Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.6 AVERAGE
3.6 AVERAGE
well it wasn't what i expected or hoped for. i wanted some of that postwar suburban cocktail party angst and what i got was something quite different. a nice surprise but really not what i was looking for when choosing to read my first cheever.
the wapshots are a fabulous bunch, a truly interesting family whose lives are highly entertaining to read about whether it be a walk in the woods or a long standing family argument. it is cheever who manages to create this magic and for that i am looking forward to reading more from him.
at times i felt myself comparing to [b:Tortilla Flat|163977|Tortilla Flat|John Steinbeck|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172329564s/163977.jpg|890203] and other times [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel García Márquez|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255666245s/320.jpg|3295655] but i think this more because of the picaresque nature of the storytelling in what seems like an everyday setting than for it's actual content or style of writing.
one major drawback for me was the change of style in writing the journal of leander wapshot. i dont think ive ever come across this method before and i found quite jarring and irritating, not a pleasure to read at all.
the wapshots are a fabulous bunch, a truly interesting family whose lives are highly entertaining to read about whether it be a walk in the woods or a long standing family argument. it is cheever who manages to create this magic and for that i am looking forward to reading more from him.
at times i felt myself comparing to [b:Tortilla Flat|163977|Tortilla Flat|John Steinbeck|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172329564s/163977.jpg|890203] and other times [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel García Márquez|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255666245s/320.jpg|3295655] but i think this more because of the picaresque nature of the storytelling in what seems like an everyday setting than for it's actual content or style of writing.
one major drawback for me was the change of style in writing the journal of leander wapshot. i dont think ive ever come across this method before and i found quite jarring and irritating, not a pleasure to read at all.
Sort of affecting despite its terrible flaws -- overall a sour and pretentious book -- and still worth reading (although perhaps not re-reading, which is what this read was).
I'm not really sure what put John Cheever's "The Wapshot Chronicle" on my reading list -- perhaps it was just that I thought I should read something by Cheever. It's hard to rate this one, as the book was a really slow starter and didn't keep my interest all that much at first. However, I really liked the latter portion of the book, which got a lot more interesting.
The novel tells the story of the men in the Wapshot family -- a typical wealthy New England family with plenty of drama. It focuses on Leander and his two sons Moses and Coverly, as the latter two are sent off into the world to find their fortunes.
There were lots of good bits in the book, but I didn't think they were all tied together well.
The novel tells the story of the men in the Wapshot family -- a typical wealthy New England family with plenty of drama. It focuses on Leander and his two sons Moses and Coverly, as the latter two are sent off into the world to find their fortunes.
There were lots of good bits in the book, but I didn't think they were all tied together well.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Slow start, but even in its stodgiest moments this book is witty, deadpan, and dry while also occasionally lush. It being a family saga, there’s just a lot in here, and it’s all pretty chaotic. But the language that ties it together is deft and elegant, with occasion pitch-perfect stabs of vulgarity. Though this meanders and lacks the focus of Falconer or Bullet Park, there’s no mistaking Cheever at work here, particularly in the masterful descriptions in rich language sprinkled sparingly with magnificent humour.
'Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'
Two brothers from a nouveau pauvre family must carry on their bloodline or risk being disinherited by their eccentric great aunt. This simple, straightforward plot is a rich springboard for an Odyssean family saga. Cheever draws on modernism / the nineteenth-century novel and marries them with a 50s technicolour melodrama sensibility (though his is less psychosexual, more sexually explicit) to stunning effect. The prose is playful and experimental, employing various tenses and POVs with purpose and skill, building a vivid world to be inhabited by the fortunate reader. The long chapter centering on the crumbling Clear Haven estate and its batty denizens is a sumptuous Shirley Jackson-esque gem. Prospero's speech from The Tempest is used to great effect: first to lampoon a self-serious pedant, then as an incredibly moving eulogy that stayed with me long after the final page.
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'
Two brothers from a nouveau pauvre family must carry on their bloodline or risk being disinherited by their eccentric great aunt. This simple, straightforward plot is a rich springboard for an Odyssean family saga. Cheever draws on modernism / the nineteenth-century novel and marries them with a 50s technicolour melodrama sensibility (though his is less psychosexual, more sexually explicit) to stunning effect. The prose is playful and experimental, employing various tenses and POVs with purpose and skill, building a vivid world to be inhabited by the fortunate reader. The long chapter centering on the crumbling Clear Haven estate and its batty denizens is a sumptuous Shirley Jackson-esque gem. Prospero's speech from The Tempest is used to great effect: first to lampoon a self-serious pedant, then as an incredibly moving eulogy that stayed with me long after the final page.
