Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks John Cheever's 'Wapshot Chronicle' And Two Novels by Younger Writers A good novel always gives one kind of pleasure or another, but the kind of pleasure that...
...They see an alligator in the water hole where they have been swimming, they get lost, and they become interested in girls...
...The vitality of the novel is surprising for another reason : Its theme is the decay of a culture...
...Most of the time, I am sure, Mr...
...Roof of old house visible in distance...
...Cheever plays last and loose with time...
...The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God (Random House, $2.95) is Donald Wetzel's third novel...
...A milieu further from that portrayed by Mr...
...Haunted house for children...
...The novel is thoroughly honest and, in its quiet way, highly perceptive...
...Botolphs, a Massachusetts town that had once been a prosperous port...
...This, too, was published as a short story in the New Yorker...
...That is, it is autobiographical, derivative and uneven...
...Rain more eloquent, heartening and merciful...
...Although the extract is always lively and often funny, it recounts a tragic episode in Leander's early life, and this is wholly appropriate, for the central fact in Leander's character is his ability to accept the evil in life along with the good...
...Although Leander is offstage much of the time, this is his book...
...Wetzel never pokes fun at Rodney or exploits his ineptitude for comic effect...
...Wetzel is remarkably successful in making us believe that we are looking through the eyes of Jack Raymond...
...Thompson can scarcely be imagined...
...Skirts blowing in wind...
...Relish the love of a gentle woman...
...Now he has written a simple, direct, sympathetic account of boyhood in rural Alabama...
...He counsels them against putting whisky in hot water bottles, sleeping in the moonlight, and wearing red neckties...
...Variable winds...
...stubble...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks John Cheever's 'Wapshot Chronicle' And Two Novels by Younger Writers A good novel always gives one kind of pleasure or another, but the kind of pleasure that is given by sheer exuberance is not often experienced in our time...
...There is a suggestion of nostalgia—it cannot be avoided in a novel of this sort—but no sentimentality, for Mr...
...old friend...
...Sound amongst leaves...
...Because The Wapshot Chronicle is episodic in structure, and especially because several episodes have been published as short stories, the question of the book's unity is bound to be raised, It is not...
...And he speaks after his death, for his sons find a letter of advice to them...
...And when he finally is given the center of the stage, we are prepared for and accept without the slightest hesitation his magnificent spirit...
...Born in 1930, Charles Thompson is very much a beginner, and his Halfway Down the Stairs (Harper, $3.50) is pretty much everything that a first novel is popularly supposed to be but more often than not isn't...
...I am a little troubled by the was Mr...
...Here it is broken up, chapters describing the experiences of his sons being inserted between passages from the journal, but the effect is just as strong...
...Both young men, however, have been influenced by Leander's example, as well as by his precepts, and they are saved from mediocrity...
...Leander, indeed, goes from bad to worse in the course of the story, and the ultimate humiliation comes when the excursion boat he had once commanded, thanks to Honora, is taken over by his wife as a floating gift shop...
...Leander...
...John Cheever comes to the novel after demonstrating for many years his mastery of the short story...
...The novel opens with a description of a Fourth of July celebration that seems to lielong to the early '20s...
...But now, in his first novel, he has simply exploded, and the fireworks are a joy to watch...
...Admire the world...
...Not cold...
...This, as it turns out, has little to do with the story...
...He has instinctively turned to the people who have something to teach him, and he has learned enough to produce a bright and readable novel...
...Wetzel respects these boys, and is careful to see that we do not underestimate them...
...Thompson, we notice that he opens with a typical Marquand gambit: Dave, looking back, realizes that he will never be anything but a smalltown boy...
...This is the summer that Jack is 14 and Rodney Blankhard visits the Hill...
...When the summer ends and Rodney goes home, Jack is sorry but not exactly inconsolable, for in his wise way he knows that his life is going to go on...
...Distant, electrical smell of rain...
...It is not hard to believe that he will go on to learn other and more important lessons...
...Thompson, attends Cornell University...
...To create a character whose vitality can be felt and believed is not easy...
...It is Leander just the same who gives the book its vitality...
...Trust the Lord...
...The place in which the novel begins and to which it constantly recurs is St...
...of course, a tightly constructed novel, but it is a unified one—partly because, as the title suggests, it is a novel about a family, but chiefly because it has a central figure...
...Father Frisbee said the words...
...South, southwest...
...Wetzel has had the courage to tell the story straight, without faked excitements or easy farce...
...Because everything is so new and fresh to the young, they are particularly susceptible to cliches...
