The Wapshot Scandal полностью

The Wapshot Scandal is very much a fully realized novel, and not only is it masterfully paced and exquisitely written but it’s also adherent to the best aspect of the novel form: its willingness to be big, messy, sprawling, and meandering. Though Cheever is never out of control – his command of his always perfect sentences and paragraphs is uninterrupted – he does make some very loose decisions. Scandal is not tidy, and few if any of the characters come out, in the end, changed in any fundamental way. One dies, and one begins drinking heavily, but otherwise there are no great and articulated epiphanies. Best of all, a number of secondary characters are introduced and developed and then never find their way back into the narrative. The book does not end in a way that would be satisfying to readers expecting closure, and this makes the book not craft but art.

That must be what some of us fear with Cheever, or with what we assume about Cheever: that his work will be ‘exquisite’ or ‘carefully crafted.’ (And I do believe I used the word ‘exquisite’ just a short while ago. And for that I’m sorry.) That it’s of small scope but ‘masterful in style.’ Something like that – like a toy boat on a small man-made pond. But I think what this book, as one example, demonstrates, is that Cheever is the blessedly craziest and most passionate kind of artist. This book is a breathless burst of a thing, no matter how long it took to write (and I have no idea how long that was, though Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicle is thought to have taken twenty years). However long it took – and that’s pretty much irrelevant, always – Scandal is one of the most fluid and riveting things written in the last fifty years, and it, yes, it showcases Cheever’s ridiculously visceral feeling for the human animal.

The best books are hits of nitrous – you suck them in, they give you a warm wa-wa feeling for awhile, and when you’re done, you go looking for more. (That is, if you’re that sort of person, a parking-lot person, eating a grilled cheese with one hand and looking for a miracle with the other. And I am not that person, except one time, in Durham, North Carolina, c. 1991.) The best books, I want to say, relight the world; they take the flaccid balloon of time, place, and character and breathe into it until the thing is about to pop. And this much is true: Cheever has amazing lungs.

Here’s an example. It takes place when Melissa, the somewhat disillusioned but lusty wife of Moses Wapshot, is at the florist and overhears another customer ordering flowers for a dead relative:

This is of course how we feel while reading The Wapshot Scandal – it’s so good in here we don’t want to leave, even though the lives of these people are not, at all, intrinsically interesting. Maybe only Cheever can acknowledge the mundanity of suburban existence, keep his characters firmly rooted in the soil of that world, and yet give them souls that soar. Every major character in Scandal is bored in some fundamental way, and instead of moping or griping or justfalling apart – the m.o. of nearly all of our American suburban heroes – they act boldly against the quietly oppressive machinery around them. They flee the IRS, they philander in the most breathtaking ways, they feed Keats into a supercomputer, they give up everything they have, again and again.