The Wapshot Chronicle (1957). Summary and Description

The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever’s first novel, was published by Harpers in 1957 and won the National Book Award in 1958. Cheever claimed that writing the novel took 20 years, and many critics see strong similarities between the novel and Cheever’s life. Though the novel explores many of Cheever’s darker themes, such as the ambiguities of love and familial commitments, several literary scholars have successfully argued that the novel is essentially a comic work in that Cheever accepts the chaos and uncertainty of everyday life and describes how imagination and moral striving can rejuvenate the human spirit.

The Wapshot Chronicle is mainly set in St. Botol- phs, a port in Massachusetts, from around 1890 to the 1950s and follows the lives of the Wapshots, a formerly wealthy and adventurous seafaring family. The main characters include Leander, the family patriarch with a penchant for nature, adventure, and amateur philosophy; Sarah, his wife and a local civic leader; Moses and Coverly, their sons; and Cousin Honora, the willful wealthy family matriarch. Though the novel is episodic, the main plot revolves around Leander as he comes to terms with his aging; with his wife, who has become the primary source of income; and with the accident that destroys his boat, the Topaze, with which he has ferried passengers from Travertine to Nangasakit for a number of years. Additionally, the novel catalogs the trials of Moses and Coverly as they attempt to find suitable careers and wives who will bear them sons so that they might obtain their wealthy cousin’s inheritance.

When the novel was published, many critics took issue with the loosely connected chapters, which, at first glance, seem somewhat unstructured and disorganized. Later critics noted the chapters’ artful arrangement, which helps juxtapose Cheever’s themes and ideas. Because of the episodic layout, Cheever covers significant periods, highlighting common threads in characters’ lives and ruminating about the cyclical nature of life with all of its vicissitudes, its successes and failures. We see especially this circularity through the story of Leander as he attempts to relive the adventures of his predecessors and tries to pass on his life lessons to his sons. Through the correspondence of the father and his sons, we see just how many experiences they end up sharing and how, though time has certainly changed some things, many of Leander’s philosophical musings serve his children quite well. Nevertheless, Cheever’s comic tendencies do not altogether crowd out the Cheeverian chaos pervading the human experience or the realistic portrait of tragedy and loss of a family striving to recreate the past while also fostering hope for the future.

Simultaneously painful and hilarious, the novel focuses on love in its many forms: family love and commitment, the love of significant places, the search for a spouse and marriage, and the love of life and its never-ending possibilities. The love motif helps us accept the eccentricities of the characters, makes us both laugh and gasp as Moses precariously tiptoes across the rooftop to his lover’s bedroom, and allows us simultaneously to feel the sorrow of Leander’s suicide and the relief of knowing that his peculiar notions of beauty and hope live on in his sons.

For Discussion or Writing
1. In The Wapshot Chronicle, Leander Wapshot often feels a sense of loss when he ponders how his ancestors went to sea to “seek their fortune” while he is relegated to ferrying passengers to and fro from the nearby amusement park. Consider some other, older epic tales that you have read (for example, The Iliad, or Beowulf) and compare their heroes to the heroes of stories of our time. What are the major differences in either the way the stories are told or the way the heroes compare to one another? Is there anything heroic about Leander? If so, what?

2. Many critics have called this novel a comedy. A comedy is generally a work in which many of the trials and obstacles facing the main characters are neatly dispelled at the end of the work, and many comedies end in a marriage or in a reconciliation of some sort. Given this, how do you view the novel’s ending? Do you consider it comic? Why or why not? Could we consider this novel a tragedy? Can we neatly categorize this novel as one or the other?