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The Wapshot Chronicle

by John Cheever, Rick Moody (Foreword by)

3.76 of 5 stars 3.76 · rating details · 2,617 ratings · 147 reviews

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. Botolp...more

Paperback, 368 pages

Published June 28th 2011 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics (first published 1957)

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Dec 05, 2007 Mike Lindgren rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

It's gonna happen sometime, people, no matter how you may dread it. Yes, I am referring to my long-planned, heavily-unanticipated, as-yet-unwritten, irritatingly irrelevant monograph on John Cheever, wherein I single-handedly return him to his proper place in the first rank of American novelists. Due in equal parts to Seinfeld and postmodernism, Cheever has become little more than a punch line: a sad symbol of dated postwar suburban cocktail-party angst… well, think again, bitches! The Wapsho...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Dorota rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

First American book with a F$#K word to make it to the Book of the Month Club!

The “Wapshot Chronicle” not only put John Cheever on the map as a novelist – it was also a first American book with a F$#K word in narrative to make it to the Book of the Month Club. And it all happened 1958! Talk about achievement!!!
But joking aside (although the little tidbit of trivia is completely true) – Cheever and his book deserved both the award as well as finally being recognized as one of the best American wr...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Ofterdingen rated it 3 of 5 stars

I see a short story writer trying to jump a weight class, using books like Winesburg, Ohio as his template.

The beginning is strong, the characters are interconnected in time and place. And though we get the disjointed point of view shifts - that characterize the entire book, the reader can say that it is all about the Wapshots; the Wapshot family is the protagonist. Many lovely descriptions and sentences here.

Then people leave. They are off doing things that have nothing to do with their home an...more

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Sep 05, 2011 Veronica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Veronica by: Modern Library's 100 Best Novels

Set in the fictional seaside town of St. Bostolphs, Massachusetts, we meet the Wapshot family. Written with such flair, we get to know many of the Wapshots at a deep level and wonder if we haven’t met them all personally at some of our own family gatherings.

The Wapshots face birth and death, financial crises and recoveries, sexual abstinence and experimentation and deal with the matters of life in their individual manners.

The eldest son of Leander, Moses is most like his father and travels to Wa...more Set in the fictional seaside town of St. Bostolphs, Massachusetts, we meet the Wapshot family. Written with such flair, we get to know many of the Wapshots at a deep level and wonder if we haven’t met them all personally at some of our own family gatherings.

The Wapshots face birth and death, financial crises and recoveries, sexual abstinence and experimentation and deal with the matters of life in their individual manners.

The eldest son of Leander, Moses is most like his father and travels to Washington, DC to prove himself to his Aunt Honora. Things don’t go quite as he planned and he ends up in a dilapidated castle of a distant cousin where he meets his somewhat unstable, future wife, Melissa Scaddon.

Moses brother, Coverly, feels he does not measure up to his father’s expectations and questions his future and sexual identity. It’s believed that Coverly’s character was autobiographical. Coverly sets off to New York to satisfy his Aunt Honora and fails a battery of personality tests given during a job prospect from a husband of a cousin. He studies and becomes a civil servant traveling far and away from his comfort zone. He meets his future wife, Betsey MacCaffery, they marry, she has a miscarriage, they separate, they reunite and have a family expected, son.

Rosalie Young enters the Wapshot’s home after a fatal accident takes the life of her date and leaves her in need of care. Mrs. Wapshot takes her under her wing and enjoys nursing her back to health. Rosalie and Moses begin an affair, witnessed first hand by Aunt Honora (you really need to read the book!), who orders the sons out into the world to prove their mettle with the threat of withholding the family’s financial support. Rosalie eventually leaves with her condescending parents and rebukes Mrs. Wapshot after she makes a unfavorable remark about Rosalie’s mother. I really wanted to get to know more of this character, but her departure was fitting with the flow of the story.

There were many more quite interesting characters; Aunt Honora, an opinionated spinster, Reba Heaslip, a local anti-vivisectionist, Justina Scaddon, an eccentric control freak. Cheever managed to make each so familiar in just a few short paragraphs.

Quotes:

Sometimes, walking on a beach and when there is no house near, we smell late in the day, on the east wind, lemons, wood smoke, roses and dust; the fragrance of some large house that we must have visited as children, our memories are so dim and pleasant–some place where we wanted to remain and couldn’t–and the farm had come to seem like this for Rosalie.

