This is an excellent book. Cheever's roots as a short story writer are truly evident. This was his very first novel, and every single line is incredibly tight and perfectly worded. It is filled to the brim with intense emotion, yet never crosses the line into being melodramatic.

This is one of those books that you'll find it extremely difficult to explain to your friends. You might say it's about a traditional New England family. But what actually happens to them? Well, the kids move out, get married, and face various troubles. The older ones stay put and also have their share of difficulties. Then, quite unexpectedly, it ends, and yet it is truly amazing.

As a description, it's hard to swallow, right? The beauty of this book doesn't really lie in the plot. Instead, it's all about the deep emotional connection that exists between all the characters. There's a quiet melancholy that spreads throughout the book, giving it a rich and substantial feel. It delves into the themes of growing up and growing old, love and family, and the diverse ways, both good and bad, that people interact with each other within those relationships. It also touches on sexuality and personal journeys. It's truly a wonderful piece of literature. I highly recommend you read it. It's not a difficult read at all. It's not one of those page-turners that keep you on the edge of your seat, but it never feels slow either. I think Falconer was perhaps a little faster-paced and better plotted, but this one is still truly tremendous. It definitely deserves five stars.

This was the very first Cheever book that I've had the pleasure of reading, and I'm quite certain that it won't be my last.

I'm truly grateful to my book club for introducing me to his works and opening my eyes to his literary genius.

Like many others, I initially had my doubts. I didn't think his exploration of the WASPy world of New England would hold any appeal for me.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. He skillfully uses this very distinct setting to tell a story that is both profound and universal.

It delves deep into the intricacies of human nature and human relationships. It explores families, the bonds of brotherhood, the process of growing old, the boundaries of sexuality, the roles of gender, and the expectations of society.

It's about the journey of growing up and sometimes growing apart. In essence, it's a captivating tale about what it truly means to be human.

The fact that I, a South Asian female in her 30s living in New York, could find this novel about a WASPy New England so relatable and moving is a remarkable testament to the power and skill of Mr. Cheever's storytelling.

In addition to the engaging story, Cheever's writing is truly vivid and complex. His sentences are long and winding, filled with complex layers of images, emotions, and reflections.

I found myself completely immersed in his words, losing track of time and space.

Simply put, I absolutely loved this book. It has left an indelible mark on my literary journey.

I have this strange feeling about John Cheever. I feel as if I should like him, I'm supposed to like him, and for goodness sake, I truly WANT to like him. But here's the thing, I just... don't like John Cheever. At least, I didn't like "The Wapshot Chronicle."

I found the story to be rather disjointed. The flow just wasn't there, and it made it hard for me to get fully invested. The characters, too, were not very appealing. Leander, in particular, was a real pain. Every time he appeared, I had this urge to bang my head against the wall. It's a real shame because I think he's supposed to be the main character or something.

I'm not really sure what masochistic tendency I must have that made me keep plugging away at this book even when every good impulse I had told me to give it up like a bad habit. The prose wasn't all that bad, and the character of Honora Wapshot was actually pretty entertaining. But other than that, I just found the whole book to be bleak and underwhelming.

Maybe I'll give myself a nice long break from John Cheever and then attempt his collected short stories. Or maybe I won't subject myself to the man ever again. Only time will tell.

On beaches, there is the joy and the gall of perpetual youth. Even today, one can smell the east wind and hear Neptune's horn. Always raring to go, one packs sandwiches and a bathing suit and catches a ramshackle bus to the beach. It is irresistible, perhaps in the blood. Father read Shakespeare to the waves, with a mouthful of pebbles. Was it Demosthenes?

* * * * *

I'd never read Cheever, not even his short stories. And like many people, I was put off by the misguided emphasis in the Wapshot jacket copy on "quintessential" fishing villages (???) and "upper-middle-class suburban life." I almost abandoned the book after the first chapter, which seemed to promise a few hundred pages of excerpts from Ladies' Home Journal. Fortunately, I saw sailors on the next page, and that lured me in. Fortunately, because now I have a new favorite writer.

This is a story about all sorts of powerlessness and is consequently very sad. But I was more than willing to endure Cheever's deflating effect on my faith in the world in exchange for the prose. Leander's chapters are so electric, like being pin-balled through space and time. How did he manage to do that?

(Do not say "alcohol"; that's awful.)

Actually, it's not quite 4 stars, but rather 4 than 3.

I generally like reading diaries, and I especially like John Cheever's diary. I often flip through it, take it off the shelf and read passages, and then forget them again because diaries are usually not extremely exciting. And then I read them again a little later. I can't quite say exactly what fascinates me about it, but the mixture of joie de vivre and depression, love for the beauties of nature and towards the end, rather horrible alcoholism, incomprehension about the effects all this has on his marriage and his (moral) struggle with his bisexuality affects me.

