Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93363 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-01
• Released on: 2003-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
Novel by John Cheever, published in 1957 and granted a National Book Award in 1958. Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel takes place in a small Massachusetts fishing village and relates the breakdown of both the Wapshot family and the town. Part One focuses on Leander, a gentle ferryboat operator harried by his tyrannical wife and his eccentric sister; he eventually swims out to sea and never returns. Part Two chronicles the disastrous lives of Leander's sons, Coverly and Moses. Told in a comic rather than a tragic vein, the novel uses experimental prose techniques to convey a nostalgic vision of a lost world. A sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, was published in 1964. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

From the Publisher
8 1.5-hour cassettes

About the Author
John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen.He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.

Customer Reviews

often overwhelming
I've got a thing for John Cheever. Surely one of the best American authors of the 20th century, Cheever has written several books that I've never stopped raving about (see the following for confimation . . .)

The Wapshot Chronicle is essentially more of the same, more of the short story magic that established Cheever as what he was (and at least to me shall always remain): a magnificent story-teller and stylist who weaved brutal honesty into his poetic tales of tragedy and disillusion. There were passages--pages--of this book that I turned back to and reread not out of confusion or misunderstanding of identity, but simply for their beauty, for the firm, strong images that glimmered in the splitting of the waves crashing in my brain. I couldn't get it out of my mind for a while after reading which caused the next thing I read to suffer in comparison.

Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read.

Floats my boat
The 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.

Of WASPs and Wapshots
The two Wapshot novels ("Chronicle followed by "Scandal") are John Cheever's first two novels. "The Wapshot Chronicle" follows Leander Wapshot's attempts to keep his dignity intact in spite of encroaching old age and his loss of career as a seaman. Leander's two sons, Moses and Coverly, have to make their own way in Cold War America armed with the airs and attitudes of 19th century New England WASPS; their encounters are both funny and poignant. In fact, "funny and poignant" characterizes much of Cheever's writing: he can have you chuckling at situational comedy in one instant and then ping your heart with human frailty in the next.

"The Wapshot Chronicle" is a great introduction to Cheever, but if you think it's too much of a stretch, go for the stories or the more accessible novel "Falconer."