Rating: 
Summary: Unexpected Events Happen to Unusual Characters
Review: Caution: The Wapshot Chronicle makes many coarse references to sex for hire. This language and the scenes described would probably earn this book an R rating if it were a motion picture.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 and 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, and their sons, Moses and Coverly. Cousin Honora does this in the spirit of honoring the family heritage, and she is quite interested in seeing the family continue on. The book focuses in on her efforts to encourage this continuity, and what resulted. John Cheever's greatest strength is his ability to conceive of highly original and interesting characters. In The Wapshot Chronicle, you will find two of the 20th century's most original fictional females, Cousin Honora and Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scadden. The men, by comparison, are pretty bland. They are so obsessed with their sexual desires and 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 and cliff-hangers near their ends. Each is a gem, and 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 and 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, and 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, and our environments? The characters seem to suggest that we are precisely and 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 and caring. In short, Mr. Cheever has a very jaundiced eye concerning modern humanity, and 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 all 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, and if you are like me, neither will you. I graded the book down accordingly, despite its stylistic genius. Be open to the potential of what supportive cooperation can accomplish!
Rating:
Summary: Unexpected Events Happen to Unusual Characters
Review: Caution: The Wapshot Chronicle makes many coarse references to sex for hire. This language and the scenes described would probably earn this book an R rating if it were a motion picture.
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 and 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, and their sons, Moses and Coverly. Cousin Honora does this in the spirit of honoring the family heritage, and she is quite interested in seeing the family continue on. The book focuses in on her efforts to encourage this continuity, and what resulted. John Cheever's greatest strength is his ability to conceive of highly original and interesting characters. In The Wapshot Chronicle, you will find two of the 20th century's most original fictional females, Cousin Honora and Justina Wapshot Molesworth Scadden. The men, by comparison, are pretty bland. They are so obsessed with their sexual desires and 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 and cliff-hangers near their ends. Each is a gem, and 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 and 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, and 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, and our environments? The characters seem to suggest that we are precisely and 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 and caring. In short, Mr. Cheever has a very jaundiced eye concerning modern humanity, and 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 all 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, and if you are like me, neither will you. I graded the book down accordingly, despite its stylistic genius. Be open to the potential of what supportive cooperation can accomplish!
Rating:
Summary: A writer's writer
Review: Cheever is a goldsmith of words, and, if you love language, the sheer pleasure of how he puts them together is enough to carry you though this picaresque family novel. The eccentric Wapshots are as unpredictable and plotless as life, and if they have dull days the author never lets us see them. In this loose, richly inventive account of Leander and Sarah and their sons, Moses and Coverly, Cheever ambles through marriage, lust, loyalty, death, and the eternal pleasures of place. Even the house has a personality: "The heart of the Wapshot house had been built before the War of Independence, but many additions had been made since then, giving the house the height and breadth of that recurrent dream in which you open a closet door and find that in your absence a corridor and a staircase have bloomed there." Reading the novel is like constantly discovering such surprises in the lives of seemingly ordinary people.
Rating: 
Summary: Wandering with the Wapshots
Review: Cheever is an excellent writer,but is less effective in this novel as a storyteller. The first half of the novel hangs together quite well, but then he seems to lose control and strange unconnected events intrude. Some of the chapters would probably been better off as short stories. Read it for the excellent prose, but be prepared to be less than fulfilled by the plot.
Rating: 
Summary: don't underestimate cheever
Review: I felt I had to say something in defense of this great 'chronicle' when I saw its relatively low ranking here. Cheever is one of contemporary America's most original writers, and some, including John Updike, consider this his best novel. On one level, the book is hilarious, yet it is full of ambivalence created by a nostalgia for a golden age that, ironically, never existed. Cheever contrasts our sense of a glorious historical past with the stark realities of the present. For me, I simply enjoy to immerse myself in Cheever's singular prose, laugh at his great wit, and contemplate the state of human nature in our present world. also, the sections of the novel that include Leander Wapshot's journal give this novel an element of striking originality.
Rating: 
Summary: Some interesting characters but way too slow
Review: I'm sorry to say but I just couldn't get through this book. Read about half of it, but I'm not into long meandering descriptions. If you want a plot that will carry you along, this is not the book.
Rating:
Summary: often overwhelming
Review: I've got a thing for John Cheever. Surely one of the best American authors of the 20th century, Cheever has written several books that I've never stopped raving about (see the following for confimation . . .)
