The work was included in the collection of Cheever's short fiction The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories (1958) published by Harper and Brothers.
[8][9] Francis Weed, father of four young children and husband to Julia, is a resident of the solidly middle-class suburb of Shady Hill.
When Francis arrives home with the tale of his survival, his wife and children are too preoccupied with their own personal affairs to register any sympathy.
Julia learns of her husband's rudeness towards Mrs. Wrightson when the Weed family is excluded from the guest list for the annual Shady Hill dance party.
Francis relinquishes his emotional anarchy and makes his peace with the denizens of Shady Hill, resigned to his suburban existence.
[10][11][12] Literary critic Jonathan Yardley offers this praise: "The Country Husband' is close to a perfect short story.
In the brief space of perhaps 10,000 words Cheever creates characters whom we see in full; he portrays the exterior and interior lives of Francis Weed with astonishing complexity and subtlety; he gets the suburban ambiance exactly right; he depicts with heartbreaking accuracy the sudden onslaught of love and the tidal wave of emotions carried with it; he gives us a man in thrall to lust…but who is faithful, in the end, to his own essential decency and moral sturdiness.
Rarely has Cheever packed so much diversity into one story: elements of myth; literary, artistic, and geographical allusions; and the old Puritan battleground between the flesh and the spirit, Dionysus versus Apollo.
To his great credit, to the very end he remained obsessed with the ethical conduct that gives life shape and meaning, and the record of his moral soundings is to be found in all his published works.
According to Nasrullah Mambrol "The contrast between the subdued Francis Weed and the elevated language is comic or ironic or just plain sad, depending on one’s interpretation.