Preview of The Wapshot Chronicle Summary:

Attempting in The Wapshot Chronicle to capture the "irrecapturable" past, Cheever creates the setting of St.

Botolphs, a romanticized version in part of his hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Wapshot family, unmistakably modeled after his own: Leander, his wife Sarah, and their sons, Moses and Coverly. Throughout the novel, Cheever charts the decline and ultimate resurrection of the Wapshots, simultaneously recognizing their limitations and celebrating their possibilities. It is essentially this cast of characters in conjunction with the setting that gives the novel its charm, substance, and conflict. An important ingredient to plot development, the setting of St.

Botolphs enables Cheever to systematically parallel the nearly extinct attributes of tradition and ceremony to the increasingly untraditional present of the novel.

The novel's central figure is Leander, the embodiment of a genteel New England aristocracy in direct confrontation with contemporary decadence, hypocrisy, and emptiness. Cheever is comparing the...