Cash, a college track star in his youth, performs a ritual demonstration at these social events to prove his athletic prowess: whenever he is teased for his evident aging, he arranges the living room furniture into a mock hurdle course, then dashes over them at great speed to astonishment and delight of his guests.
[5][6][7] The opening framing sentence of the work—"one of the longest Cheever ever wrote"—is a litany of empty amusements that occupy the suburban residents of Shady Hill.
[8][9] This is the social milieu in which Cash declines morally and physically, and which can offer no alternative to his pathetic search for his lost youth.
Literary critic Patrick Meanor remarks on the closing scene in the story: …Cash is determined to accomplish two tasks: to test the illusion once more that he is still the youthful track star and, concurrently and unconsciously, to kill himself because his spiritual poverty offers him no other alternative.
Literary critic Samuel Coale writes: The broader view of the human condition transcends the detailed reproduction of the suburban social scene that long fascinated Cheever in his earlier tales…In "O Youth and Beauty!"
"[16]Writer Tim Lieder notes that Cash's "glory days" were during the Great Depression accompanied by the rise of Communism and Fascism.
So Cash is not only a callow youth in the body of a 40-year-old man but he is also privileged to have avoided most of the horrible things of the past 20 years including World War II.