A MASTERPIECE FROM JOHN CHEEVER

The Wapshot Chronicle is John Cheever's first novel, published in 1957, and it is a timeless masterpiece of expressing the sorrow, the pity and the tragicomic dimensions of American middle-class life. The titular family consists of eccentrics, all pursuing their varied and impulse-driven distractions with little apparent purpose. The novel follows Leander Wapshot, an aging patriarch and ferryboat pilot in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, as he grapples with his eccentric family and fading relevance in an uncertain world. His sons, Moses and Coverly, leave home to seek purpose in a world that seems increasingly absurd and disjointed beyond their immediate experience. Moses navigates a series of romantic misadventures and professional aimlessness, while Coverly wrestles with existential confusion and sexual identity in his own way. Their cousin Honora, a wealthy and domineering matriarch, exerts control over the family’s finances and future with considerable personal authority. Through their missteps and revelations, their private illusions collapse. All such activities show to be vanities and the characters, despite vague assertions and protests from time to time of declaring themselves fully motivated citizens, show themselves to be a rudderless lot, a family in decline, each in their own way sensing that a veil has lifted and the illusion of their own normality is evaporating, but who still maintain that all is fine with their oddball takes on reality despite everything they witness. Cheever has one of the greatest, if not the greatest prose styles of his generation, an elegant tone that guides savvy and sympathetic sentences throughout this remarkable novel. He writes with an anonymous narrator that never reveals his or her hand, keeping matters in the third person, showing intimate knowledge of the lives of this family and their ideas as such, but withholds any outright suggestions as to how anything resolves or what ultimately follows. His wordsmithery is a marvel of elegant brevity with just enough detail, his treatment of seasonal light is brilliant conveyed with extraordinary emotional precision. Also on display is a sad ruthlessness in how he leads the reader toward the inevitable and its painful consequences. The effect is comic, but the laughs are not slapstick but more like a melancholic jolt of recognition--the reader draws from their experiences and comes to recognize that the books' characters are approaching inevitable consequences they never dreamed of. This is fatalism in a lower, oddly comforting register.