Word: coverley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...