Being the son of one of America's best-known and most honored fiction writers, particularly when you're in the same line of work yourself, could be an onerous burden, but if it is, Benjamin Cheever carries it lightly. At 50, John Cheever's middle child appears quietly content with his life, happily settled in a marriage of 17 years (to New York Times film critic Janet Maslin), and solidly launched on a career as a novelist that began when he was past 40. In a conversation at Grand Central Station's Oyster Bar -- he and Maslin prefer to keep the press away from their Westchester home and their two young sons -- he's intelligent, candid, just neurotic enough to be interesting, and almost as funny as his books. Indeed, he's not above recycling a line from one of them if it fits the situation at hand.

And why not? They're good lines. When Atheneum published The Plagiarist in 1992, critics were pleased to discover a wickedly observant and new comic novelist. The book's autobiographical elements were obvious -- The American Reader, where protagonist Arthur Prentice labors, bears more than a passing resemblance to Reader's Digest, Benjamin Cheever's employer for 11 years; Arthur's sardonic, alcoholic father is a John Cheever-like author -- but its lively dialogue and deadpan satire make it a roman à clef with a difference. Cheever's second novel, The Partisan (Atheneum, 1993), which made the New York Times's year-end Editor's Choice list, featured another literary father-figure and plenty of the author's now-familiar wit, but his meditation on "the whole mystery of family" (as he puts it) is also unexpectedly moving.

Famous After Death, out from Crown in April, is Cheever's most ambitious book yet. This mordant depiction of America's love affair with celebrity has a broader scope, a sharper edge and less of a desire to please than his earlier books do. The emotional violence that simmered in The Plagiarist and The Partisan roils into physical violence in Famous After Death, which revolves around a series of deadly bombings by a right-wing cult. The novel's hapless hero, N l Hammersmith, yearns for love and fame -- and gets both when he agrees to take responsibility for the bombings, even though he didn't commit them. This plot twist has a grim irony that's new for Cheever: by masquerading as a mass murderer, N l sparks the interest of women who previously disdained him and winds up on network television. Cheever's satire of American society could hardly be sharper, or less linked to his own past.

"I think it's traditional for people to write two vaguely autobiographical novels and then move on," comments the author. "That material's used up. When you write a book, it changes you. Whatever bothers you the most causes you to write the book, then it bothers you less, and whatever else is bothering you prompts the next one."

What's bothering Cheever and his protagonist in the new novel is "that fame is so precious to us, and as a society we give it almost always to the wrong people. My wife turned on the Today show this morning, and who were they talking about? Charles Manson and John Hinckley. Ten minutes of TV, and these are the two people we have to learn about! They become role models just by the force of their position, and that's tragic and awful, I think."

But awfully funny as well in Famous After Death, which shows a network re-upholstering the prison armchair in which a convicted murderer will sit for his inevitable TV interview. "What's awful has always seemed funny to me," says Cheever. "The worse life is, the funnier it is, don't you think?"

One of the most comic industries, lampooned in all of Cheever's books, is American publishing, whose cultural pretensions are mocked by the reality of producing sentimental, right-wing pap (in The Plagiarist), phony memoirs and backstabbing biographies (in The Partisan) and ridiculous self-help and diet books (in Famous After Death). The author's portrait of a business culture in which publishing houses are gobbled up by pet-food companies named Pretty Kitty, Inc., or German conglomerates called Ich Spreche Nicht Viel Deutsch, hits the mark smartly because he knows the subject so well.

"The Digest was just hilarious," comments the author, whose first novel painted a fairly merciless portrait of a community in which articles are cut to make room for jokes (by well-paid editors who have all the time in the world to tinker) and a lot of lip service is paid to art while the real work of commerce g s on uninterrupted. "My father was a writer," says Cheever. "I thought of publishing as this magnificent, almost sacred thing done by dedicated people who don't care about anything else. Then you find all these time servers and dishonest people publishing books that have no value at all; you think to yourself, 'How can this be happening?' It was once a punishable offense to give a slave a book to read: Can you imagine punishing someone for reading The Grapefruit Diet?"

Though he flashes one of his engaging grins as he paraphrases a wisecrack from Famous After Death, Cheever's outrage is as real as his amusement. He grew up in a household where people took books seriously, where Ralph Ellison, a family friend, assured bookish young Ben that "writing a novel was like being a human being: our aspirations to be good are similar to our aspirations to write well." Losing himself in the fiction of Thackeray, Orwell and Dickens took some of the sting out of being "a maladroit, arrogant, uncoordinated outcast -- I think the kids were probably right to beat me up in the playground, but that didn't make it any more fun!"

