Word: wapshot
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...least popular neglect seems to be coming to an end. The Wapshot Scandal (TIME, Jan. 24), the second of his two novels, is selling at a brisk 2,000 copies a week, and has already topped the total sales of his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle-although the Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958. Movie rights to both have been bought for $75,000, but it seems likely that any movie will mirror merely the realism. Cheever has been long acknowledged as a master of the short story, of which he has written over a hundred. Some...
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...
Myth Is Reality. For all its period paraphernalia and local coloration of bicycles, Fourth of July parades, clambakes and the richly detailed human flotsam and jetsam of a tidewater town, The Wapshot Chronicle is essentially a simple drama of destinies and moralities. Father Leander Wapshot's wonderful journal (found in a trunk in the attic) recites like a Greek chorus the ancient obligations to race and region. He had taught his sons to "fell a tree, sow, cultivate and harvest, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat...
...currently bestselling Wapshot Scandal, this world takes on baffling shapes-both more familiar and more strange. The scene is contemporary, but the solid modern pavement on which the characters walk is fractured by the inexplicable convulsions of the Space Age. Coverly, exiled to the noncommunity of a missile base, finds the apparently human personnel recognize each other's existence no more than so many shades in a picture-window limbo of tract houses. His brother Moses, apparently better equipped than his dreamy brother to achieve success and enjoy its rewards, is defeated by the metamorphosis of his wife Melissa...
Cheever's father, a model for Leander in the Wapshot books, was a shoe salesman-"a commercial traveler with a flower in his buttonhole," says Cheever. He had a way with and an eye for the ladies, did not marry till late in life. He was 49 when John was born. Soon thereafter he began to have financial trouble...