Her life had been virtuous, her dedication to innocence had been unswerving and she had been rewarded with a vision of life that seemed as unsubstantial as a paper match in a fairly windy place.

The only thing I found a tad cumbersome were the chapters that captured diary entries. While trying to convey what a person may have actually written in such a journal, it just fell a little flat and took away from the book’s overall continuity.

How could anyone not enjoy spending time with Mr. Cheever. I’d love to listen to him spin some yarns sitting on a beach with the glorious sound of waves lapping the shore.

My rating for The Wapshot Chronicle is a 9 out of 10.
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Mar 25, 2011 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I kind of feel bad for The Wapshot Chronicle. I wrote in my most recent post that I prefered to read nonfiction over John Cheever’s National Book Award winning novel, but I found that I began to enjoy the novel after one hundred pages. Maybe I began to relate to the characters? Maybe I got on a role reading wise? Who knows, but I flew through the latter half of the novel when I thought, in the beginning, that I might never finish it. I guess it goes to show that you should give everything a figh...more I kind of feel bad for The Wapshot Chronicle. I wrote in my most recent post that I prefered to read nonfiction over John Cheever’s National Book Award winning novel, but I found that I began to enjoy the novel after one hundred pages. Maybe I began to relate to the characters? Maybe I got on a role reading wise? Who knows, but I flew through the latter half of the novel when I thought, in the beginning, that I might never finish it. I guess it goes to show that you should give everything a fighting chance.

The Wapshot Chronicle follows the Wapshots, a New England family that seems, compared to most other families in these sagas, pretty normal in the grand scheme of things. The Wapshots live in the town of St. Botolphs where the father–Leander–pilots a ferry boat, the wife–Sarah–is a respectable town figure, and the two sons–Coverly and Moses–do everything you expect normal teenage boys to do*. The spinster-aunt Honora owns the family fortune and promises to give the family her riches whenever either son sires a heir. While the first half of the novel tells every ho-hum folksy story that happens in the town, the latter half of the novel follows Moses and Coverly as they seek their place in the world and marry their respective nut-job wives.

First of all, the first half of the novel. The first one hundred-and-fifty pages of The Wapshot Chronicles feels like a never-ending rendition of The News from Lake Wobegon. ”St. Bolophs is a quiet town,” I can hear Garrison Keiler say “where Mr. Baker the drugist one day woke up to find a Orangutan in his garden. He went down to the Luthern church…” It’s just one quaint, folksy story after the next. This type of storytelling, to me, grows old after about twenty pages, and I had to discipline my reading to trudge through the stories of Honora, who one day went to the movie theater, who then went to the butcher, who then went back to the movie theather because her food wasn’t ready yet, and who enjoyed the movie immensely. Each character, and their characteristics, seems larger than life in the small-town way, and while I prefer it on A Prarie Home Companion, Garrison Keiler never makes The News from Lake Wobegone one-hundred-and-fifty-pages long.

Thankfully, Honora overhears Moses getting fresh with a local girl, and the patroness tells Leander that the boy has to leave St. Botolphs and enter the world (like every Wapshot male before him). While I’m not sure how this would prevent Moses from having premarital-sex, it sure as heck made the latter half of the novel a lot more interesting than the first. Moses goes off to Washington D.C., and Coverly, who can’t live at home without his brother, takes off for New York. Both succeed and fail at jobs and love, and both manage to find pretty little wives who are both out of their minds (At least I hope they’re out of their minds, because if that’s how women normally act I think I’ll just die single thank you very much). One newlywed wife (alert the spoiler), turns into a withholding she-cow after a mild-suggestion from her Aunt, and the other leaves her husband after a man who tries to sleep with her–and is caught–refuses to return the next day for a dinner party. So if we’re keeping track, I much prefer to read stories about crumbling marriages and crazy wives than anecdotes about small-town life. If this were netflix it would tell me what book I should read next.

