Word: cheevers
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...Cheever Wapshot Chronicle...
...that of Emile and Melissa; of Moses, who takes, with suicidal singlemindedness, to drink; or of Coverley and Betsey, his lonely wife, who exposes them to ridicule among their neighbors at a certain missile site. All the Wapshots are involved in scandals of one sort or another, and Cheever seems to be saying that the fault is not theirs but society...
Another stumbling block is the strength of the author's emotions. For all his felicities of phrase, his small ironies and pointed understatements, one feels that Cheever is not always in control of his own voice. Some of his mannerisms--a tendency to adopt a coyly melodramatic tone, for example--eventually become obtrusive. When he attempts satire, the element of fantasy that distinguishes his funniest passages becomes mere grotesqueness. On the other hand, his excesses of sentimentality are almost embarrassing; even readers who do not mind his beginning the novel on a snowy Christmas Eve may object to his ending...
...Cheever's Poignant Vision...
Above all, The Wapshot Scandal expresses the poignancy of Cheever's vision of life. When Coverley, who works as a computer programmer, analyzes the vocabulary of Keats's poetry, he finds that the most common words are, in order of frequency...