 | By: John Cheever Binding: Paperback Publisher: Harper Perennial ISBN: 0060528877 ISBN-13: 9780060528874 Released: 02 Jun 2003 RRP: Average Rating:  |
The Wapshot Chronicle is one of those big family stories that details parts of the lives of three generations, while providing a sense of those who came before. This is a family of sea-faring New Englanders who explored the far reaches of the Pacific & also produced missionaries who served in Hawaii. If you have read James Michener's Hawaii, you will have a picture in mind that will be accurate about the Wapshot forebearers. In the current generation, there's plenty of money in the hands of eccentric, elderly Cousin Honora. She provides for her cousin Leander, his wife Sarah, & their sons, Moses & Coverly. Cousin Honora does this in the spirit of honoring the family heritage, & she is quite interested in seeing the family continue on. The book focuses in on her efforts to encourage this continuity, & what resulted.
John Cheever's greatest strength is his ability to conceive of highly original & interesting characters. In The Wapshot Chronicle, you will find two of the 20th century's most original fictional females, Cousin Honora & Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scadden. The men, by comparison, are pretty bland. They are so obsessed with their sexual desires & wanting to have a superior, independent position that they become predictably limited.
His second greatest strength is that he is able to weave a novel out of a series of short-story-like episodes that have unexpected twists & cliff-hangers near their ends. Each is a gem, & glitters shiniest with understatement. A few words, a few concepts sketch out the beginnings of a pregnant circumstance. Then, he moves on . . . leaving you as the reader with plenty of room to imagine the actual circumstances. No two readers will describe what happens in this book the same way, because each will perceive the action to be quite different from everyone else. It is sort of like having The Lady or The Tiger continue on to a further story, but without resolving clearly which one lay behind the chosen door. Ambiguities pile atop ambiguities.
The book's third greatest strength is an ability to use imagery to turn the same object into expressing its opposite meaning. This Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde quality imbues the book with a very deep irony seldom found in modern novels. Mr. Cheever uses names to good effect to reinforce this nuance. Clear Haven becomes anything but. The Wapshot name is traced to its Norman French roots as Vaincre-Chaud (loosely, defeating others in hot blood). The latest generation of Wapshot males is anything but that, so the name has had to change to reflect their humbler role.
While the writing shines with rare beauty, the themes will often feel too trivial to be worthy of the attention lavished on them. What does it mean to be a man in a society in which women are strong, capable, & independent? Cheever seems to suggest a drone-like role like that in the beehive. Are we nothing more than our genes, our parents' child-rearing methods, & our environments? The characters seem to suggest that we are precisely & merely the sum of these influences. Can we accept help? The very generosity of the sharing seems to create shackles, rather than bonds of love & caring. In short, Mr. Cheever has a very jaundiced eye concerning modern humanity, & that leaves the book with a very downbeat feel. Unlike the existentialists who left us with nobility of spirit in facing meaningless events, Mr. Cheever sees nothing at alll uplifting going on. You could think of this book as describing the emergence of the bland, disconnected, dependent modern city dweller. I wasn't persuaded by this view, & if you are like me, neither will you. I graded the book down accordingly, despite its stylistic genius.
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