Oh What a Paradise It Seems

John Cheever's last novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful.

John Cheever was born in 1912. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. He won the National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Stories of John Cheever. He also received the Howells Medal for Fiction and the National Medal for Literature. He died in 1982.