The Wapshot Chronicle is essentially more of the same, more of the short story magic that established Cheever as what he was (and at least to me shall always remain): a magnificent story-teller and stylist who weaved brutal honesty into his poetic tales of tragedy and disillusion. There were passages--pages--of this book that I turned back to and reread not out of confusion or misunderstanding of identity, but simply for their beauty, for the firm, strong images that glimmered in the splitting of the waves crashing in my brain. I couldn't get it out of my mind for a while after reading which caused the next thing I read to suffer in comparison. Absolutely one of the best books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: One of the all-time great American masterpieces
Review: Looking over the previous customer reviews of this masterful, moving and tragicomic novel by one of this country's greatest and most melodic writers ever, I was struck by the small clique of people who claimed that the novel was "boring" or otherwise somehow unworthy of the National Book Award it had received upon publication almost half a century ago now. At first I was troubled by this; how could anyone read this and fail to experience that so-called shock of recognition, the realization that this is one of the great masterpieces in the English language. And then the answer came quite simply: Some people simply aren't capable of such recognition. Pity, for them. The Wapshot Chronicle is Cheever at his best. (And to the customer who wrote that Cheever was merely a short story writer and not a novelist...absurd! In addition to this book, Bullet Park and Falconer were both brilliant novels of the first order.) This is quite simply a work of art, rich in color and textured in Cheever's unique and brilliant prose. Cheever's obvious and famous love of the language shines through on every page, with a lilting, almost musical cadence. But what he offers that so many other great writers of prose can't is his wonderful storytelling gift. No one before or since has matched Cheever's ability to marry substantive narrative and an almost poetic meter with such mesmerizing results (although lesser writers such as Updike have built long and distinguished careers trying.) I have my well-worn copy of "Chronice" here in front of me, and I have opened two pages at random. Here is a line drawn from each page, to illustrate Cheever's soaring gift: "What a tender thing, then, is a man. How, for all his crotch-hitching and swagger, a whisper can turn his soul into a cinder. The taste of alum in the rind of a grape, the smell of the sea, the heat of the spring sun, berries bitter and sweet, a grain of sand in his teeth--all of that which he meant by life seemed taken away from him..." And: "Now Moses knew that women can take many forms; that it is in their power in the convulsions of love to take the shape of any beast or beauty on land or sea--fire, caves, the sweetness of haying weather--and to let break upon the mind, like light on water, its most brilliant imagery..." And that was just two random passages! Imagine what I'd find by digging through the book in (no pun intended) earnest in search of his best Hemingwayan "true sentence"! Boring? Well...there are no violent car chases here, no thrilling police shoot-outs, no serial killers, no massive technical military craft, no gripping courtroom dramas. So, hey, if you are "bored" by astonishing imagery, mesmerizing storytelling, marvellous and beautiful use of our language, and compelling insight into the human condition as offered by one of the most sympathetic and engaging American authors of all time, then definitely steer clear of this book; next time you're in the bookstore, just inch a little to the right and you'll find the Clancy section. But if you have even a faintly glimmering capability to recognize greatness when you see it...
Rating:
Summary: try his stories instead
Review: Somehow, this piffling little wifty novel won a National Book Award in 1958. The, supposedly, tragicomic story of the decline of the Wapshot family--father Leander, a ferry boat captain, & his sons Coverly and Moses--left me totally unmoved and uninterested. N.B.--I'm writing this two years later (May 2000) and I've figured it out. Cheever was a master of the short story (see Orrin's review of The Stories of John Cheever) and the Modern Library panel simply rewarded a bad novel in an attempt to acknowledge him as a writer. The book's still dreck, but it makes a little more sense that it made the list. GRADE: D
Rating:
Summary: New England Style Machismo
Review: The central characters are the Wapshot males - Leander and his two sons Coverly and Moses. Leander is an old New England salt in the winter of life, while his sons are just coming into their own as young men. The older female charcters exhibit an exterme form of bitchiness and excentricity. While the younger females all seem to be rather flighty and promiscious. I am suprised that female readers were not put off by Cheever's chauvinism. Cheever achieves a unique yet powerful style with the contrite journal of life that Leander pens. Especially poiignant is Leander's letter to Coverly after the son reveals to his Father the homosexual advances that he had encountered and his accompanying fellings of guilt. All in all it was a worthwhile read at least from a male point of view. Female readers may disgree.
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