"I've been homesick for countries I've never seen, and longed to be where I couldn't be." Was John Cheever's excellence in the observation of the common American as he knew him/her a hindrance on what could have been a more diverse approach to writing America? Did he long to write about what he wasn't as a person?
Judging from his work it is telling that both his work's most strenuous crux and most profound insight was that which delved into the everyday undertakings of the silent sufferer of the suburbs. It might appear he was an sentient entity never quite dedicated to but always verging on self-destruction, and this was perhaps what fascinated him about his fellow middle-class Americans.
But was he so fixated on the pursuit of insight into the lives of these marginals that he neglected the curiosity and responsibility of such an esteemed writer to draw wider attention to the greater injustices of the American cultural strata? As with stories like The Enormous Radio, in which a "pleasant, rather plain" Irene Westcott struggles to come to terms with the destabilisation of her homeland securities, Cheever writes almost exclusively about a particular middle-class realm of post-war America, the kind of social context where those characters featured are ostensibly well-sustained and satisfied but furtively at the borders of some ruinous collapse.
While he wrote his silent sufferers so well, Cheever doesn't seem to have made room in his insights for the marginals beyond his marginals, i.e. the minorities. Perhaps you might say that Cheever felt it wasn't his place to touch on the lives of characters beyond his own knowledge of existence? Nevertheless, Cheever demonstrates beyond the capacity of most to write so assiduously about the abnormalities of being the social norm that it seems nothing less than immature to demand more of his literary legacy.
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