Many years ago, when I guess I was just out of the cradle, I attended a literary event in Manhattan and was standing in a large crowd of people when a ripple went through the place.  People began murmuring, "John Cheever is here."  This was indeed remarkable as the short story writer and novelist had been quite ill and had been making fewer and fewer appearances by then.  I remember straining to catch a glimpse, and seeing a thin, somewhat frail but dignified looking man making his way through the throngs.  This was the author of The Wapshot Chronicles; this was the man whose Stories of John Cheever (1979) had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction two years before as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors during his lifetime.  Alas, he passed away in June 1982 at the age of 70.  Little did I know that just a few years after that, in 1984, his daughter, Susan, would write a book about her father, Home Before Dark, that would become one of my all-time favorites and remains so to this day. 

    I used to scrawl my initials and the date I first read a book on the title page, in pencil.  It was a note to myself, I guess, a way of keeping track.  I've long since abandoned that practice (after all, how many times can you write that...).  But just for kicks, I went searching for that chicken scratch in the front matter of Home Before Dark the other day, and was astonished.  It said, "December 1986." 

    So I have carried this book close to me for 22 years, across assorted homes, jobs, offices, major life events, and everything else...  Just goes to show that when you like something, you like something. 

    Complicated, poignant, tender and brutal -- all of this describes Susan Cheever's portrait of her father, a book she says she never really wanted to write.  But what makes it rise above is its utter humanity.  She draws on his own journals and letters and literature to create a full picture of a man who was driven to succeed, but who waged almost constant battles with himself.  He desperately sought love but often didn't find it.  He fought battles with alcohol and homosexuality.  He looked for father figures in his editors at The New Yorker and that had its complexities.  He imagined himself at the pillar of high society at one time yet felt great tension and stress in that role.  He would isolate himself but then miss people terribly.  And father and daughter fought, but made their peace.

    One of my favorite passages -- mostly because it's so unexpected -- is about the family's move to Italy for a time, when the author was 13.  She describes how her father tried to master Italian.  "He spoke a stilted, conversational Italian, but he used it at every opportunity," she says.  Then she shares an example of how his struggles with Italian got him in trouble.  They'd hired a young housekeeper named Vittoria, who used to serve breakfast in bed to John and his wife Mary each morning. This woman would completely peel the boiled egg, though John preferred eating it out of the shell.  Realizing he had been unable to make himself clear in English, he studied the "dictionary carefully, finding the word for egg, the word for kitchen, and the word for peel," Susan Cheever writes. Then, "in the morning, when Vittoria appeared, he cleared his throat and carefully asked her not to peel the eggs in the kitchen. Vittoria shrieked, blushed, and rushed from the room in tears.  What my father had said was, 'Do not undress in the kitchen, you egg.'  The fact that Vittoria had been changing her clothes in the kitchen didn't help." 

    Home Before Dark was published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1984.  In 1999, it was released by Washington Square Press in paperback, as a contemporary classic. Susan Cheever has written a number of other books but this one remains a favorite.