ay . . . that we and our friends and our part of the country, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of the irremediable failure (Cheever 8).
To draw distinction between Lawrence's views on suburbia and opposing views, Cheever immediately includes his mother's declaration: "Let's go swimming and have Martinis on the beach.
. . . Let's have a fabulous morning" (Cheever 9).
The dream of suburbia here is shown to be not only an escape from the ills of the city, from the ills of poverty-stricken and violence-stricken environs, but from the very past itself. The suburbia of the 1950s, for example, allowed its residents to believe they had indeed escaped these ills, but the suburbia of later years, during which about half of Cheever's stories take place, is a dream or fantasy world much-threatened by those encroaching ills. The people of the bulk of Cheever's stories do not address the ills of the city, but they do address---primarily---the effect on suburbanites of the knowledge that things are not as they once were and will never be again. The poles of responses to this fact, symbolized by Lawrence, the narrator, and their mother, demonstrate the options available to the residents of suburbia. The mother sinks more deeply into alcoholism and the denial of reality; Lawrence rages in cynical judgment and condemnation of everything and everyone around him and ruins not only his own life but the life of his children; and the narrator tries to find some middle ground, accepting some of the truth of Lawrence's assessment of suburbia, but still trying to find some semblance of peace and happiness. The narrator concludes with anguish and compassion for his miserable brother:
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? . . . How can you dissuade hi...