story that ends in such a bizarre desperate, haunting way, to me that’s like a horror story, a story where you’re estranged from your own life, everyone you love is gone, you can’t account for how you got so far into the woods. There’s something just so devastating about it.
To understand how Cline infused the eerie emotional vibes of Cheever’s work into her own, we can compare the emotional superstructures of the two stories.
In the process, we’ll see how any older story can serve as the inspiration for fiction that could be really popular today, and how superstructure is the perfect tool to help writers analyze and capture the emotional effects of existing stories we love.
The Swimmer’s Emotional Superstructure
A man from a prosperous, gin-soaked social set — gifted in repressing painful memories — must swim home cross-county through his friends’ pools to feel like a legendary explorer.
How to Turn Us Into a Living Ghost, Part 1
You might feel that there’s something immediately destabilizing about this superstructure, and that is exactly the emotional effect of Cheever’s entire story, even if you look down to the paragraph or sentence level, at which you can see the constant development of different elements of the superstructure.
(If you haven’t read it yet and want to experience that “first time feeling” for a story that does end with a bit of a twist, you can read it here in about 20 minutes. If you are probably only going to read the story only once and don’t mind experiencing it with that “second time feeling,” ie with increased perceptual fluency, you can read the rest of this post before reading the story.)
To begin with, the stakes are quite thin. The fact that “to feel like a legendary explorer” is included in the superstructure sentence means that it is the best answer the story offers to the question “what happens if Neddy doesn’t complete his quest?” How would his life be different if he got home a different way than swimming through his friends’ pools? Or if he stayed at the friend’s pool right where we found him at the beginning of the story, as his wife Lucinda presumably does?
Neddy himself hardly knows why he’s doing this. “The day was beautiful, and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty,” is one reason the story offers. Certainly, nobody else in Neddy’s set cares whether he completes this quest, if they even know what he’s doing.
The biggest reason Neddy comes back to, again and again, is imagining himself to be a daringly original explorer, making a contribution to modern geography by showing that it is possible to swim across the county. The story provides exactly zero evidence that this is true outside of Neddy’s fanciful imagination.
And so, his feeling about himself is the biggest thing at stake.
And feelings are fleeting.
Especially those of a man who we already know is gifted at repressing painful memories.
In other words, almost nothing is objectively at stake in this story.
And Neddy’s feelings of being an explorer are hardly the most emotionally weighty implications of this ominous superstructure.
A man gifted at repressing painful memories — something Neddy explicitly contemplates about himself multiple times on the page — and swimming through the pools of many people he knows might end up having little choice but to confront some of those memories.
A man from a prosperous social set, who knows many people in his county with pools, has far to fall.
With all that alcohol and repression, whose perception and memory are we going to trust within the world of this story?
The things that could go wrong within this superstructure have much more emotional gravity than the thing that could go right.
And yet Neddy feels fervently compelled to complete his quest, no matter how many things actually begin to go wrong along the way. We might ask, why is chasing this seemingly silly feeling so desperately important to him?
This is where we’ll see similarities with Cline’s story in the next post.
For now, we can just note that the eerie and haunting emotional vibes she mentions in the interview quote above are connected to a superstructure in which the main character has very little stake.
How to Bend the Natural World to Our Journey
But there is one other powerful lesson in emotional spellcasting that we can draw entirely from Cheever’s story: how to bend elements of the natural world to inform and reflect a main character’s inner journey.
As a writer, if one of the most important things about your main character is their gift for repressing painful memories, how do you show that on the page?
Cheever uses elements of the natural world, particularly the weather and the time, and the thing that connects them most intimately: the seasons.
Right from the first sentence — which always gains precise emotional power when pointing to as many elements of a story’s superstructure as possible — we’re clued in that seasons will be important: “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’” (There’s that gin-soaked social set from the superstructure too!)
Quickly after that, we’re explicitly invited to consider seasons as symbolically connected to Neddy: “He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag, the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.”
We’re already sliding from the time of day when people are most likely to be talking about their hangovers from the previous night, to the last hours of the day. Time is slippery in this world.
At Neddy’s not quite the prime of the day either. He’s the last hours of one.
He lacks certain physical objects. He’s down to simply giving an impression. All this is still on the first page.
And what happens to the summer’s day as the story progresses? The same thing that happens to Neddy’s reception as he progresses through the county’s various pools: it gets chillier, all the way to downright icy as night falls.
Neddy continually can’t remember whether various things with his friends happened recently or a long time ago. He’s surprised when certain families have abandoned their horse rink, emptied their pool, put their house up for sale.
There’s a storm. The day gets dark quicker than he expected. And there are increasing signs that it might actually be autumn, not summer at all.
All of this is carrying us to the end on a current of subtext: Neddy’s time may already be up.
Key takeaway for story creators: If your character’s ability to avoid unpleasant truths is an important part of their psychology, can you use elements of their surroundings to reflect this emotionally for the reader?
Question for You
If you’ve read “The Swimmer,” do you notice any other clever ways Cheever expresses the emotional superstructure as he crafts this story’s vibes?
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