Walter, Like Water

John Cheever and A. M. Homes.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser David Hockney, Portrait of Nick Wilder, 1966. From a portfolio in issue no. 217. "The water is so warm it feels thick like gel. His arms slice through, clean and clear. He's not going fast, just warming up. Walter in water is Walter in his element," writes A. M. Homes in a new story, which appears in our recent Spring issue. In Homes's story—a retelling of John Cheever's classic "The Swimmer"— a teenage boy in Los Angeles swims home across his neighbors' pools on a hot midsummer day. "Walter knows the pools not by their owners' names but by the stories he's heard about them," the narrator continues. "There is the house of the movie star, the drug dealer, the game show hostess, the barking dog, the lottery winner, the house that gives out full-size candy bars at Halloween." This week, we're unlocking our Art of Fiction interview with John Cheever, which appears in issue no. 67 of the Review.  INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 62 John Cheever CHEEVER I've written a story about men with a lot of names, all abstract, names with the fewest possible allusions: Pell, Weed, Hammer, and Nailles, of course, which was thought to be arch, but it wasn't meant to be at all … INTERVIEWER Hammer's house appears in "The Swimmer." CHEEVER That's true, it's quite a good story. It was a terribly difficult story to write. INTERVIEWER Why? CHEEVER Because I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it's dark and cold, it has to have happened. And, by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story. As a matter of fact, it's one of the last stories I wrote for a long time, because then I started on Bullet Park. Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write. From issue no. 67 (Fall 1976) To read more from issue no. 67, including poems by Elizabeth Handel, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-two-year archive. Copyright © 2025 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.