Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [141]
One of the first important notices, in the March 24 New York Times Book Review, seemed to portend no such result. “The ‘New Yorker’ school of fiction has come in for so many critical strictures lately that one almost wishes John Cheever, a talented member of this group, would confound the critics and break loose,” wrote Maxwell Geismar, who went on to conclude that Cheever had not, in fact, broken loose, nor was his novel “quite a novel,” or at any rate a very “serious” one. Rather it was mere “entertainment”—a “picaresque” that “didn't quite hang together.” Other reviewers would also point out the novel's “episodic” or “fragmented” structure, and the main question was whether or not they thought this defect was transcended by its virtues. Most of them did. Two days after Geismar's mixed review, Charles Poore wrote in the daily Times that the novel was “a magnificently exuberant story of a Massachusetts sea-sprayed clan, rising, falling, rising again, entangled in plots of awesome adventurousness,” and the Washington Post was similarly effusive: “Cheever's venture is exuberantly, cantankerously, absurdly, audaciously alive,” wrote Glendy Culligan, who also found the book “brilliant, ebullient, alternately sad, funny and tender …” And then there were critics who thought Cheever had decidedly broken loose—not only advancing on previous work, but (as Fanny Butcher claimed in the Chicago Sunday Tribune) “add[ing] something new to the stream of American fiction.” But perhaps the poet Winfield Townley Scott said it best: “It is difficult to think of another contemporary who can write without sentimentality and yet with so much love.”
Love was very much to the point: “A dear book it is,” Cheever would say of his first novel, never forgetting the terrible obstacles he'd overcome in writing it—a twenty-year effort to reconcile himself (in art, at least) with family demons, and thus find the strength to forge a style, a world, that was magnificently his own. As Rick Moody wrote in his foreword to a later edition, “Where did [Cheever] get the confidence to begin disassembling and reassembling American naturalist fiction, thereby helping to pave the way for the experimentation of the late sixties and the seventies? He got the confidence by writing The Wapshot Chronicle.“ Abandoning naturalism—in this case a literal and all-too-painful evocation of the past—was akin to walking out the “door” that had stood open for Cheever all those years he spent trying to dig his way out of jail “with a teaspoon,” as he'd once put it. What this entailed was yet another reinvention of the young writer who'd once, long ago, been preoccupied with history—namely, the fatalism of a generation coming of age between the wars, during a Depression that had left one feeling rootless and doomed. In The Wapshot Chronicle, however, there is no history as such: no wars, no Depression, and very few “signposts” whatsoever. “I am a little troubled by the way Mr. Cheever plays fast and loose with time,” wrote the critic Granville Hicks, noting (for example) that Hamlet's search for gold in California “must have happened in the 1890s” and yet is depicted “as if he were one of the original Forty-niners.”* Just so, and this was one of Cheever's favorite effects: wiping the slate clean, as it were, the better to give his characters “a freedom to pursue their emotional lives without the interruptions of history.” Likewise he cobbled together a mythical place, St. Botolphs, that “can't be found on any map” but rather represents “a longing for simplicity and coherence.”
Ejected from this paradise, the brothers Moses and Coverly embark on a series of adventures in the disorderly modern world, with little regard on their creator's part for narrative continuity. As Cowley predicted, Cheever would always be an episodic writer, more or less, having persuaded himself that conventional cause-and-effect narration was silly and contrived,