...Cheever is so good at creating an atmosphere that I am bothered when it turns out that he has created the wrong kind...
...Thompson appears to be conscious of this and to struggle against it...
...as a general rule, the more we are told about a character's zest for life, the drearier he seems...
...Although it is fun to read, more fun than anything I have come across in some time, it leaves one with a feeling of sadness, and this is right...
...The story is told in the first person, and Mr...
...We can assume, then, that there are other not exactly coincidental resemblances, though of course we will not make the mistake of assuming that everything that happens to Pope happened to his creator...
...One may argue that this is merely evidence of the backwardness of St...
...Wind slacked off in middle of prayer...
...In spite of the differences between them, Jack and Rodney become reasonably good friends and share in the mild adventures the summer offers...
...Abode of rats, squirrels, porcupines...
...that the action must have taken place about 1950...
...His first, A Wreath and a Curse, was a story, almost a parable, of courage and honesty confronted by various kinds of slackness...
...Here is the wonderful coda, after the tragedy has struck: "Overcast day...
...In Leander, on the contrary, the relish with which he lives is palpable even in the early chapters, where he is little more than a background figure...
...Botolphs has declined and the Wapshots with it...
...And in the end we find that Ann, the heroine, is a femme fatale in the tradition of Lady Brett...
...Oldest sound to reach porches of man's ear...
...After the scene shifts to Cornell, we are introduced to some specimens of the beat generation, complete with marijuana, cool jazz and promiscuity...
...Stand up straight...
...Botolphs, but I am not satisfied...
...It is the acute sense was have of Leander's vitality that makes his death so moving...
...Never marry again...
...After Rodney's arrival, Jack's older syster admonishes him: "Remember that Rodney is a stranger here...
...But such faults as the book has are of little importance in comparison with its achievement...
...Heaven knows this isn't the kind of novel in which a scrupulous authenticity is important, but Mr...
...Leander's sons are, almost necessarily, smaller men...
...Thompson—a town on the Massachusetts coast—and, again like Mr...
...On the contrary, his stories have excelled in what one thinks of as the New Yorker vein, subdued, understated, non-euphoric...
...He sure is," Jack says...
...Hath but a short span, says Father Frisbee...
...Rodney's innocence—his gift, as Jack sees it, for doing everything wrong—accounts for a good deal that happens in the book, but Mr...
...and it is a shock to discover, as we eventually do...
...Moses has a certain liveliness, and his romance with Melissa, held in her Aunt Justina's castle bv a kind of fairy-tale enchantment, is a splendidly bizarre and extravagant episode...
...How literally autobiographical the novel is we have no way of knowing, but Dave Pope, the hero, grows up in the same sort of place as Mr...
...the account of his trip, including the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, sounds as if he were one of the original Forty-niners...
...The heart of the book is a long extract from Leander's journal, which was published in the New 5 orker and reprinted in the 0. Henry prize collection...
...Thick stockings...
...Thompson's borrowings are unconscious...
...Wetzel has made sure that his memories have not betrayed us...
...Courage tastes of blood...
...Yet it is only in his love affairs that Moses is able to assert himself with his father's boldness, and his brother Coverly is a mild sort of blunderer in everything he does...
...Few rubbernecks watching...
...He sets the scene precisely, and he writes vividly without destroying the illusion that a 14-year-old boy is speaking...
...Old man then...
...Water, hills, fields restore first taste of sense...
...Soon, with the introduction of the heroine, the J. D. Salinger influence makes itself felt, although Mr...
...I say these things not to make fun of the novel but to suggest how difficult the path of the beginning novelist is...
...There is more in this vein, both practical and eccentric, and then: "Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house...
...There is also the business about Leander's brother, who, Leander tells us, went to California in search of gold.Although this must have happened in the 1980s...
...That John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle (Harper, $3.50) should be marked by exuberant vitality is something of a surprise, for this is not the quality that has distinguished the admirable short stories he has been writing for twenty years and more...
...Eccentric, tyrannical Aunt Honora has money, but the Leander Wapshots haven't and are largely dependent on her uncertain charity...
...Purple face...
...Showed old-fashioned congress boots...
...The New Yorker, it is interesting to observe, cleaned it up a little...
...As for the influences on Mr...
...Family lot on hill above river...
...Cheever describes his last few days briefly but in such a way that we see how true to himself he is in every moment of them...
...His second, The Age of Light, which was experimental in form, was a study of people in search of love...
...Hearse at station...
...The dialogue seems completely right, and both the narrator and Rodney come through as persons, complex and sharply individualized...
Vol. 40 • April 1957 • No. 14
