John Cheever: Summer Vacation, 1954

The Book Bench bloggers spent last week looking back at some favorite New Yorker fiction of summer vacations past. All their selections are worthy, but this excerpt from John Cheever’s “The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well” really resonated with me. Here’s a quick teaser:

In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” ... The perfect days—and there had been hundreds of them—seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.

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