The Wapshot Chronicle
by John Cheever
Award: National Book Winner 1958
Date Read: December 22, 2022
Leander Wapshot is the pater familias of the Wapshot family and the chronicler of the tale told therein. A long line of Wapshots have decorated the landscape around St. Botolphs, Massachusetts since God was a boy. Their name is well-known throughout the town. His Aunt Honore lives in a bungalow on the same property as Leander and his family – wife Sarah and sons Moses and Coverly.
From the time Leander was a child through to his sons heading out on their own to find their fortunes, we experience the lives of this quirky family – sometimes sad, sometimes humorous, always real. The character of Coverly was largely informed by Cheever’s own experiences as he was growing up.
Moses is set out into the world at the behest of Honore, who caught him having sex with a house guest, and it pissed her off. She made connections for him in Washington DC so that he had a decent start in his career. Of course, his penis is the reason that opportunity came crashing down. He almost immediately took up an affair with a married woman and she ultimately disparaged him to (who it’s never quite clear). He strikes out on his own and becomes a successful financier. Moses meets, courts and marries Melissa, getting himself mixed up in one of the strangest families ever concocted on paper.
Coverly does equally well. He ultimately trains as a Taper, which is essentially an early system of coding for primitive computers. He also falls in love and marries Bettie, a flighty girl who isn’t fully sure what she wants out of life. This is kind of an equal match since Coverly isn’t sure of his sexual orientation and stumbles into his bisexual truth.
Both sons are fundamentally estranged from their parents, never really returning to visit so engrossed are they in their own lives. They are also estranged from each other since their inevitable parting at the end of a visit is too damn painful. All of the male characters in this novel seem lonely and disconnected. There is no great heart or deep feeling among the men and their relationships to one another are circumspect at best.
As Cheever’s first full-length novel, having only published short stories prior to this, his writing is engaging, pithy and entertaining. This is the classic American novel at its best. And winning the National Book Award was no small feat for a first try novel, especially one that includes the word fuck.
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