"The Hartleys": 01/01/25

"The Hartleys" by John Cheever (1949) is a short horror story about a family tragedy on a ski trip. Like Cheever's other stories it builds its horror out of the mundane. Things that the upper middle class take for granted become the source of great terror and in this case, personal tragedy.

The Hartleys go a resort that only offers skiing and drinking on nights when the weather is too bad for skiing. They have buses to the good slopes and a home built run for days when the buses run.

The Hartleys, mother, father and daughter go to New England to ski as it's what New Yorkers of a certain class do. The father is good a skiing. The mother is so-so at it. The daughter only wants to do it if she can do it with her father.

The trip though reveals the cracks in their happy family. The couple isn't happily married any more. The wife resents the daughter's clinginess on her father. I suspect she's also bored by the daily routine of ski, drink, and be seen.

Throughout the story is the proprietress's pride in her the lift her son has built for the hotel. It was clearly done with little to no thought, little to no money, and certainly little to no skill. There probably weren't permits or any thing else you'd want from a ski lift, even one that is just a rope you hold onto for a pull up the hill.

But there's a blindness to a certain set of people. A belief that their class, their money, makes them invulnerable. But it doesn't always and it doesn't here. The Hartleys and the other skiers present get to watch in horror as the youngest Hartley is killed by the shoddily built lift on a day when the buses didn't run.

As with the other Cheever stories, this one sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. The travelers are family (though the end as a couple) (33). Their journey is to the wildlands (99), the ski slopes of New England. Their route there is the labyrinth (99) as represented by the repetitive nature of their daily routines as well as the circular paths they make while skiing: up and down, up and down. But it's also a transformative route in how an unhappy family is reduced down to a grieving couple by their trip.

Four stars

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