Oh and then Cheever starts a chapter with “And now we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale and any disinterested reader is encouraged to skip.” Wha? I guess you had to give advanced warning in the 1950s or risk being thrown out of America. Still kind of odd to read that. At least, unlike Waugh, Cheever makes it blatantly obvious (“THERE IS A HOMOSEXUAL IN THIS CHAPTER!! PAGE 251! NO I’M SERIOUS!”). Of course, I wouldn’t find the warning so strange if the chapter in question wasn’t so tame. In the chapter a coworker hits on Coverly; that’s all that happens. It’s not exactly the most blush-inducing thing I’ve ever read, but I guess Cheever was trying to appeal to a mass-audience, so homosexuality needed an asterisk and a fair warning clause.

*I found a lot of parallels, whether purposeful or not, between this novel and East of Eden. While Steinbeck made the Biblical themes a lot more obvious, both novels dwelt in the Biblical realm, and there were several allusions to Biblical stories found in both books. Both novels also had two sons, and it’s no surprise that certain themes found their ways into both of the novels featured on this book blog.
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Mar 22, 2011 Judy rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: John Cheever fans

Shelves: 20th-century-fiction, books-from-1958, national-book-award-winners

John Cheever is best known for his short stories, but his first novel won the National Book Award in 1958. I was expecting one of those John O'Hara or John Marquand novels because I had gotten the idea Cheever was a "New Yorker" favorite. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised.

The Wapshot family has lived for generations in a New England village which began as a sailing port. By the time of the novel, it is a dying town and the fading family lives mostly for tradition. Leander Wapshot, the current...more

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May 13, 2013 Leon rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Meet the Wapshots of St Botolphs. There is Captain Leander Wapshot, venerable sea-dog and would-be suicide; his licentious older son, Moses; and Moses's adoring and errant younger brother, Coverly. Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque, and partly based on Cheever's adolescence in New England, The Wapshot Chronicle is a family narrative in the finest traditions of Trollope, Dickens, and Henry James

Review

"Cheever's debut novel is skittish, mercurial and ringing with life" Guardian

...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Judith Hannan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Have you ever met someone who is particularly striking or beautiful but when you pick apart all their features they don't add up to your definition of attractiveness. Maybe their lips are thin and you associate that with being cruel. Maybe their nose is off-center or their eyes too close. Pointy chin, rough skin, thick shins--it shouldn't add up but it does. Tne Wapshot Chronicle was a glorious read, but if you analyze all its separte pieces it doesn't seem as if it should. Set in a Massachusett...more Have you ever met someone who is particularly striking or beautiful but when you pick apart all their features they don't add up to your definition of attractiveness. Maybe their lips are thin and you associate that with being cruel. Maybe their nose is off-center or their eyes too close. Pointy chin, rough skin, thick shins--it shouldn't add up but it does. Tne Wapshot Chronicle was a glorious read, but if you analyze all its separte pieces it doesn't seem as if it should. Set in a Massachusetts fishing village, the book tells the stories of the eccentric Wapshot family. The description of the back of my copy calls the book, "Tragic and funny, ribald and splendidly picaresque ..." I was expecting a farcical read but Cheever goes so deep; you barely realize he's taking you there. A chapter that examines Coverly Wapshot's possible homosexuality is filled with yearning and pain as he looks into "... the dark plains of American sexual eperience where the bison still roam."

Cheever's strength as a short story writer are in evidence, which is why The Wapshot Chronicle isn't just an overarching tale, but a series of individual stories. Some might see this as a flaw. Characters are introduced and dropped. One chapter might be following one theme with a distinct writing style and suddenly you are inside the voice of Leander Wapshot who tells his story in short phrases meant to be his memoir. Cheever's free use of adjectives would be damned by most writing teachers and the changes in point-of-view would be equally frowned upon. There are sudden shifts in direction. At the end of the book, there is a scene of destruction following which the characters are suddenly back on track, as if Cheever got himself into a tight space and didn't know how to get to the end without destroying what came before.

But because Cheever is not a writing workshop student, his lack of concern for rules makes for an exuberant read. His words flow and break over you because of their rhythm or because his vocabulary is so rich. Even the most minor characters are described with full attention. A stranger who has fallen off her horse is imagined by Moses Wapshot as "... pasty and round and worn it seemed with such anxieties as cooking, catching trains and buying useful presents at Christmas ..." A art appraiser who has a bit part at the very end receives ten lines of description including, "He must have been fifty--the bags under his eyes couldn't have been formed in a shorter time."

