Synopses & Reviews
In this simultaneously hilarious and poignant companion volume to
The Wapshot Chronicle, the members of the Wapshot family of St. Botolphs drift far from their New England village into the demented caprices of the mighty, the bad graces of the IRS, and the humiliating abyss of adulterous passion.
A novel of large and tender vision, The Wapshot Scandal is filled with pungent characters and outrageous twists of fate, and, above all, with Cheever's luminous compassion for all his hapless fellow prisoners of human nature.
Review
"Full of surprises...with profound good sense that approaches wisdom." New York Times Book Review
Review
"What this book, as one example, demonstrates, is that Cheever is the blessedly craziest and most passionate kind of artist." from the Foreword by Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Review
"I read The Wapshot Scandal with pure delight in the characters, in the firm and deceptively simple style, and most of all in the continual power of invention." Malcolm Cowley, author of Exile's Return
Review
"A delectable and glorious piece of fiction...it paints our country as an earthly paradise, but paradise full of evil, inhabited by more serpents than one." Glenway Wescott, author of The Pilgrim Hawk
About the Author
John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.