A Summary and Analysis of John Cheever’s ‘The Worm in the Apple’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The short stories of John Cheever (1912-82) are among the greatest American short stories of the twentieth century. His Collected Stories runs to 900 pages and contains tales which are by turns realist, borderline magic-realist, and downright strange.

In Cheever’s short story ‘The Worm in the Apple’, the narrator fixates on the seemingly perfect Crutchman family. The narrator suspects they must have flaws beneath their idyllic suburban existence, represented by the hidden ‘worm’ in the apple. The story satirises the portrayal of perfection in American life, particularly in the 1950s, that golden period of American expansion and confidence.

Summary

The setting, as often in a John Cheever story, is well-heeled American suburbia: the neighbourhood is called, suggestively, Shady Hill. The narrator discusses the Crutchmans, a ‘very, very happy’ American family comprising husband and wife Larry and Helen and their two children, Rachel and Tom. Through the course of the short narrative, the narrator dissects the Crutchmans’ meticulously decorated home, their expensive car, and their seemingly harmonious family life. Each detail is scrutinised carefully in the hope of finding ‘the worm in the apple’: the one corrupt flaw in the family’s otherwise happy life.

For example, the narrator wonders if the fact that Helen, the wife, is far richer than her husband is a cause of resentment for Larry, who could easily lose his sense of purpose when he is not the breadwinner of the family. But the narrator admits that no proof of such resentment can be found. The narrator also combs over other details of the family’s life: does the husband have a drink problem, or are there issues with their children? But every line of enquiry yields a dead end.

As the narrative progresses, the narrator’s attempts to uncover this ‘worm in the apple’, this hidden darkness in the Crutchman family, become increasingly desperate. In the end, the narrative voice shifts from the present tense to the future imperfect: he imagines whole futures for the two children, which contain unsavoury or unhappy elements.

The story ends with the narrator confessing that the Crutchman family continue to live happily, with no indication of any unhappiness in their life or their relationship. Despite the narrator’s intense scrutiny, the Crutchmans remain an enigma, leaving the reader to ponder the nature of appearances, hidden truths, and the human desire to find flaws in others.

Analysis

At the heart of Cheever’s story is a critique of the all-too-common obsession many people have with finding flaws in others. But, as is so often the case with a John Cheever story, there’s more going on than this one-sentence summary implies.

The role of the narrator in the story is particularly curious. Cheever could easily have chosen one of the Crutchmans’ neighbours as the narrator: an individual person who might have cause to resent this all-American family’s perfect happiness and want to take them down a peg or two.

Instead, he gives us a third-person narrator who can speak with an authoritativeness and (supposed) omniscience which goes beyond any petty personal rivalry an individual friend, neighbour, or acquaintance of the family might have. We are used to thinking of these impersonal third-person narrators as fair-minded and objective, and the narrator’s talk of ‘one’ being ‘bound to suspect a worm in their rosy apple’ establishes this smooth, cool, dispassionate tone from the off.

This is the key to the story’s success. After all, a jealous neighbour who cannot stand the self-satisfied complacence of the Crutchmans would be all too easy to understand, and thus uninteresting. It is Cheever’s masterly use of narrative voice which raises this story above this level. We cannot be sure exactly how impartial the story’s narrator is: whether ‘he’ is speaking on behalf of a general distrust of the Crutchmans’ all-pervasive happiness which can be found among their circle of friends and associates, or whether he is, in fact, impatient with the family’s borderline smug contentment, too.

What also makes the story a nuanced piece of writing is the fact that the Crutchmans clearly do invite such suspicion, both because it’s rare to find any family which is entirely devoid of worry or conflict or scandal, and because the few concrete details we are given about the family suggest that their carefree attitude is unnatural given the problems they have faced (their son nearly dying of pneumonia, for instance). For such things not to have emotionally affected a family on some level – especially a family with the rather unlovely name of ‘Crutchman’ – strikes us as odd, even perverse.

With this in mind, a critical reader of ‘The Worm in the Apple’ is tempted to respond to the narrator, in his quest for the ‘sorrow’ in the family, that he has missed the ‘worm’ hiding in plain sight: namely, that the Crutchmans’ blithe inability to be affected by any unhappy events which have befallen them is a sign of a mental and emotional unbalance, of something which seems unnatural (such as someone’s inability to grieve when they lose a loved one). Or, to put it more glibly, the Crutchmans’ heedless nonchalance, their persistent happiness, is the sad thing about them.

But perhaps to put it this way is to fall into the very trap set by Cheever in the story: we become, like the narrator, suspicious of a happy family and seek to find some darker undercurrents to make everything ‘fit’ our preconceived notions. And there is no doubt about it: the narrator soon leaves behind hard facts about the Crutchmans in favour of imaginative speculation.