Tackled this in my quest to read all National Book Award winners for Fiction (1958) and I have to admit this is my first Cheever that I remember reading (probably read a short story in college) and I loved it.
This is simply a fun book to read. It follows a ragtag family of goofballs from a small fictional town in New England, the Wapshots, and the book doesn't really have much of a plot, but meanders around from incident to incident, as if the plot devices are just a way for Cheever to work great material and writing throughout.
It took me about 100 pages to get into it because it does jump around from character to character at the beginning but once I did, there were many laugh-out-loud moments, the good kind, where the writing is excellent and the author communicates something in a way that seems to have just nailed the truth.
This is simply a fun book to read. It follows a ragtag family of goofballs from a small fictional town in New England, the Wapshots, and the book doesn't really have much of a plot, but meanders around from incident to incident, as if the plot devices are just a way for Cheever to work great material and writing throughout.
It took me about 100 pages to get into it because it does jump around from character to character at the beginning but once I did, there were many laugh-out-loud moments, the good kind, where the writing is excellent and the author communicates something in a way that seems to have just nailed the truth.
This book got off to a slow start for me, and pretty far into it I was inclined to think that Cheever was a better short story writer than a novelist. There was something a little too cute for my taste about the first part of the book, as if the eccentricity of the characters, their quirkiness, was what was going to carry the book rather than the sure grip of a dramatic narrative unfolding. That got better, and my opinion changed. The second half of the book was excellent, a page turning account of key moments in the lives of characters that I grew to love, or at least to understand on a deeply empathetic level.
Beyond this, and the reason for that five star rating, is that I continue to find Cheever's writing remarkable in its unique sparkle and ecstatic precision, its ability to penetrate with seeming effortlessness the obscure corners of the human soul. His landscape descriptions in particular are wondrous to behold, the atmospheric and defamiliarized world he creates with his shrewd choice of details. I found myself marking passage after passage, of which I reproduce a few examples below. I hope these snippets will serve as encouragement for you to read this wonderful, rich, and entertaining novel by one of the great American writers of the 20th century.
"We are all inured, by now, to those poetic catalogues where the orchid and the overshoe appear cheek by jowl; where the filthy smell of old plumage mingles with the smell of the sea. We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season's end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images -- as though we drowned -- streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember this and more as we board the train."
"The administration met this problem by having public rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons. Transportation was furnished so that whole families could pack their sandwiches and beer and sit in the bleachers to hear the noise of doom crack and see a fire that seemed to lick at the vitals of the earth."
Beyond this, and the reason for that five star rating, is that I continue to find Cheever's writing remarkable in its unique sparkle and ecstatic precision, its ability to penetrate with seeming effortlessness the obscure corners of the human soul. His landscape descriptions in particular are wondrous to behold, the atmospheric and defamiliarized world he creates with his shrewd choice of details. I found myself marking passage after passage, of which I reproduce a few examples below. I hope these snippets will serve as encouragement for you to read this wonderful, rich, and entertaining novel by one of the great American writers of the 20th century.
"We are all inured, by now, to those poetic catalogues where the orchid and the overshoe appear cheek by jowl; where the filthy smell of old plumage mingles with the smell of the sea. We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season's end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a tumult of brilliant and precise images -- as though we drowned -- streams through our heads. We have indeed come back to lighted houses, smelling on the north wind burning applewood, and seen a Polish countess greasing her face in a ski lodge and heard the cry of the horned owl in rut and smelled a dead whale on the south wind that carries also the sweet note of the bell from Altoona but we do not remember this and more as we board the train."
"The administration met this problem by having public rocket launchings on Saturday afternoons. Transportation was furnished so that whole families could pack their sandwiches and beer and sit in the bleachers to hear the noise of doom crack and see a fire that seemed to lick at the vitals of the earth."
Lotsa thoughts but all I'll say right now is that this book may contain the highest concentration of singularly beautiful sentences I've ever encountered in a novel.