Rating: 
Summary: Kept waiting for it to start
Review: Let it be known that I listened to this book on cassettes. It may read differently. About 2/3 of the way through, I realized that all the character and place descriptions were there for their own sake. Up to that point, it led me to falsely think we needed to know the information for future reference. This book is not "about" anything. It follows the lives of a few fairly ordinary people and generally covers ground many other works have covered, but does so with Cheever's style. But when a book is about little other than the writing style of the author, it smacks of self-indulgence. I can recommend Cheever's great short stories, but this novel takes a long time to go nowhere and say things many other writers have also said.
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.
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.
Rating:
Summary: Floats my boat
Review: The fictitious Wapshot family of Cheever's "The Wapshot Chronicle" are old-line New Englanders, prominent but modest citizens of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. The central characters are Leander, the aging father, who is the captain of a boat that transports passengers between a leisure island and the mainland; his loving wife Sarah; his carefree, irresponsible sons Moses and Coverly; and his elderly, senile cousin Honora, who owns the boat and is in fact the family's financial anchor. The novel's chain of events is set into motion one night when a car crashes into a tree near the Wapshots' house. The driver is killed, but the passenger, a girl named Rosalie, is taken inside the Wapshots' house for convalescence. It's not long before Moses and Rosalie take advantage of the intimacy of their living arrangement and engage in intercourse, unaware that Honora is eavesdropping. Shocked by this display of debauchery, Honora vows to cut the family's financial ties loose unless Moses learns some responsibility and goes out into the world to make his own way. And so he leaves St. Botolphs to go to Washington to get a job, and Coverly sneaks away from his parents to accompany him. The two boys go their separate ways and each ends up married but in very different milieus with different sets of values. Coverly marries a poor Southern girl, becomes a technician on a rocket-launching site, and takes up residence in a homogenized modern suburb. His new life represents the modern (as of the 1950's), technical, practical, utilitarian world. It is taken even further into classic Cheeveresque territory when Coverly considers a ... relationship after his wife abandons him. Cheever's proclivity for ironic romanticism is represented in Moses's new life, which is quite a contrast to his brother's. After his prospects in Washington go sour, a chance encounter gives him a new opportunity as an aspiring banker. With his new connections, like Jack climbing up the freshly-sprouted beanstalk of society, somehow he ends up in a sort of fairy-tale world. He marries a beautiful princess named Melissa who is the ward of a wicked witch (the imperious harridan Justina Scaddon, heiress to a five-and-dime store fortune). He and Melissa are imprisoned in the wicked witch's castle (Justina's ancient expansive mansion), staffed by a legion of harried servants and cohabited by Justina's companion, the foppishly ... Count D'Alba. Leander keeps a journal, a sort of combination autobiography/family history, in which his entries are written in a choppy style of sentence fragments, as though he doesn't have enough time to put subjects in his sentences, and he writes letters to his sons in the same style. A problem of his own rears its ugly head in the form of a woman who claims to be his daughter from a previous marriage. This is an interesting plot line that unfortunately is not developed as fully as it could have been. I don't feel this novel is quite as great as Cheever's best short stories, but unlike his short stories, which generally tend to be depressing or somber, this novel has quite a bit of humor in it. I found many symbols in the novel, the most important being that the father or head of a family is, in a way, like the captain of a ship, and no matter how hard he tries, sometimes he can't keep the ship from breaking up and sinking. It is this sharp use of symbolism, the rhapsodic prose, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the familiar that lends Cheever's work its considerable charm.
