We understand these impulses because they are within each of us.
Set due east from the bright lights of Rockefeller Center and the charming windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Tiffany & Co., John Cheever’s “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” orchestrates a quiet yet bruising confrontation with the moral and spiritual decay of the holiday season. Cheever’s prose — tenaciously passive, quietly merciless — gradually develops like a grainy darkroom negative, slowly tightening its focus to reveal the dark underbelly of Christmas, inside a luxury Sutton Place high-rise and, later, a dank tenement on the Lower East Side. It’s a long cab ride from a wistful Bing Crosby Christmas, but when you arrive home, you’ll be sharpened and sober, and a bit more wary of the season’s traps.
New Yorker link – Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor
