John Cheever

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 You will notice, however, that some ambiguities are never resolved (“I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of ambiguities, this marvellous atmosphere of untruth,” Cheever says in his journals)—ambiguities in the matter of sexuality, ambiguities elsewhere. Always another rock with its subterranean communities to overturn and consider. Always the lie that tells a deeper truth. Always a cache so secreted away as to be invisible. The writer under forty who thinks he knows himself is arrogant indeed. It’s in this climate of individuation that we find the opportunity for the psychic density of indirection, in which our foibles, seeded in the mulch of our youth, begin to express themselves in correlatives, as we are driven to get them down, until we have said what we’re here to say and are left instead with quiet and the stir of time past: “Now I’m undressing to go to bed, and my fatigue is so overwhelming that I am undressing with the haste of a lover.”