I have also read a few of his short stories, and his first novel "The Wapshot Chronicle" has been sitting unread by me for years until now. It's his first novel, and the completion - after he was already a moderately successful and well-known short story author - took a long time, and it was very important to him to be taken seriously as a "real" author (which then worked, the book won the National Book Award).

The book follows the family history of the Wapshot family in New England in the 1950s, and the first half of the book is as mediocre (or boring) as that sounds. Without wanting to interpret too much, I have the feeling of detecting a short-story-like quality in the book - anecdotes, flashbacks, plot threads that move spatially and temporally away from each other, chapters that would work on their own.

In the last third, when I was already considering whether I would lose interest, everything then actually becomes a bit more interesting (or darker).

From all the women (who are mostly smart and shrewd), a danger emanates, all of them make life difficult for their men in such an unfair way (which can also be found in his diaries at this time, the mean, depressive Mary who doesn't take good care of him, while he at the same time realizes that he is slowly sliding into alcoholism and drinks every day at noon), but in the end everything is still somehow quite good. Technically, I think it's very well done, great little details in the formulations, skillfully introduced subplots, etc.

John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle is, for me, a novel that is beautifully crafted yet unfortunately underwhelming.

It is filled with well-rounded characters, a plot that is sometimes wonderful and at other times not so sublime, and elegant Chekhovian descriptions of scenery that are quite picturesque. However, there is no knockout punch or wow factor that grabs hold of me.

The Wapshot Chronicle is, and I hate to say it, mediocre in its conveyance of mediocrity. It is only softened by occasional winsome humor that lifts me out of the dark dredges and questionable edginess of the characters' personal behavior, confusion, and other assorted problems.

It reminds me so much of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries, another work that evokes similar feelings of mediocrity in me. While the writing in these two novels is both superb and one hundred percent pitch-perfect, there is just too much of the humdrum that overwhelms whatever positives the authors were trying to convey to their readers.

Yes, there is truth in the ordinary, and there is also remarkable extraordinariness. Some of the harshest yet most eloquent truths can come out of the works of Shields and Cheever. However, the primary works that have elevated them to the highest levels of global literary esteem, for me, miss the mark.

Perhaps I am missing the point. While I was not overly excited about these two works in particular, I was absolutely in love with Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater, a literary work and underrated classic of its time that is still in the tradition of Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle and Shields' The Stone Diaries.

The beginning of Cheever's novel takes place in the fictitious seaside village of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts, an inspired landscape from Cheever's own upbringing. Here, readers are introduced to the unique (to put it mildly) Wapshot clan: Captain Leander Washpot, his son Moses, his other son Coverly (and Coverly does cover some personal things about himself), and Aunt Honora. They all have their own demons and are flawed to the bone because of them. Yet, they try to find their way the best they know how. They are redeeming characters, just broken, fighting the world against them, and that is admirable.

If you know anything about John Cheever and his personal life, The Wapshot Chronicle may not be such a surprising work, as it did win the 1958 National Book Award. But for those who haven't read anything by him, I would probably start with The Short Stories of John Cheever. These works are truly classic and more digestible, perhaps because they are short and not as depressingly drawn out as The Wapshot Chronicle regrettably is. Any novice writer would certainly gain a lot from Cheever's shorter works and perhaps from the novels Falconer and Bullet Park.

While I hope my review does not deter some readers from picking up The Wapshot Chronicle or forgoing John Cheever as an author altogether, I would probably get this book from the library and save myself a couple of bucks.

I read this book because I had heard good things about Cheever in school and the New York Times had claimed on the cover that this is "The best introduction to Cheever's work." Well, I have now been introduced.

To be honest, this should have been a DNF (Did Not Finish). I was halfway through and nothing of interest had occurred, and no one interesting had been introduced. The only reason I actually finished was that when I wanted to read, I failed to locate another more interesting book. So, I read just a few more pages and miraculously something did happen. I got barely interested enough to hate-read for a while. Then, since three-quarters of the way through is too much to not finish, there you have it. And I must say, having completed this work, I am confident in claiming that "not being of interest" is the point of this book.

The Wapshots (family name) are normal people with normal peculiarities from a normal rural New England town. In this pursuit, Cheever is mostly successful, at least in my estimation. He captures common ambitions choked by common problems, and that is much more difficult to accomplish than most would guess. The problem for me is that he fails to propel that commonness into something special until the very end, which makes the process a dull, sometimes unpleasant ordeal.

In a lot of ways, this book reads like Americanized D.H. Lawrence, which could be a good thing depending on your tastes. The prose is carefully measured, the settings delightfully bucolic and descriptive, and most characters are astonishingly oversexed. There's even a couple of tyrannical matriarchs, one eccentric, one brooding. I was half expecting to have seen something nasty in the woodshed. The stakes are low and rather than help the reader escape from reality, "The Wapshot Chronicle" chooses to rub your face in it for a while. Unlike the highly artistic and literary short stories of modern times, it ends on a comforting and hopeful note, reassuring us that we are enough and despite it all, the Wapshots, and by implication we, are living good and happy lives. I just found myself wishing St. Botolphs was closer to Arkham, and these dull little people in their dull little town would be consumed by a horror man was not meant to know.

