Volume 1, Number 12 · February 6, 1964
The Family Way
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Wapshot Scandal
by John Cheever
Harper & Row, 309 pp., $4.95
John Cheever's literary career is like one of those graphs of the movements of the middle class after the war. He, like they, is seeking some lonely corner of beauty and truth, some 'real' place exempt from the disfigurations he has fled. The compulsion, in Cheever, to move on is perplexing since his most valuable bit of inventory is his knowledge of the slummy asphalt alleys of the middle class. He began in New York City and out of that came the gritty brilliance of the stories in The Way Some People Live (written between 1935-43) and The Enormous Radio (1947-53). These stories are tenderly and painfully urban in feeling and usually in setting. They are truly observed, gently desperate, and a selection from the two volumes would make one of the impressive literary achievements of the period. Then the city seemed to become more than Cheever felt anyone had to endure. He moved on to the shady, bankrupt suburbs of The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1953-1958). That too, at last, seemed compromised beyond hope and he began to write stories with a European setting in Some Places & Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel. His next novel instead, went back, back home, back to the roots, beyond the city, the suburb, to the old New England village, to the study of St. Botolph's (a sort of Newburyport, Mass.) and its leading family—the Wapshot family. (The names in his early work are the usual ones; they will now, in the novels, become old-fashioned, traditional: Honora and Leander and so on. The name Wapshot is itself a curiosity. The only thing plain about it is that in both syllables it threatens to become obscene unless uttered with the utmost vigilance.)
Review, 1227 words
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