The Wapshot Chronicle

St. Botolphs had been an inland port in the great days of the Massachusetts sailing fleets, and now it was left with a few small industries, the river, the east wind, a fine show of houses on River Street and the Wapshots.

For generations Wapshot men had sailed from St. Botolphs to seek their fortunes on the seven seas. But when Leander Wapshot's sons left home, it was by train, and their search for a fortune or a way of life took them to famished rooms in Washington and New York, to trout streams, a Pacific island, a rocket-launching station and a feudal castle founded on a five-and-ten-cent-store for-tune.

In Leander the future took its impress from the past, and The Wapshot Chronicle is the story of Leander's heritage from his forebears and his legacy to his sons.

For although Cousin Honora owned the house Leander and his family lived in and paid for the food they ate, the meaning of Leander's life could only be conveyed in such words as richness, triumph and celebration. If he felt a duty toward his sons it was the duty of transmitting to them, uncorrupted, his sardonic, bawdy, loving delight in the excellence and continuousness of things. (He had, after all, already taught them to fish, sail a boat and fell a tree, and had by his example indicated the wisdom of cold showers in the morning and dark clothes after 6 P.M.) And the boys themselves, in their careers, courtships and marrying—rapid and Rabelaisian in Moses' case; in Coverly's, slower, tentative, painful—made what use they could of their unique inheritance.

In its variety of people (Wapshots and others); variety of incident (lyrical, ribald, hilarious, heartbreaking); in its unforced exuberance, unsentimental tenderness and the gusto of its narrative sweep, The Wapshot Chronicle is worthy of Leander himself. It is, in every sense, the novel for which John Cheever's many readers have been waiting.