Review of the Day: The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

The book was notable for being Cheever's first novel after publishing many short stories, for winning the National Book award, and for being the first mainstream novel to drop one f-bomb:

“if it’s absolutely necessary for you to make love to me I’ll do it, but I think that you ought to understand that it’s not as crucial as you make it.” 

“You’ve talked yourself out of a fuck,” he said bleakly.

And there is some brief same sex sexuality:

And now we come to the unsavory or homosexual part of our tale and any disinterested reader is encouraged to skip…. 

The book is often episodic like a series of well written stories stapled together, but, at least in my opinion, the highlight of the book is the prose; the sentences occasionally border on the sublime.

We all, man and boy, know what a transient barracks looks like and there would be no point in enumerating this barrenness.

He had not fallen in love with her because of her gift with arithmetic, because of her cleanliness, her reasonable mind or any other human excellence. It was because he perceived in her some extraordinary inner comeliness or grace that satisfied his needs.

Now Moses knew that women can take many forms; that it is in their power in the convulsions of love to take the shape of any beast or beauty on land or sea—fire, caves, the sweetness of haying weather—and to let break upon the mind, like light on water, its most brilliant imagery, and it did not dismay him that this gift for metamorphosis could be used to further all kinds of venal and petty schemes for self-aggrandizement.

There is a parochialism to some kinds of misery—a geographical remoteness like the life led by a grade-crossing tender—a point where life is lived or endured at the minimum of energy and perception and where most of the world appears to pass swiftly by like passengers on the gorgeous trains of the Santa Fe.

She was beautiful and it was that degree of beauty that fills even the grocery boy and the garage mechanic with solemn thoughts.

kindle and Audible audiobook. 391 pgs. 28 June