Well, it wasn't what I expected or hoped for.

I wanted some of that postwar suburban cocktail party angst, but what I got was something quite different. It was a nice surprise, but really not what I was looking for when choosing to read my first Cheever.

The Wapshot family is a fabulous bunch, a truly interesting family whose lives are highly entertaining to read about, whether it be a walk in the woods or a long-standing family argument. It is Cheever who manages to create this magic, and for that, I am looking forward to reading more from him.

At times, I found myself comparing this book to "Tortilla Flat" by John Steinbeck and other times to "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez. However, I think this is more because of the picaresque nature of the storytelling in what seems like an everyday setting rather than for its actual content or style of writing.

One major drawback for me was the change of style in writing the journal of Leander Wapshot. I don't think I've ever come across this method before, and I found it quite jarring and irritating. It was not a pleasure to read at all.

I trudged through the writing, painstakingly making my way sentence by sentence, hoping against hope to reach the heart of the story that lay hidden within those words.

However, as I persevered, it became increasingly clear that it was not worth the effort. The prose was convoluted, the ideas muddled, and the narrative failed to engage my interest.

I found myself constantly distracted, my mind wandering to other things, as I struggled to make sense of what the author was trying to convey.

In the end, I emerged from the experience feeling disappointed and frustrated, wondering why I had bothered to waste my time on something that offered so little in return.

It was a reminder that not all writing is created equal, and that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can't find the beauty or the value in a piece of work.

This book isn't immediately gratifying.

It's like the choice between broccoli and a Mars bar. The first bite of this "broccoli" was a little... perhaps "tedious" would be a better word than "boring", but it's the best I can come up with for now.

As I persisted in digesting this broccoli, I was able to perceive and sense the benefits! And the more I digested, the greater my desire to keep digesting grew, until my diet consisted solely of broccoli!

And then, before I was fully aware of it, I had devoured all of the broccoli and treated myself to a palate-cleanser of chocolate, caramel, and nougat.

Overall, I would rate this book four out of five stars.

It may not have been an instant pleasure, but the rewards it offered upon closer examination were well worth the effort.

Just like broccoli, which may not be as appealing as a Mars bar at first glance, but provides numerous health benefits in the long run.

This book has the potential to expand your mind and provide valuable insights if you are willing to invest the time and effort to understand it.

So, if you're looking for a book that will challenge you and make you think, this might be the one for you.

Many people complain about the causality/continuity issues in this book.

It is doubtless that Cheever wrote much more than was included in the final draft of the novel.

Moreover, one of the central issues in "The Wapshot Chronicle" is not simply time, but how individuals and families evolve in relation to time and space.

Both of the Wapshot boys must leave their familiar space and venture to places where their identity as Wapshot's is without its usual cloak of history rooted in their ancestral hometown and the provenance of their parents.

They need to de-familiarize their identity and rediscover (re-found, re-invigorate) what it means to be Wapshots, or what it means to have identity rooted in place and family (space and time), in a world (50's America) where Pop and other theories of Art were allowing people to construct their reality & identity in very different ways.

I argue that no one would want to read the vast tome that The Wapshot Chronicle could have been (and which the title hints at).

This is because to include scenes from all the places and times that the book encompasses would be tedious to read or write.

We are modern sophisticated readers, and we don't need everything spelled out for us.

By jumping through time we are better able to glimpse the changes effected by place and time, and are able to more easily relate these scenes in our mind.

Cheever's prose is clear and elegant, rolling forth like someone talking at length.

His characters are perhaps a little difficult to penetrate, but his story is compelling in its readability and in its penetration into the difficulties facing young men in constructing an identity for themselves away from their history.

I really struggled to finish this book, and now as I write, I don't have a clear opinion about it.

Here, the "judgment" is briefly expressed in stars, at most five like luxury hotels. So, I would assign three stars to it, like a grand hotel that is a bit rundown, dusty, and in need of maintenance. Because that's exactly the atmosphere I felt while reading.

The suggestions in these pages are very strong, such that sometimes it seems as if one can smell and hear the sounds of a landscape, that of New England, which appears to us as both real and enchanting at the same time.

In the same way, the characters have a dignified and customary exterior but a tumultuous inner life, filled with fears and hopes that lead them to sometimes even absurd behaviors.

From a formal and technical point of view, it is a magnificent book. As the pages progress, the interiority of the protagonists, the dreamy, inner, and fairy-tale-like aspect definitely takes precedence, and this, personally, I have difficulty appreciating. But perhaps I just need to let some time pass.