The Ghosts of Chicsville

THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL by John Cheever. 309 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

In his second novel, John Cheever has substantially raised his bid to establish the Wapshots of St. Botolphs, Mass., among the First Families of U.S. literature.

One of the most curious and original writers in the U.S. today, John Cheever continues to be underestimated. The Wapshot Chronicle received the National Book Award. But Cheever is neither chic nor shocking, and no critical claque inflates his reputation. He is neither politically opinionated nor a Freudian, and the sex he celebrates is freakishly normal, occurring at its best in the connubial bed.

In fact, Cheever is an old-fashioned moralist, and would be claimed as kin by that Old Lady from Dubuque for whom The New Yorker Magazine is not edited, but where, ironically, the bulk of his work has appeared. Old-fashioned abstractions that have almost been jostled out of intellectual currency--words like humility, goodness, pride, honor and love--constantly appear in his work. This has baffled some readers dazzled by the deceptively brilliant surface texture and the sort of knowing social-insider's stylishness that will set a time period with: "Now that was the year when the squirrels were such a pest and everybody worried about cancer and homosexuality." One sentence like that and The New Yorker reader knows where he is or thinks he knows where he is--in Chicsville, U.S.A., a tightly zoned community.

Precarious Paradise. But this sort of thing is a social disguise for the heft of Cheever's work, which moves between tragedy and farce and realism and fantasy to present a heavy parable of American life--especially the life of the semi-migratory U.S. bourgeoisie and the uncertain ecology of their nesting grounds in the U.S. suburb. Suburbia, which in its modern form is barely a generation old, has so far lacked the kind of precentor or poet that the South, the West, the City, and the Small Town long since acquired. In John Cheever, Suburbia has its first poet-mythologist.

Proxmire Manor seems to 'be located in northern Westchester. (Novelist Cheever himself was born in Quincy, Mass., but now lives in Ossining, N.Y., in a stone-gabled 18th century house with wife, three children, two Labradors, two Roman doves, and two cars.) With no irony whatever, Proxmire Manor is presented as the kind of a place where people could, if they were good, live happily ever afterward, but foolishly, because they are wicked, choose not to do so.

It is a precarious paradise--beleaguered from without by The City, source of the commuter's money, and by proletarian Parthenia down by the railroad tracks, from which emerge teen-age toughs, rapacious plumbers and reefer-smoking baby sitters. It may be attacked from within by moral failure. Felicity is threatened by the second wife, the third mortgage, the fourth child, or the fifth martini. In Proxmire Manor, as in Eden itself, the penalty for sin is banishment--but only to the next town. The angel at the gates may be a suburban bank manager or may appear, as in The Wapshot Scandal, in terrible female form as a community leader who has graduated from love into good works.

The Wapshot Scandal can be properly understood only against a background of Cheever's stories and his earlier Chronicle. Cheever is dealing with two basic themes of U.S. literature, previously treated by such great but different writers as Mark Twain, Hemingway, Wolfe and Faulkner. These are the Desirable Life and the Lost Innocence of men looking wistfully back on a small-town and country boyhood. The themes are spun out in terms of the pilgrimage of the brothers Moses and Coverly Wapshot. In the Chronicle, the brothers were baptized in the innocence of an obsolete world, the "disingenuous community" of St. Botolphs on Massachusetts' tidewater. In the Scandal, the old ferry boat--symbol of the manly independence of a seagoing race--has been converted into a floating "gift shoppe," and Moses and Coverly have been expelled from St. Botolphs and from the 19th century into the 20th.

Brother Smart. Moses Wapshot has come to Proxmire Manor trailing his memories of the land where it is always Christmas Eve, the Canada goose is in the oven, and snow falls on the timeless village green. He has become the doting second husband of Melissa Scaddon, who inherited chain-store millions and became instant-feudal. Moses and Melissa are happy in bed and at table, and their infant son croons upstairs. Only willful sin can poison this provisional paradise, and Melissa is the sinner.

Melissa's crime is one of the unforgivable sins of Proxmire Manor, something which could be called "mixed adultery"--mating with the wrong age or class. She becomes infatuated with the 19year-old grocery boy, profanes the household gods by taking him to the family summer cottage on Nantucket, is discovered. Her fate is terrible; she is last seen, tied to her now sulky lover, weeping over cans of American food in a Roman supermarket. Moses takes to the bottle and becomes a declassed vagrant.

There are episodes which suggest that Cheever believes that Melissa is nothing less than an old-fashioned New England witch, with power over others but not over herself. Alternatively, she is Circe, the classic love-harridan who had the power to turn men into beasts. In such scenes, Cheever deserts the realistic conventions for fantasy, but his wonderful eye for significant detail never deserts him. He creates a familiar domestic interior and then seats hags on the Hepplewhite.

Brother Simple. Unlike Moses, who can deal with anything but the dark gods, Coverly is a simple innocent who can be defeated by a bus conductor. All sorts of modern Furies await such awkward innocence. Coverly has become a pre-programmer for computers, and finds himself condemned to a special kind of modern hell--a noncommunity named Talifer. Talifer appears on no maps. It is populated by oafish technicians and scientist submen, and security is total. Work is all underground. The old virtues of the community are unknown. People do not nod to each other in the treeless streets. Coverly's wife invites neighbors to a party; no one comes. An occupant of one of the Government-designated houses falls from a ladder, but no neighbor comes to help him up.

Coverly, a modern Candide, is hopelessly bedeviled by a world of science in which the scientists know as little about what they are doing as an ant knows of formicology. His boss, Dr. Cameron, is a mathematical genius but a moral idiot bedeviled by lechery and made absurd by his own lack of self-knowledge. Coverly is inadvertently rescued from this nightmare by good old Aunt Honora back at St. Botolphs. Aunt Honora has never paid an income tax; when the FBI discovers this, guilt by association deprives Coverly of his security clearance, without which no man can live in the world of tomorrow.

The Wapshot Scandal is the most enigmatic and gruesome fable to appear in U.S. fiction for a long time. Cheever has presented three American communities--one colonial, where life is over; one contemporary, where life is precarious; and one of tomorrow, where life is impossible. It is a totally original work by a writer who is not yet great, but who is greatly obsessed by his exploration of American life. It makes him a disconcerting fellow. He is the entertaining natural-shoulder guest at any Westchester cocktail party who embarrasses the neutral-toned neighbors by producing the Book of Common Prayer from his gabardine slacks. If a Halloween charade appears, Cheever is the one who points out that the innocents are using real skulls painted to look like pumpkins.

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