Love that this appeared on HN! For context, this I think is Cheever’s (“the Checkhov of the suburbs”) most famous story. Another widely anthologized one is “The Enormous Radio” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enormous_Radio. Cheever’s collected stories won the Pulitzer Prize.

From https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/31/the-swimmer-by...:

“But as fun as it is to play spot-the-allusion – and as tempting as it is to view The Swimmer as a Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man – Cheever’s greatest short story transcends its influences and any autobiographical frisson to emerge as a quietly devastating journey into one man’s heart of darkness. And as a piece of prose it is as near-miraculous as the journey it describes, standing as a perfect example of Cheever’s description of fiction as ‘the telling of lies … a sort of sleight-of-hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.’ “

If you like this style you may also want to read William Trevor’s stories, for the British equivalent.