The Wapshot Chronicle (Perennial Classics)
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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.
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
Archetypal yet accessible
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Comment:
The further I got into the book,the less interested I became in the characters themselves. Cheever has molded them into people who are also archetypes, and this seems to reverberate more deeply as the novel advances. I don't particularly follow Jung's archetypal images, don't care much about them, but as the characters unfold they become--as in an old medieval manuscript--emblems of such as Sleeping Beauty and the Prince, Miss Havisham and Estella. The rich prose adds gilt to this weaving of life, nature, death, striving, and possession. Near the end,when Cheever interpolates the closing lines of The Tempest ("...We are such stuff as dreams are made of...") I was as affected as if I had just read one of the bard's own plays.
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Summary:
Memorable narrative.
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Comment:
I believe that every one should read this book twice: the first to get touched by the beautiful story, the characters that pop up all the book, the almost tangible Cheever's New England, etc. - the second to understand and learn how a masterpiece is created and how some books became gifts to the mankind. This is the kind of book that you get upset when it is over and you start advising your friends to read it as slow and quiet as possible. John Cheever is - no doubt - one of the great writers of the XX century, and this book shows why.
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Summary:
Unique story, quick read
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Comment:
This is one of those books that follows the lives of a limited number of idiosyncratic people (otherwise known as a "character study"). As I am particularly fond of the "character study" genre, I found this book to be an enjoyable, quick read. It might be a bit outdated to the modern reader, but..."nifty"...nonetheless. Buy it used for a reasonable price.
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Summary:
Wapshot Chronicle
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Comment:
In this comic novel, John Cheever revels in the power of the written word. Leander Wapshot, hero of the book, is endlessly browbeaten by his sister Honora and his wife Sarah, but through the journal he keeps, despite his writing in choppy, incomplete sentences, he's able to rise above his humiliations and is even able to give some good advice to his son Coverly at the very end of the novel in a scrap of paper Coverly finds in a volume of Shakespeare belonging to Leander. The novel is also concerned with Leander's two sons, Coverly and Moses, as they leave home to seek their fortunes. Moses' story is fairly complicated, with many different adventures and twists and turns, and both he and Coverly end up in not very promising marriages. Cheever is at his strongest in character development and at his weakest in plot construction; in fact, there's hardly a plot at all. The dialogue is superb, however, and therein lies much of the humor of the book. I regard Cheever a better short story writer than a novelist, but there's still much to admire in this National Book Award-winning novel, his first.
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Summary:
A wonderful, underrated novel!
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Comment:
Cheever is one of the most underrated American authors, and he's almost as good here as in his best short stories, which may be the best by an American. (A bold statement, I know. But I really do like him better than Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, certainly O'Connor. Maybe the other WASP John--Updike--is his only real contender.)
Anyway, the only thing I don't like about this edition of the book is that it is introduced by, of all people, Rick Moody, who is as pitiful a stylist as Cheever is a great one. What an atrocious pairing, kind of like having Escher write about Matisse, or having Huey Lewis write about Rush.
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