John Cheever

Reading Cheever again I see that he is the great American novelist, and that the great American novel is The Wapshot Chronicle.

I'd forgotten what a superb nature writer Cheever was, and the passages he writes about trout fishing, the main character Leander, the father, walking through the woods to be on the water by dawn, are among the finest passages of nature writing in American literature. Cheever's one of the most natural writers I've ever read.

Cheever guides his own natural lyricism into its shape as prose, and then lets it loose as a poet. As graceful as Cheever's prose is--is there an American writer who renders both the pure and evil hearts of his male and female characters as completely as Cheever?--he's also honest, as if he's sewn his own heart into his characters?  John Steinbeck comes close to John Cheever, though Steinbeck seemed to take more pleasure in writing about the evil in men's hearts than the evil in women's. 

In The Wapshot Chronicle everything is so beautifully described, but somehow Cheever leaves enough room beneath the descriptions, under what's being described, for the reader to provide his or her own description, to swim around in the sounds and sights and silences of Cheever's sentences. The fluidity of the storytelling seems as natural as the poet's leaves once seemed to the tree.

At the very end of the book Leander, ferryboat captain, father of Moses and Coverly, swims out to sea and disappears. His sister, Honora Wapshot, matriarch of the family, old maid, guardian for years of all things properly 'Wapshot', gives up her fortune and starts attending Boston Red Sox baseball games, dressed by the way, almost exactly like the poet Marianne Moore down to the tricorn hat, though Cheever doesn't directly invoke Moore.

Leander has left a note to his sons, which Coverly finds much later, and instructions that Prospero's short speech in The Tempest--"Our revels are now ended..." (Act 4, Scene 1)--be read at his funeral.

In honor of Cheever's great book I'm committing that short speech, written by William Shakespeare for his character Prospero, to memory.

San Francisco Model Yacht Club, Golden Gate Park, photo by author, October, 2016.