I wanted desperately to be a writer, starting from the time I was seven or eight, but by my early 20s I had decided that my father was talented and I was not, so he was a writer, and I would be a magazine editor." After graduating from Antioch College in 1970, Cheever worked as a reporter for five years at the Rockland Journal News, a Westchester County newspaper, then moved to the Digest in 1976. "I was always trying to write a short story or a novel in my free time, which was a way to guarantee that I was unhappy, because none of it was any good."

A couple of developments helped clear the ground for Cheever to make a full-time commitment to writing. His first marriage (from which he has an adult son) broke up in the late '70s, and he spent a year living at home with his mother and newly sober father. "When he quit drinking he became a different person, much less critical and much nicer. We had a chance to become friends again." Then in 1987, a few years after John Cheever died, his son took a leave of absence from the Digest to edit his letters, which were candid about his struggles with his writing and the bad reception it got from some editors and critics. "That really knocked me off my pins," says Benjamin Cheever. "I realized, it's just a decision that you make, to become a writer, and maybe it will work out and maybe it won't, but you don't wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder."

The Family Legacy

The letters (released by Simon &Schuster in 1988) were also frank about the writer's alcoholism, bouts of depression and bisexuality. Susan Cheever grappled with these issues in her 1984 memoir, Home Before Dark, as did Benjamin in his introductions to the letters and to their father's journals, published by Knopf in 1991. (Their younger brother, Fred, a law professor in Denver, d sn't get involved in the family's literary affairs.) The siblings got some bad press for allegedly trading on personal problems, particularly after they joined their mother, Mary, in a 1988 lawsuit against Academy Chicago to stop publication of a collection of early John Cheever short stories. How could the family argue that John Cheever would not have wished his apprentice works to be reprinted, asked their critics, when they were themselves making public material of a decidedly intimate nature?

For starters, says Benjamin Cheever, his father wanted the journals published: "He didn't want to do it until after he was dead, but he did want to do it." Moreover, he says, though Academy Chicago presented the project to the family as a small-scale, scholarly work, it suddenly became a high-profile publication with a large first printing, heavily promoted "with the idea that the stories had been withheld because they contained inflammatory personal material," which wasn't true. (The publisher was eventually permitted to issue a small collection of public-domain stories.)

The journals and letters did contain "inflammatory personal material," but it was important to release them, Cheever believes, because "my father's writing came out of who he was. He seemed on the surface to represent a certain kind of rich person who lived in Connecticut and drank too much. But in fact, the brilliance of those stories has nothing to do with that kind of person: most third-generation lawyers who live in Connecticut aren't interesting at all. The reason that it was all illuminated is because he was always disguised -- he felt he had to be, because he was bisexual at a time when it just wasn't acceptable. So he was inventing himself every day, and that was what made his writing so spectacular and beautiful."

This knowledge was important for his son personally as well. "I learned that, although my father seemed to be a very conventional man, in fact he wasn't. That made my thirst for conventional life less intense." Cheever quit his Digest job and started The Plagiarist. Not that he had an easy time: the novel was turned down all over town and rewritten several times before Atheneum's Lee G rner bought it. "Probably it wasn't ready," says Cheever of the early rejections, "but I was used to being an editor and I assumed someone would want to edit me. Nobody did; they wanted a finished book. Finally, it was my agent, Gail Hochman, who helped me; she wrote a two-page letter explaining what she thought would make it more marketable." Atheneum published the resultant manuscript, and The Partisan, with very few changes.

In the wake of Atheneum's demise, however, Cheever had a hard time placing Famous After Death. "The first two books got great reviews, and I thought this was going to be a cinch. I had what I thought was a finished book in 1995, but nobody wanted it." Cheever had given up on the novel and begun working on a nonfiction proposal when a writer friend suggested sending Famous After Death to Peter Ginna at Crown. Ginna liked it, bought it, and in the wake of his departure for Oxford University Press, Karen Rinaldi did the actual editing.

"Karen was just what you want in an editor: enthusiastic and interested in helping me write whatever I wanted to write," says Cheever. "I don't know why all editors aren't that way, because you get better work out of people. If coaches acted like most editors, no one would ever go on the field!"

With Famous After Death out of his hands, Cheever is concentrating on the nonfiction project. "It's about starting over, taking entry-level jobs. I've been pretending I was a disappointed novelist who would take whatever job he could get on the qualifications of a novelist. I'm terrified that I won't be able to write it. But the research was great; I loved getting out of the house."

By contrast, writing fiction,"means spending all your time at home with the person you like least!" jokes the author. "Still, there's nothing nicer than being in the middle of a novel: I hate starting it, because it's like swimming to Portugal; and I hate finishing it, because then people may not like it; but being in the middle is just paradise. I'd like to do both fiction and nonfiction. I think it's good to go out in the world and have something happen to you; being a naturally fearful person, if I don't force myself out, my big adventure will be getting a package in the mail, and that d sn't make for lively writing."

Smith is the author of Real Life Drama: A History Of the Group Theater.