to take personal offense—Robert Kirsch of the Los Angeles Times deplored the author as “weary, bored and confused,” and of course there were times when Cheever was inclined to agree. In due course, though, he'd arrive at a more charitable view, describing his second novel as “an extraordinarily complex book built around non sequiturs really.” And so it is: The Wapshot Scandal bulges with sideshows and discordant (to the humorless) bits of slapstick, but it is actually built around such moments. To take perhaps the most notable instance, the entire novel (more or less) is conveyed in microcosm through the self-contained parable of Gertrude (“Dirty Gertie”) Lockhart, who over the course of a four-page anecdote slides into alcoholism and promiscuity and finally suicide.* “Her downfall began not with immortal longings but with an uncommonly severe winter when the main soil line from their house to the septic tank froze. The toilets backed up into the bathtubs and sinks. Nothing drained.” Unable to find an available plumber in all of Parthenia, Gertrude hires a derelict to dig a ditch for two dollars an hour plus all the whiskey he can drink, and the two end up in bed together. The woman's decline continues as her appliances break down one by one, leaving her isolated and helpless and faced with the awful fact of her own “obsolescence.” One day she throws herself at the milkman in drunken despair, after which the oil burner stops working and no repairman can be found on short notice: “It was very cold outside and she watched the winter night approach the house with the horror of an aboriginal. She could feel the cold overtake the rooms. When it got dark she went into the garage and took her own life.” The lonely nomadism of modern life is such that Gertrude's husband can find no friends among their neighbors to attend the funeral; instead he musters a few “near strangers” whom they'd met “on various cruise ships.” Finally, as a kind of parenthetical rim-shot, we are told that the “oil-burner repairmen, electricians, mechanics and plumbers who were guilty of her death did not attend.”
Melissa, as it happens, is a passenger on the train bearing Gertrude's remains back to Indiana, and it is Melissa's story that is mostly foretold here. In his notes to the novel, Cheever reminded himself to emphasize “the lonely and erotic nature of man, that all the splendid ceremonies, the music and the bells, meant to honor and contain his drives, the atmosphere of loneliness and bewilderment is never expunged.” In a world where nuclear oblivion seems imminent, and life in any case is “bitterly disappointing”—bereft of “splendid ceremonies” or much in the way of spiritual fulfillment—one is apt to overindulge one's carnal appetites. Lonely Gertrude, without even the creature comforts afforded by working appliances, consoles herself with drink and sex until she's driven to suicide; Melissa takes up with the nineteen-year-old grocery boy, Emile, because she thinks she's dying of cancer: “The image, hackneyed and poignant, that came to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best.” But human beings are meant for better things than dancing and rutting; the erotic, for Cheever, is ideally a symbol of divine love, and animal despair can only be transcended by the soul's aspiration toward the “illustrious.” The Dionysian Melissa does not end up dead like her farcical counterpart Gertrude Lockhart, though her eventual life in Rome does seem a living death of sorts, as she divides her days between dubbing Italian movies and thereby impersonating fallen women through the ages (“She was the voice of Mary Magdalen, she was Delilah, she was the favorite of Hercules”) and wandering around a supermarket (“Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean“) in search of food for her oafish paramour. In a separate but “parallel” story line (so noted by Cheever), Coverly also has a brush with death—a mysterious hunter fires an arrow at his head just as he stoops to tighten his shoelaces