Word: cheevers
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...level of realism, the Cheever biography is just another success story -of a man reaping the modest rewards of recognition after a lifetime of devoted apprenticeship, journeyman years, and final mastery of a difficult trade. His spiritual biography is something else again, seen clearly only in terms of his own severe moral vision. He sees man not in modern terms as any individual but as the center of a system of obligations. Evasion or betrayal of these obligations may be punishable by metamorphosis into some monstrous, less-than-human form. Life, he writes, is "a perilous moral journey." The freaks...
Chosen Roots. Being so caught up, so concerned with the orderly structure of society, it is not surprising that Cheever is much obsessed with roots-particularly his own. Los Angeles, on a brief visit, horrified him as the haven of all the U.S.'s displaced persons. In a final statement of pity and contempt for one character, he wrote: "He doesn't come from anyplace really. I mean he doesn't have anything nice to remember and so he borrows other people's memories...
...typical of Cheever, both as realist and fabulist, that his own roots are partly invented. As Novelist Ellison observes: "Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values...
...Cheever's vision of a New England social and moral aristocracy can probably not be substantiated by historical research. But it is a genuine vision which he successfully imposed upon the fictional past of St. Botolphs in creating The Wapshot Chronicle. Maybe St. Botolphs is not Quincy, Mass., where Cheever was born 51 years ago, but it is St. Somebody's; its topography is drawn in Cheever's mind. As such, it has become one of the great home towns of American fiction, like Mark Twain's Hannibal, Mo., or Thomas Wolfe's Altamont...
...Leander was defeated in his patriarch's role when his ferryboat was beached by women and turned into a gift shoppe. Leander's two sons, Moses and Coverly, were expelled from the paradisial St. Botolphs, but in the case of Coverly (who doubles for Author Cheever), he never really left it or rejected it; his life's task was "to create or build some kind of bridge between Leander's world and that world where he sought his fortune...