The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) By John Cheever

 

Every once in a while I’ll read works by an author who I know next to nothing about. Such was the case when I picked up the collected novels of John Cheever printed by the Library of America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 for a collection of short stories published primarily in The New Yorker magazine.

The Wapshot Chronicle was his first full length novel. Written in 1957, it is set in New England in the post-war era (WWII) and is a family history of sorts. The Wapshot family had generations of prominence in the village of St. Botolphs, an old river town now nearly forgotten to all but summer visitors from Boston.

The family consists of Leander Wapshot, known as the “captain,” his wife Sara, their two boys Moses and Coverly, and Leander’s cousin Honora who is the matriarch of the family and controls the purse strings. Cheever quite skillfully tells each of their individual stories as they progress through their lives, eventually spawning the next generation of Wapshots. Leander, Sara, and Honora are mostly presented in recollections, and the boys are in present tense. The most interesting (to me) is Leander who tells the whole story through a journal he posts in every day, and in his letters to the boys.

The boys, while compatible, are quite different. Moses is slightly older and is clearly the “heir apparent” to the family’s history. He’s sports oriented, destined for college, though at first life beyond the village holds no interest to him. Post graduation he’ll head to Washington DC to a job arranged by Honora. Coverly is more of an introvert, interested in literature, and whose interests are focused anywhere but St. Botolphs. When Moses leaves for DC, Coverly secretly departs on the same train, but with the destination of New York. Both of them will have interesting and improbable lives as they go through young adulthood and marry. This part of the novel reads like a page-turner.

They will return to their childhood home in St. Botolphs for their father’s funeral at which it rains. “Then, before the rain began, the old place appeared to be, not a lost way of life or one to be imitated, but a vision of life as hearty and fleeting as laughter and something like the terms by which he lived.” 

In 1964 Cheever wrote a sequel to the Chronicle and titled it the Wapshot Scandal. I thoroughly like the Chronicle, and I am eager to read Scandal.

Recommended: Yes