John Updike and John Cheever shared a number of similarities: Both spent their careers publishing in the New Yorker and both focused on the everyday lives of middle-class Americans. They were both celebrated as brilliant chroniclers of suburbia. And each man produced a child who became a writer: David Updike and Susan Cheever.
And while both men’s marriages were marked by infidelity, they both possessed a religious faith – and a dutiful explanation for it. Updike, a regular church-goer, once said that not to believe in a higher power would have seemed “ungrateful.” Cheever, according to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal (in a review of a new book by his daughter), was a practicing Anglican who said: “There has to be someone to thank for the party.”
