'The Wapshot Scandal': A View Of a Heaven Marked With Call

One 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 of The Wapshot Scandal is about an affair between Melissa--a Wapshot only because she married Moses--and a grocery boy named Emile. The reader, like both characters, will probably find it a tiring relationship.

Several Scandals

Although the scandal of the book's title has 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's.

Dismal Disjointed View

The picture he offers of suburbia, science, politics, and other vulnerable aspects of contemporary life is a credibly dismal one, but is also disjointed and confused. While the Wapshots stay to one side of the picture, a number of characters (some of them quite minor) occupy, with their mutually irrelevant stories, a suprising amount of room. Six parts of The Wapshot Scandal originally appeared in The New Yorker, and signs of the independence that they once enjoyed prevent them from forming a coherent whole.

Another stumbling block is the strength of the author's emotions. For all his felicities of phrase, his small ironies and pointed understatements, one feels that Cheever is not always in control of his own voice. Some of his mannerisms--a tendency to adopt a coyly melodramatic tone, for example--eventually become obtrusive. When he attempts satire, the element of fantasy that distinguishes his funniest passages becomes mere grotesqueness. On the other hand, his excesses of sentimentality are almost embarrassing; even readers who do not mind his beginning the novel on a snowy Christmas Eve may object to his ending it, beneath a haze of pity and brotherly love, in the same manner.

Cheever's Poignant Vision

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:

Silence blendeth grief's awakened fail

The golden reaims of death take all

Love's bitterness exceeds its grace

That bestial scar on the angelic face

Marks heaven with gall.

This may be, as one critic triumphantly observed, linguistically impossible, but it approximates the author's viewpoint. Despite some hilarious episodes, The Wapsot Scandal is not, in the end, a comic novel.