Though John Cheever was a leading writer of short fiction, his story “The Geometry of Love” has received little prior literary or mathematical comment. In this essay it is read, against the background of Cheever’s own troubled life and marriage, as a Don Quixote-like search, explicitly following the model of Euclidean geometry, and at times wildly funny, for an ideal world of truth and happiness. John Cheever (1912-1982) (see Figure 1) was one of the top writers of his time, especially of short fiction. He published 180 stories, 120 alone in The New Yorker, and his collected The Stories of John Cheever won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote five novels, of which the first, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), won the National Book Award, and the second, The Wapshot Scandal (1964), won the William Dean Howells Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters as the best American novel of the previous five years. The present essay focuses on Cheever’s story “The Geometry of Love,” originally published January 1, 1966, in the Saturday Evening Post, which has received little prior commentary. With literary critics perhaps finding any connection of geometry to love too esoteric or absurd to credit, and mathematical commentators perhaps lacking the literary background for full appreciation, the story seems to me never to have been properly understood. Cheever story citations are from [4] or, for New Yorker stories not in this collection, from [16]. Cheever biographical information is from the Bailey chronology in [4], and the biographies [9, 6, 1]. Bailey terms the story a “rabidly misogynistic satire”, which Cheever’s New Yorker editor William Maxwell, who rejected it, viewed as “positive proof that Cheever was ‘losing his powers’ because of alcohol” [1, pages 364–365]. Donaldson says “The basic idea— Journal of Humanistic Mathematics Volume 10 Number 1 (January 2020)

中文翻译：

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约翰·彻弗（John Cheever）的故事“爱的几何”

尽管约翰·谢弗（John Cheever）是短篇小说的主要作家，但他的小说《爱的几何》（The Geometry of Love）之前几乎没有受到文学或数学评论。在这篇文章中，它是在Cheever自己陷入困境的生活和婚姻的背景下阅读的，就像唐吉x德一样，明确地遵循欧几里得几何学的模型，有时甚至很滑稽，以寻求理想的真理和幸福世界。约翰·谢弗（John Cheever，1912-1982年）（见图1）是他那个时代最杰出的作家之一，尤其是短篇小说。他发表了180则故事，其中只有120则在《纽约客》上发表，他所收集的《约翰·谢弗的故事》获得了1978年普利策奖。他还写了五本小说，其中第一本《 The Wapshot Chronicle》（1957年）获得了国家图书奖，第二本《 The Wapshot Scandal》（1964年），曾获得美国艺术与文学学院威廉·迪恩·豪威尔斯奖章，这是过去五年中最好的美国小说。本文的重点是Cheever的故事“爱的几何学”，该故事最初于1966年1月1日发表在《星期六晚报》上，该评论此前鲜有评论。随着文学评论家可能发现几何学与爱情之间的任何联系都太深奥或荒谬而无法相信，数学评论家可能缺乏文学背景来获得充分的欣赏，在我看来，这个故事似乎从未被正确理解。有趣的故事引文来自[4]，对于不在此收藏集中的《纽约客》故事，引文来自[16]。有趣的传记信息来自[4]中的Bailey年表，以及传记[9，6，1]。Bailey将该故事称为“疯狂的女性厌恶讽刺”，谢弗的《纽约客》编辑威廉·麦克斯韦（William Maxwell）拒绝了该书，他被视为“证明谢弗因为酒精而“失去力量”的积极证据” [1，第364-365页]。唐纳森说：“基本思想-人文数学杂志第10卷第1期（2020年1月）