FOREWORD
A Foreword by a non-Cheever-scholar and infrequent reader of forewords:
I don’t know how certain books become canonical and others don’t. I know nothing about how these things work, what committees are formed, consulted, and what powers they wield, but I picture the process like a Pachinko. The book, playing the part of the silver lead ball – stay with me here – is sent through the top of the machine – the literary-cultural-academic machine – and it tinkles back and forth, subjected to popular and critical reaction, to revisionist theory, to changes in taste over a period of time, and eventually, if all goes well, it scores some points and stays in play. (I guess maybe I should have used a pinball metaphor. Your thoughts? Send them to 826 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. Thank you in advance.)
For whatever reason, Cheever’s stories, which are not superior to this novel and its predecessor, are remembered better than the Wapshots, but there is no clear way to explain why. Did the first Wapshot book not win the National Book Award? It did win that. Are these novels lacking in scope? Not a bit. Are they not representative of the human condition at a juncture in time? They are. Are they convincing? They are. Are they beautiful? They are so filled with love that it’s hard to believe that a man wrote these sentences, and not some kind of freakish winged book-writing angel-beast or something. And finally: Are these just short stories stretched to novel length? Not at all.
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:
‘I guess I’m the closest she has left,’ he said confusedly, and Melissa, waiting for her roses, felt a premonition of death. She must die — she must be the subject of some such discussion in a flower shop, and close her eyes forever on a world that distracted her with its beauty. The image, hackneyed and poignant, that to her was of life as a diversion, a festival from which she was summoned by the secret police of extinction, when the dancing and the music were at their best. I do not want to leave, she thought. I do not ever want to leave.
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.
As many of the most staid-seeming of Wapshot’s standard-bearers leave St. Botolphs, the book follows them through the Southwest and Europe, and Cheever’s perceptions are no less acute when he’s trailing their progress around the world. Early on, we’re introduced to an IRS agent named Norman Johnson, who is about to change the venerable Honora Wapshot’s life irrevocably and send her on a journey of her own. But when we meet him, he is staying at a hotel in St. Botolph’s, and Cheever uses Johnson’s time there to elucidate the price of travel, setting the tone for all the wandering and searching to come:
[Johnson] was a traveler, familiar with the miseries of loneliness, with the violence of its sexuality, with its half-conscious imagery of highways and thruways like the projections of a bewildered spirit; with that forlorn and venereal limbo that must have flowed over the world before the invention of Venus, unknown to good and evil, ruled by pain.
So we know that Cheever writes beautifully and with as much lust for words and life as anyone this country has yet produced (I said it, you didn’t). But he’s also funny. I’ll leave you with one of the funniest lines written in our language, and it’s all the funnier for when it was written, in the darkest shadow of possible atomic Armageddon. It occurs in a passage about Coverly’s boss, Dr. Cameron, a nuclear scientist and the director of a massive government research center, who stands in as a sort of passive, crazed God-among-us. He is at once brilliant, broken, and powerful enough to destroy the world many times over. (This book is very much a Cold War book – confused and terrified by atomic energy, by knowing so little about it, its makers, its wielders.) Cameron is a widower and has a mistress he visits in Rome; he flies there as often as he can. He must see her in Rome because to do so in the United States would be scandalous, but – and soon we’ll get to the line in question, couched between em dashes: ‘There was a legitimate side to these trips — the Vatican wanted a missile — and a side more clandestine than his erotic sport.’
Anyway. I thought it was funny. Please read this book.
Dave Eggers, December 2002