It is for passages like this, though, that The Wapshot Chronicles is worth reading. Leander has gone to the beach, hoping for solitude but finds two "old ladies who were discussing canned goods and the ingratitude of daughers-in-law while the surf spoke in loud voices of wrecks and voyages and the likeness of things; for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like a fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho."

Cheever's words vibrate and tremble like Jericho but they never fall down.

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Jun 13, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this book almost entirely on a round-trip bus excursion to Cincinnati. I love kooky characterizations and GoBus (11 bucks?! C'mon, that's great).

The Wapshot Chronicle concerns the Wapshot Family, residents of a fake but familiar Massachusetts town. They're well-off and traditional but also buffeted by financial worries, shipwrecks, and unconvential adventures/desires. I think it's what we'd call ribald, meaning that many of the scenes are kind of funny-sexy and don't usually verge into in...more I read this book almost entirely on a round-trip bus excursion to Cincinnati. I love kooky characterizations and GoBus (11 bucks?! C'mon, that's great).

The Wapshot Chronicle concerns the Wapshot Family, residents of a fake but familiar Massachusetts town. They're well-off and traditional but also buffeted by financial worries, shipwrecks, and unconvential adventures/desires. I think it's what we'd call ribald, meaning that many of the scenes are kind of funny-sexy and don't usually verge into intense-sexesque. (Maybe that oughta be bawdy, not ribald, then. What's the difference between bawdy and ribald?)

Anyway, I found myself at about page 289 actually pumping my fist because Cheever'd pulled off a chase scene on the roof of a giant mansion, the participants of which were ridiculous men attempting to reach a woman's window in order to kiss her. I saw this coming about two sentences before it happened, hoped it would happen, and then let it happen.

That's representative of a lot of what JC seems to be up to here. He follows his paths. So, a lot of the writing doesn't seem practical or plot-driven, but the absurd and silly and sometimes emotional descriptions and digressions are the thing. (Reminded me of documentary Gates of Heaven, which is ostensibly about a pet-graveyard, but really turns out to be a bunch of people having to do with the pet-graveyard monologuing about their personal philosophies).

Early on in WC (ha!), a horse gets a fire-cracker lit under its behind and takes off, hauling a parade float behind it. As the float moves through town, the women on it give us their viewpoint about the residents and locales of the place, St. Botolph's. The novel itself seems like a runaway parade float that brings us to different people and odd situations, all of which seem linked by a kind of optimistic loneliness.

All that said, here's the best part. At one point, one of the Wapshot sons--Coverly--regrets having taken a physics course in nightschool (financial worries) when he should have been taking a course on love (the conceit of the book is that both sons, Coverly and Moses, need to get married and produce sons in order to inherit a fortune, so their romantic tales are the glue).

This is what we get when he imagines the course on love:

"He saw the entrance and the pediment of such a school and imagined the curriculum. There would have been classes on the moment of recognition; lectures on the mortal error of confusing worship with tenderness; there would have been symposiums on indiscriminate erotic impulses and man's complex and demoniac nature and there would have been descriptions of the powers of anxiety to light the world with morbid and lovely colors. Representations of Venus would be paraded before them and they would be marked on their reactions. Those pitiful men who counted upon women to assure them of their sexual nature would confess to their sins and miseries, and libertines who had abused women would also testify. Those nights when he had lain in bed, listening to trains and rains and feeling under his hip breadcrumbs and the cold stains of love--those nights when his joy overshot his understanding--would be explained in detail and he would be taught to put an exact and practical interpretation on the figure of a lovely woman bringing in her flowers at dusk before the frost. He would learn to estimate sensibly all such tender and lovely figures--women sewing, their laps heaped with blue cloth--women singing in the early dark to their children the ballads of that lost cause, Charles Stuart--women walking out of the sea or sitting on rocks. There would be special courses for Coverly on the matriarchy and its subtle influence--he would have to do make-up work here--courses in the hazards of uxoriousness that, masquerading as love, expressed skepticism and bitterness. There would be scientific lectures on homosexuality and its fluctuating place in society and the truth or the falsity of its relationship to the will to die. That hairline where lovers cease to nourish and begin to devour one another; that fine point where tenderness corrodes self-esteem and the spirit seems to flake like rust would be put under a microscope and magnified until it was as large and recognizable as a steel girder. There would be graphs on love and graphs on melancholy and the black looks that we are entitled to give the hopelessly libidinous would be measured to a millimeter. It would be a hard course for Coverly, he knew, and he would be on probation most of the time, but he would graduate. An upright piano would play 'Pomp and Circumstance' and he would march across the platform and be given a diploma and then he would go downstairs and under the pediment in full possession of his powers of love and he would regard the earth with candor and with relish, world without end.
But there was no such school and when he got into New York, late that night, it was raining and the streets around the station seemed to exhale an atmosphere of erotic misdemeanor" (257-258).