Rating:
Summary: Floats my boat
Review: The fictitious Wapshot family of Cheever's "The Wapshot Chronicle" are old-line New Englanders, prominent but modest citizens of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. The central characters are Leander, the aging father, who is the captain of a boat that transports passengers between a leisure island and the mainland; his loving wife Sarah; his carefree, irresponsible sons Moses and Coverly; and his elderly, senile cousin Honora, who owns the boat and is in fact the family's financial anchor. The novel's chain of events is set into motion one night when a car crashes into a tree near the Wapshots' house. The driver is killed, but the passenger, a girl named Rosalie, is taken inside the Wapshots' house for convalescence. It's not long before Moses and Rosalie take advantage of the intimacy of their living arrangement and engage in intercourse, unaware that Honora is eavesdropping. Shocked by this display of debauchery, Honora vows to cut the family's financial ties loose unless Moses learns some responsibility and goes out into the world to make his own way. And so he leaves St. Botolphs to go to Washington to get a job, and Coverly sneaks away from his parents to accompany him. The two boys go their separate ways and each ends up married but in very different milieus with different sets of values. Coverly marries a poor Southern girl, becomes a technician on a rocket-launching site, and takes up residence in a homogenized modern suburb. His new life represents the modern (as of the 1950's), technical, practical, utilitarian world. It is taken even further into classic Cheeveresque territory when Coverly considers a ... relationship after his wife abandons him. Cheever's proclivity for ironic romanticism is represented in Moses's new life, which is quite a contrast to his brother's. After his prospects in Washington go sour, a chance encounter gives him a new opportunity as an aspiring banker. With his new connections, like Jack climbing up the freshly-sprouted beanstalk of society, somehow he ends up in a sort of fairy-tale world. He marries a beautiful princess named Melissa who is the ward of a wicked witch (the imperious harridan Justina Scaddon, heiress to a five-and-dime store fortune). He and Melissa are imprisoned in the wicked witch's castle (Justina's ancient expansive mansion), staffed by a legion of harried servants and cohabited by Justina's companion, the foppishly ... Count D'Alba. Leander keeps a journal, a sort of combination autobiography/family history, in which his entries are written in a choppy style of sentence fragments, as though he doesn't have enough time to put subjects in his sentences, and he writes letters to his sons in the same style. A problem of his own rears its ugly head in the form of a woman who claims to be his daughter from a previous marriage. This is an interesting plot line that unfortunately is not developed as fully as it could have been. I don't feel this novel is quite as great as Cheever's best short stories, but unlike his short stories, which generally tend to be depressing or somber, this novel has quite a bit of humor in it. I found many symbols in the novel, the most important being that the father or head of a family is, in a way, like the captain of a ship, and no matter how hard he tries, sometimes he can't keep the ship from breaking up and sinking. It is this sharp use of symbolism, the rhapsodic prose, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the familiar that lends Cheever's work its considerable charm.
Rating:
Summary: a peak into human nature of the New England kind
Review: The plots and sub-plots of the novel are great vignettes into different aspects of New England society in the early and mid parts of this century. I didn't find the women bitchy and manipulative (Mrs. Wapshot was sweet, although scared and fossilized on her ways, and unable to change). However, i did find that some of the men very willing to be manipulated (the case of Leander and his first marriage, and Coverly and his cover-girl bride). Leander's account of his first marriage is sad and touching, and the contrast with the disgruntled woman who comes to ask for explanations makes her look even more ugly. This novel was full of side characters that gave a lot of color and vividness to the whole book. John Cheever has influenced a good part of modern American authors, and should not be dismissed.
Rating:
Summary: a peak into human nature of the New England kind
Review: The plots and sub-plots of the novel are great vignettes into different aspects of New England society in the early and mid parts of this century. I didn't find the women bitchy and manipulative (Mrs. Wapshot was sweet, although scared and fossilized on her ways, and unable to change). However, i did find that some of the men very willing to be manipulated (the case of Leander and his first marriage, and Coverly and his cover-girl bride). Leander's account of his first marriage is sad and touching, and the contrast with the disgruntled woman who comes to ask for explanations makes her look even more ugly. This novel was full of side characters that gave a lot of color and vividness to the whole book. John Cheever has influenced a good part of modern American authors, and should not be dismissed.
Rating:
Summary: Of WASPs and Wapshots
Review: The two Wapshot novels ("Chronicle followed by "Scandal") are John Cheever's first two novels. "The Wapshot Chronicle" follows Leander Wapshot's attempts to keep his dignity intact in spite of encroaching old age and his loss of career as a seaman. Leander's two sons, Moses and Coverly, have to make their own way in Cold War America armed with the airs and attitudes of 19th century New England WASPS; their encounters are both funny and poignant. In fact, "funny and poignant" characterizes much of Cheever's writing: he can have you chuckling at situational comedy in one instant and then ping your heart with human frailty in the next. "The Wapshot Chronicle" is a great introduction to Cheever, but if you think it's too much of a stretch, go for the stories or the more accessible novel "Falconer."
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