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: Makes you want to read the 'Wapshot Scandal'
Review: Check this book out! It is easy to follow and the characters are interesting. It was fun to get caught up with the male Wapshots and their relationship with each other.
Rating: 
Summary: The book is a dud.
Review: Cheever has to be one of America's most overrated writers. Like everything he's done, The Wapshot Chronicle is painfully contrived, rather ineptly written (despite a few clever turns of phrase), not to mention dreadfully boring. To be honest, I couldn't get past page one hundred. Only of interest for future anthropologists who, many years hence, might --God knows why-- wish to understand something about bland and provincial New Englanders . Yawn.
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: 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.
| 