So you can see that Cheever is being indulgent, but, in my opinion, he's indulgent about the right stuff.(less)

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Mar 29, 2009 El rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: late20th-centurylit, modern-library-list-top-100-fiction

The "chronicle" here is the story of Captain Leander Wapshot and his sons, Coverly and Moses, and their lives on the New England coast. Parts of the story are told through Leander's diary, though other chapters are written as flashes, like pieces of short stories. This is Cheever's first novel, being a short story writer first so an entire novel being written in that format is not particularly surprising. It often reminded me of, ugh, Sinclair Lewis, or, double-ugh, Sherwood Anderson, but for a...more

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Oct 30, 2012 Myles Osborne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Everyone says the contents of this book—not to mention Cheever’s other attempts at long form narrative— are botched amalgamations, tenuously unified by exceptional vignettes and shorts. I’m not going to contest that, but I am going to contest whether that’s a bad thing. The Wapshot Chronicle is a strange tasting menu of moods and voices and its inattention to an overarching plot—damn it, this book wanders—makes it an unpredictable journey, but it is also a delightful one.

Each moment is aptly pre...more

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Nov 23, 2012 Jeb Harrison rated it 4 of 5 stars

It is hard to imagine anyone reading the Wapshot Chronicle without getting the feeling that there is nothing in the narrator’s vision, and particularly the narrator’s olfactory awareness, that is left undescribed. Each of the narrator’s moments it seems is packed so full of detailed description that, for the less attentive or patient reader, the tale being told is temporarily buried. Some readers may feel that Cheever is more interested in flexing his remarkable attention to detail than he is in...more

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Mar 23, 2009 Paul rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

John Cheever is probably the best short-story writer I've ever read. Better than Carver, better than Ford, better (though, sure, different) than Barthelme. Maybe Carver's stuff resonates with me more strongly, but on a sentence/word level, just pure skill, Cheever tops anyone I've read. That said, this novel didn't really do anything for me. Like Oh, What a Paradise it Seems, which I actually thought was bad, the novel fell far short of any short story I've read. The first half of Wapshot was a...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Jesse rated it 3 of 5 stars

Cheever takes a velvet hammer to the institution of the Olde New England Family, with a case study of the Wapshots, a family with few skills or resources for functioning in modern society. Some shakeups at home lead to them finally getting properly injected into the modern American bloodstream, after a car crash victim upsets the ruling order of the house. Patriarch Leander is first to crumble, falling victim to his domineering Aunt, who tries to turn the family home into a bed and breakfast and...more

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Jul 20, 2009 Elizabeth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

I was hesitant to begin reading Cheever (I have no idea why I believed his fiction wouldn't interest me), and even more skeptical about starting with a novel rather than his more well-regarded short stories. However, this novel was nothing short of excellent, and makes me even more excited to turn to his short fiction. The Wapshot Chronicle tells the tale of a single family's existence in and around St. Botolph's, a fishing village on the northern coast of Massachusetts. The novel focuses most h...more I was hesitant to begin reading Cheever (I have no idea why I believed his fiction wouldn't interest me), and even more skeptical about starting with a novel rather than his more well-regarded short stories. However, this novel was nothing short of excellent, and makes me even more excited to turn to his short fiction. The Wapshot Chronicle tells the tale of a single family's existence in and around St. Botolph's, a fishing village on the northern coast of Massachusetts. The novel focuses most heavily on the wildly complex relations between the patriarch of the family and his two sons, who are as different as they come. As the sons attempt to chart their own courses, both geographically and emotionally removing themselves from their hometown, the full strength of their family ties abruptly surfaces, again and again.

