BOOK REVIEW : More Pruning on Cheever Family Tree : TREETOPS: A Family Memoir, <i> by Susan Cheever,</i> Bantam Books, $19.95, 204 pages

“Treetops” may well be Susan Cheever’s masterpiece. All the praise in the world could not do justice to this book, nor can paraphrase encompass its majesty.

At first glance, “Treetops” is simply a memoir of the author’s mother--meant to balance her earlier, controversial book about her father, in which she yanked her deceased literary dad rather unceremoniously out of the closet, disclosing to the American reading public that John Cheever was bisexual. Susan Cheever took a lot of heat for that book. It was suggested that, at the very least, she was trading on the coinage of her father’s name to advance her own career.

But you very quickly see that in “Treetops,” Susan Cheever has assumed a wonderful mastery over material that has eluded her time after time. There’s been a hectic, giggling “oh, I shouldn’t be telling you this” quality to much of her work, including her last novel, “Elizabeth Cole,” in which a beleaguered daughter has a “great man” for a father, and an even “greater” man for a grandfather, and the daughter meets a strenuously awful man, and marries him but is rescued by a nicer man, and so on. The reader knew that the whole Cheever legend was lurking in that material, like the infection behind a boil that wasn’t ready to come out yet; couldn’t get out.

Here, in “Treetops,” the tone is entirely different. It’s awesome. The image that keeps coming to you is the terrible iron power of the truth, because the real truth, the whole truth, is massively powerful. It doesn’t have an ax to grind. It carries retribution and compassion in the same hand. And there’s no defense against it, because it is the truth.

In “Treetops,” Susan Cheever looks at her mother. But her mother, as a female in a certain time and place, had to be defined by her relatives, the males in her clan. Mary, Susan’s mother, came from a good, prominent, stately family--the kind that John Cheever wanted to be part of; he got lucky when he married into it. So this book is about in-laws and “outlaws,” about haves and have-nots. Susan’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father all had marvelous careers--of which more later--but these men were generals in a familial army. The mothers, aunts, daughters were cannon fodder in the fight for their men’s fame. The women paid dearly, in early death, insanity, depression, sad lives.

But this is not a feminist treatise, although again and again Susan Cheever comes back to the desperate importance of individual women having a job, so that they can have the money for pure self-defense. The wife of a rich and ambitious man may be in a far worse fix, Cheever says, than the wife of any ordinary failure. The main thrust of this book, though, is about the force of myth in families, how we each are assigned our roles--or grab them, greedily, for ourselves. This is about the “artist,” and those liberties which the artist is allowed to take, and when his (or her) artistic liberties turn into moral murder.

Three generations! Susan’s maternal great-grandfather was Thomas Watson, who, with Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone. But the story we all know--”Watson! Come here, I need you!” and the acid on Bell’s trousers--all that was just a story made up by Watson to make his part in the telephone invention sound better. We all make up these stories; they don’t all find their way into American history.

Susan’s grandfather was Milton Winternitz, who knocked Yale Medical School into shape, and then was demoted for his bad temper and for being Jewish. Milton’s wife died, leaving five sad orphaned children. Winternitz then married Pauline Whitney (of the famous, rich Whitneys) and her four confident, handsome, snotty children began to torment the sad and loveless Winternitz children, one of whom was Mary, Susan’s mother, who married young John Cheever.

This is a short book, and it’s a good thing. Each sentence, in its somber, undecorated stiffness, really does evoke the entire human condition. Why must people be so cruel? Why was it that, though she was mean as a snake, Pauline Whitney Winternitz was Susan’s favorite? Why did John Cheever, in his later years, so mercilessly brutalize his own wife in print, when it was he who was doing her wrong in the first place? Why are people unable to love when they should? And why must every career leave a fetid wake of ruined relationships and broken lives?

Susan Cheever asked everyone in her family all the questions she could think of. They answered as best they could. She’s not out to get anyone in this book, just to tell the truth about families and artists and ambitions and a hundred heartbreaks and a few scarce moments of joy. She’s as strong as a steam engine here, sturdy and fair-minded, much more than loving; determined to understand.

Next: Connie Casey reviews “Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell” by Michael Kreyling (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).