Word: coverley
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...thing wrong with The Wapshot Scandal is that too little of it is about the Wapshots. The remark is not as captious as it appears, for it was that old New England family--Leander, his wife Sarah, their sons Moses and Coverley, and Cousin Honora--that gave Cheever's 1957 book, The Wapshot Chronicle, its extraordinary vitality. Honora, quirky and self-willed as ever, admittedly comes close to being the central figure in this, the author's second novel; and Moses and Coverley, now mature and married, appear from time to time, usually under increasingly desperate circumstances. But most...
...generally been taken to refer to Honora's flight from the Internal Revenue Service (never having paid her income tax, she sails to Europe to avoid arrest), it might just as well be 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...
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...
...giving some wealthy hosts the jim jams by using it to salute the footmen at dinner. She crept into native mud huts, worked an ancient spinning wheel in New Delhi, accepted a handmade revolver from Khyber Pass tribesmen, showed some Pakistani teen-agers how to dance the "Roger de Coverley." In the seven years since she has become the world's most famous widow, Mrs. Roosevelt has hardly been still a moment : kind, literal, awesomely helpful and endlessly patient, she has trotted up & down the stairways of the world, year after year - straightening its curtains, eying its plumbing...
...Marilya Coverley '52 and Anthony W. Morss '53 will speak in favor of the proposal. Herbert J. Spiro '49 2G and David L. Ratner, '52 will argue for continued separation of church and College...