In three short stories by John Cheever, we see the isolation and destruction of the individual that occurs within modern upper middle-class suburban living: The Swimmer; The Worm in the Apple; The Geometry of Love. In The Swimmer we see a man who thinks he will swim across the country when all he really does is swim at the bottom of a bottle of booze. He swims through his neighborhood of upper middle-class suburban homes and families. At each stop along the way he observes some facet of upper middle-class existence and “refreshes” himself with a drink. Some of the neighbors from his social circle he visits are gone. All he can remember about them comes from his memories of social mores, “When had he last lard from the Welches-when, that is, had had and Lucinda last regretted an invitation to dine with them?” (Cheever 607).
The country he is swimming through and has swum in is a superficial existence of money, status and booze. He understands the shallow nature of this kind of existence, an existence where as along as everything appears fine on the surface no one makes much of an effort to be deep. The trappings and superficial occupations of this social set conceal the truth underlying the existence of the people within it. The swimmer occasionally comments on this phenomena, because he is afraid it has affected him as well, “Was his memory failing or had had so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?” (Cheever 607).
In The Geometry of Love, we see the similar phenomena of superficial social trappings robbing a man of his identity and true nature, in fact, even his life. In the story we encounter Charlie Mallory, an engineer who tries to apply the scientific principles of his occupation to real life. He believes that, since geometry is an accurate method of discovering the truth that its principles can be applied to all a
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