As my summary suggests, the story is an old one, but the expression is entirely unique and wondrous (if sometimes slightly uneven) to read. At its best, Cheever slips out of the third person into the minds and hearts of his characters, recreating their journal entries, suggesting their innermost anxieties. He also makes some of the most affective use of the second person I've ever encountered. An example: "You walk and walk and walk, changing your suitcase from hand to hand. You pass lighted store fronts, monuments, theaters and saloons. You hear dance music and the thunder of tenpins from an upstairs bowling alley and wonder how long it will be before you being to play a role against this new scene. You will have a desk, a secretary, a telephone extension, duties, worries, triumphs and promotions. In the meantime, you will be a lover. You will meet a girl by that monument on the corner, buy her some dinner in that restaurant across the street and be taken home by her to that apartment in the distance. You will have friends and enjoy them as these two men, swinging down the street in shirt sleeves, are enjoying each other. You may belong to a bowling club that bowls in the alley whose thunder you hear. You will have money to spend and you may buy that raincoat in the store window on your right. You may--who knows?--buy a red convertible like that red convertible that is traveling southeast above the trees, and you may even be a father holding a little girl by one hand and a quart of strawberry ice cream in the other. It is only a question of days before the part begins, you think, although it must in fact have begun as soon as you entered the scene with your suitcase."

Cheever's prose, second person or not, is filled with this sort of density and richness. It makes you want to linger over sentences and exposes the power of small moments and gestures. Its meaning is in its intricacy, and its strength is such that it carries what shortcomings this novel might have in terms of its plot. A page-turner this novel is not, but it is well-worth the effort.(less)

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Jul 08, 2011 Erring Wildly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Excellent book. Cheever's origins as a short story writer really come through. This was his first novel. Every line is tight, perfectly worded, frothing over with emotion, never melodramatic.

This is one of those books that you have a hard time explaining to your friends. It's about a traditional New England family, you'll say. What happens to them? Well, the kids move out and get married and have troubles, and the older ones stay and have troubles, then it ends, and it is amazing.

Hard to swallow...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Tfitoby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit

well it wasn't what i expected or hoped for. i wanted some of that postwar suburban cocktail party angst and what i got was something quite different. a nice surprise but really not what i was looking for when choosing to read my first cheever.

the wapshots are a fabulous bunch, a truly interesting family whose lives are highly entertaining to read about whether it be a walk in the woods or a long standing family argument. it is cheever who manages to create this magic and for that i am looking f...more

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Aug 11, 2009 Phil rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First off, this is not my sort of topic for a book. Waspy New England families of a bygone era? Blech blahh! Second of all, it doesn't matter when the prose is so lovely and vivid. Cheever manages to make otherwise boring crap sound beautiful. And out of the random doings of a family in a New England port town emerge many of the problems and themes universal to families, blah blah blah. But then out of nowhere, you see through the character's mundane workaday into what makes them tick. Cheever n...more

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Apr 14, 2009 Lobstergirl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Rod Blagojevich

Shelves: fiction

Not at all what I expected; yes, there are WASPs committing adultery (some of them), but not at suburban cocktail parties, and the WASPs are poor and live on a farm in a small town. They swim in rivers and swimming holes rather than backyard pools. The men are fuelled by testosterone and the women by anger and righteousness, yet these are enchanting characters in an eccentric family and it's impossible not to like them. The book has many hilarious passages. Sometimes I was reminded of Gabriel Ga...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Sparrowfall rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a well-written story about a new england family told in a style utilizing a charming mix of detail and believable, character-specific vernacular. But the hypersexuality threatened to make the main characters one dimensional. And, despite the investments in the characters that one inevitably makes, I kept trying to understand if there was some significance in the symmetrical, often too convenient plot developments. This is not a novel in which one learns a great deal about the human condi...more

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May 18, 2013 Bruce Watson rated it 4 of 5 stars

While not in the same league as Cheever's short stories, The Wapshot Chronicle has its moments. It offers a vivid portrait of old New England culture in decline. Lyrical and moving, it captures the pain of romances and marriages on the rocks. If only the characters were as well-crafted as Cheever's prose. Alas, unlike the picture-perfect snapshots of his short story suburbanites, they exist as props for his set pieces, as one-dimensional and unbelievable as their names -- Leander, Moses, Coverly...more

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Apr 10, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

The venerated Cheever's first novel and it totally reads like Cheever's first novel; I found myself reading the book like a collection of short stories concerned with a broad theme, that theme being the Wapshot family in this case. This isn't necessarily a negative judgement on the work. Cheever writes in a quirky manner, more so than Updike, and St. Botolph's is a bubble of absurdity that compares only superficially to any small town you've ever know. A refreshing take on the personality of New...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Stephanie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: top-100-lists

Meh. That is all the emotion with which this book left me. Somewhere I read that Cheever was heavily inspired by James Joyce, and it is so, so obvious here. I don't mean that in a good way either.

