The Wapshot Chronicle
by John Cheever
Summary
St Botolphs is an old Massachusetts river town subsiding gracefully into the past, and the Wapshots are its first family in the same condition. Leander Wapshot captains the Topaze, a barely seaworthy launch ferrying tourists across the bay, keeps a journal in a clipped telegraphic style that is the book's great comic invention, and holds to a code in which honour, fishing, drink and the love of women are one continuous sacrament. The money, meanwhile, belongs to Cousin Honora, a magnificent tyrant who wears a hat in the bath, and she attaches a condition to it: the Wapshot fortune will pass to Leander's sons only if they produce male heirs.
So Moses and Coverly are pushed out into postwar America to seek their fortunes and their wives, and the novel splits with them: Moses into a castle full of eccentrics after the beautiful Melissa, Coverly into rocket site suburbs and a marriage with weather in it, and both into discoveries about desire that the town they came from has no vocabulary for. Cheever alternates their adventures with Leander's journal and the town's seasons, and the mixture of farce, lyricism and ache is entirely his own.
It reads as a family album with the dangerous pages left in: bright surfaces, and underneath them the fear of failing as a man among men.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who know Cheever's stories and want the novel where that world got its founding myth, elegy and comedy in the same breath.
Historical Context & Significance
The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1958. It was Cheever's first novel, arriving when he was already the New Yorker's reigning short story writer, and it settled the question of whether he could sustain a book; the Modern Library later ranked it sixty third among the century's novels. It also carried a quieter distinction: the first novel chosen by the Book of the Month Club to print its era's most unprintable word.
St Botolphs is built from a family romance of decayed New England grandeur he burnished all his life, and Coverly's troubled currents of desire are the book's most directly autobiographical freight, decades before the journals made that public.
The Wapshot Scandal followed in 1964, darker and stranger, and the two books bracket the suburban stories that made his name. The 1979 Pulitzer for the collected Stories completed the set, but this is where his long form reputation began.