An attempt at John Cheever's writing style

When asked to write about an object I always write about my watch. Why?

Because it’s damn-well interesting.

Think about it; one of the greatest novels ever written – The Great Gatsby – revolves around the theme of time, with Gatsby wanting to ‘repeat the past’. Another – The Catcher in the Rye – is about protagonist Holden Caulfield starving off the onslaught of adulthood by escaping the humdrum of responsibility for several days.

This theme is present in John Cheever’s short story O City of Broken Dreams. The reader is acutely aware that EVERYTHING happening around the Malloys is innately fishy, and that it’s only a matter of time before they have to fight or fly. And regardless of the extraneous characters, Cheever is well known for formulating his protagonists around the notion of self-sabotage.

But surely this ‘matter of time’ is a side effect of any piece employing a typical narrative arc? It was for this reason that I took primary narrative cues from Cheever’s, The Enormous Radio when asked to do the writing task. And so I wrote the opening to 'Averyman has their time'. Initially the tale of a man going to a unique Watchmaker’s in order to stop his own watch, the concept later developed into the man wanting to stop someone else’s watch and subsequently end their life. You see in this tale, the watches and clocks are the physical embodiment of biological clocks (in the same way that the radio can tune into other homes). Either way, it’s a work in progress as I feel I have yet to master Cheever’s meticulous execution of time and place in his pieces.