Cheever is not a novelist, and it is quite apparent. He is a short story writer who wanted to jump ship for novels, but this book is nothing more than a short story that is about 200 pages too long. I got bored more times than I can count.

Aside from that, he is a good writer. The book flows well, and he...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Smcleish rated it 3 of 5 stars

Originally published on my blog here in March 2000.

It took me a long time to get into The Wapshot Chronicle, the supposedly hilarious story of the old family of the Wapshots in their New England small town. Most of it I found not interesting enough to be funny..

There are occasional amusing paragraphs, but it is not until near the end when I realised that the section about Moses Wapshot's married life was a parody of Henry James that I began to enjoy it more.

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Jul 12, 2009 Andy rated it 4 of 5 stars

The first Cheever novel I've read. Better story than I'd expected. I think Cheever wants us to compare the adventures of the Wapshot boys to the adventures of their 18/19th century ancestors who sailed on clipper ships out of St Botolph's harbor, finding fortune in the orient and love in the south sea islands. More constrained and ambiguous in the 20th century, but still a rush compared to the namby pamby crap young people do today where there's a helmet and a release form to go to the mailbox -...more

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Nov 25, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Wapshot Chronicle John Cheever (1957) #63

September 27, 2009

Amid the stark confusion of moving into a new house, and the hiatus of reading several off list “fluff” novels and even fluffier horror stories (not to mention a few works of non-fiction), we return to the list. I got most of the reading done on the shitter, in airports, and in airplanes. Secured this nifty first edition at Good Books in the Woods. Another one from the Comstock collection, it is a combination of both The Wapshot Chr...more

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May 30, 2013 Darwin8u rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, favorites

"Man is not simple. Hobgoblin company of love always with us."

The Wapshot Chronicle is a twin Bildungsroman of sons Moses and Coverly, framed by the letters, journaling, and loneliness of their father Leander. It is a crazy beautiful 20th Century Great Expectations-like novel of a family's depth and breadth, its secrets and its flaws. The two brothers are saddled with the albatross and obligation to insure ensure that Old Honora’s keeps paying the bills (future) for the boys and (current) for th...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Realini rated it 5 of 5 stars

After reading The Wapshot Chronicle, my list of to-read books (from The Modern Library Top 100) has only 16 books left on it. If I take out Ulysses and Pale Fire, there would only be 14 left.

I would then move on to The Guardian Top 100, where I still have about 30-40, out of which I still don't think I will find writers like Juan Rulfo, Elsa Morante.

Coming back to The Wapshot Chronicle, I must say that this is book that I thoroughly enjoyed.

"The Wapshot Chronicle follows the tortuous circuit tw...more

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Aug 19, 2011 Malati rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was the first Cheever book I"ve read and I don't think it'll be my last. I'm so glad my book club opened my eyes to him. Like others, I did not think his exploration of the WASPy world of New England would appeal to me. However, he uses this very distinct setting to tell a story that is quite universal. It is about human nature and human relationships. It is about families, brotherhood, growing old, sexual boundaries, gender and societal expectations. It is about growing up and growing apar...more

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Sep 05, 2010 Justin Evans rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

So, there are two types of card games. One you play usually as an adult, and each hand has an effect on the following hand. You know, you keep score and there's an ultimate goal. Then there are the games you play, usually as a kid, where each hand stands completely on its own. No scoring. No advantage to winning a hand. And this book is like the second. If you're not really involved in the hand you're playing/chapter you're reading, there's no reason to pay any attention whatsoever, because the...more

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About John Cheever

John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.

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Quotes from The Wapshot Chronicle

“I have spent considerable of my leisure time in this past year in the improvement of my mind but I find that much of it has been spent extremely foolish and that walking in the pasture at dusk with virtuous, amiable and genteel young ladies I experience none but swineish passions. I commenced to read Russell’s Modern Europe sometime last summer.” — 3 people liked it

“These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns.” — 2 people liked it

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