The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics) Review

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The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics) ReviewThe fictitious Wapshot family of Cheever's "The Wapshot Chronicle" are old-line New Englanders, prominent but modest citizens of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. The central characters are Leander, the aging father, who is the captain of a boat that transports passengers between a leisure island and the mainland; his loving wife Sarah; his carefree, irresponsible sons Moses and Coverly; and his elderly, senile cousin Honora, who owns the boat and is in fact the family's financial anchor.
The novel's chain of events is set into motion one night when a car crashes into a tree near the Wapshots' house. The driver is killed, but the passenger, a girl named Rosalie, is taken inside the Wapshots' house for convalescence. It's not long before Moses and Rosalie take advantage of the intimacy of their living arrangement and engage in intercourse, unaware that Honora is eavesdropping. Shocked by this display of debauchery, Honora vows to cut the family's financial ties loose unless Moses learns some responsibility and goes out into the world to make his own way. And so he leaves St. Botolphs to go to Washington to get a job, and Coverly sneaks away from his parents to accompany him.
The two boys go their separate ways and each ends up married but in very different milieus with different sets of values. Coverly marries a poor Southern girl, becomes a technician on a rocket-launching site, and takes up residence in a homogenized modern suburb. His new life represents the modern (as of the 1950's), technical, practical, utilitarian world. It is taken even further into classic Cheeveresque territory when Coverly considers a ... relationship after his wife abandons him.
Cheever's proclivity for ironic romanticism is represented in Moses's new life, which is quite a contrast to his brother's. After his prospects in Washington go sour, a chance encounter gives him a new opportunity as an aspiring banker. With his new connections, like Jack climbing up the freshly-sprouted beanstalk of society, somehow he ends up in a sort of fairy-tale world. He marries a beautiful princess named Melissa who is the ward of a wicked witch (the imperious harridan Justina Scaddon, heiress to a five-and-dime store fortune). He and Melissa are imprisoned in the wicked witch's castle (Justina's ancient expansive mansion), staffed by a legion of harried servants and cohabited by Justina's companion, the foppishly ... Count D'Alba.
Leander keeps a journal, a sort of combination autobiography/family history, in which his entries are written in a choppy style of sentence fragments, as though he doesn't have enough time to put subjects in his sentences, and he writes letters to his sons in the same style. A problem of his own rears its ugly head in the form of a woman who claims to be his daughter from a previous marriage. This is an interesting plot line that unfortunately is not developed as fully as it could have been.
I don't feel this novel is quite as great as Cheever's best short stories, but unlike his short stories, which generally tend to be depressing or somber, this novel has quite a bit of humor in it. I found many symbols in the novel, the most important being that the father or head of a family is, in a way, like the captain of a ship, and no matter how hard he tries, sometimes he can't keep the ship from breaking up and sinking. It is this sharp use of symbolism, the rhapsodic prose, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the familiar that lends Cheever's work its considerable charm.The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics) Overview
When The Wapshot Chronicle was published in 1957, John Cheever was already recognized as a writer of superb short stories. But The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the 1958 National Book Award, established him as a major novelist.

Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel follows the destinies of the impecunious and wildly eccentric Wapshots of St. Botolphs, a quintessential Massachusetts fishing village. Here are the stories of Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea dog and would-be suicide; of his licentious older son, Moses; and of Moses' adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the tradition of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James.


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