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By Root 3990 0

worthy only of parody—and on a deeper level, he was almost temperamentally incapable of constructing such a plot. “Perhaps you could have given the book a little more of a novelistic air by adding a few sentences here and there to answer some questions left hanging,” Cowley remarked, noting that strands of the novel are abandoned and never retrieved. (What becomes of Rosalie from the first section? Leander's illegitimate daughter?) Cheever, with his usual breezy candor, replied that such questions were left unanswered because the author was “such a pig-headed fool”: his editors had made all the same points, Cheever said, but he simply chose to ignore them, because “for once [he] was on [his] own and would not change or explain a word.” And doubtless he liked it better his way, without a lot of deadly, quibbling logic. Cheever was, after all, an improvisational writer who trusted his instincts: he wrote scenes out of sequence, in bursts of inspiration, and when tangents or characters were exhausted in his mind, he dropped them and moved on to something else. “One never, of course, asks is it a novel?” he once wrote. “One asks is it interesting and interest connotes suspense, emotional involvement and a sustained claim on one's attention.” In those terms, at least, Cheever was a consummate novelist, as were his eighteenth-century forebears, Fielding and Sterne.

And whatever its structural lapses, the novel has a high degree of thematic integrity. “St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town,” it begins, with repetitive insistence on oldness: permanence, tradition. In this pastoral setting, everybody knows everybody else (“It's only the Wapshot boys”), and such familiarity breeds a kind of grim sufferance for human quirks. During the wonderful tour of St. Botolphs in the third chapter, one encounters such curious specimens as Reba Heaslip (“SALUTE YOUR FLAG! ROBBERS AND VANDALS PASS BY!”) and Uncle Peepee Marshmallow, who is adopted almost as a kind of village mascot, despite his tendency to wander around naked: “What could the rest of the world do for him that could not be done in St. Botolphs?” But the most elaborate and loving study of eccentricity—so incubated in the hothouse of a tiny New England town—is Honora Wapshot, who deliberately leaves lobsters behind on buses (fighting for their lives in a bag), and tosses her mail in the fire. The kindly and humorous narrator, however, is at pains to remind us that such a person is not to be regarded as a simple figure of fun: “[H]ow much more poetry there is to Honora,” he remarks of her impulse to throw away mail, “casting off the claims of life the instant they are made.” And such uniqueness has its poignant side, too, as people like Honora are scarcely aware of their own freakishness. Walking past a window, she overhears her servant laughing over her odd behavior: “[Honora] stops and leans heavily, with both hands, on her cane, engrossed in an emotion so violent and so nameless that she wonders if this feeling of loneliness and bewilderment is not the mysteriousness of life.” Fortunately such paroxysms are passing in a noble soul, and Honora proceeds to eat supper with a “good appetite.”

The most abiding human quality found in this old, stalwart place is the kind of Emersonian self-reliance embodied by Leander, who first appears at the helm of the Topaze—a larger-than-life character given to shouting “Tie me to the mast, Perimedes!” whenever he hears the merry-go-round at Nangasakit. Leander wishes to instill in his sons “the unobserved ceremoniousness of his life”—the kind of values that enable a man to be a man and enjoy life as it ought to be lived: “He had taught them to fell a tree, pluck and dress a chicken, sow, cultivate and harvest, catch a fish, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc.” In the better world of St. Botolphs, all this is enough, and one has the courage to be oneself, whatever that may be; amid the institutionalized conformity of the modern city, though, an assertion of anything smacking of