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Myth Is Reality. For all its period paraphernalia and local coloration of bicycles, Fourth of July parades, clambakes and the richly detailed human flotsam and jetsam of a tidewater town, The Wapshot Chronicle is essentially a simple drama of destinies and moralities. Father Leander Wapshot's wonderful journal (found in a trunk in the attic) recites like a Greek chorus the ancient obligations to race and region. He had taught his sons to "fell a tree, sow, cultivate and harvest, save money, countersink a nail, make cider with a hand press, clean a gun, sail a boat, etc." But Leander was defeated in his patriarch's role when his ferryboat was beached by women and turned into a gift shoppe. Leander's two sons, Moses and Coverly, were expelled from the paradisial St. Botolphs, but in the case of Coverly (who doubles for Author Cheever), he never really left it or rejected it; his life's task was "to create or build some kind of bridge between Leander's world and that world where he sought his fortune."
In the currently bestselling Wapshot Scandal, this world takes on baffling shapes—both more familiar and more strange. The scene is contemporary, but the solid modern pavement on which the characters walk is fractured by the inexplicable convulsions of the Space Age. Coverly, exiled to the noncommunity of a missile base, finds the apparently human personnel recognize each other's existence no more than so many shades in a picture-window limbo of tract houses. His brother Moses, apparently better equipped than his dreamy brother to achieve success and enjoy its rewards, is defeated by the metamorphosis of his wife Melissa. Once the personification of love, she is transformed into a spirit of hostile chastity, and then into a voracious nymphomaniac, with Circe's vile power of turning men into beasts. Intended as a design in "improbability," Cheever's Scandal is saying that the bizarre, inexplicable and mythical event is closer to the truth of 1964 than any realistic report.
Missionary on the Terrace. In both his novels and stories, Cheever has taken, more or less intact from the past, the ancient American moral severities and told a hundred parables to show that the emancipated middle class about which he now writes must pay homage to his tribal gods of purity and order. He has added (his ancestors might have thought it a subtraction) a lyrical delight in natural creation. The American wilderness is a sacred grove (not an inimical principle, as it was to Hemingway). Cheever's world is one of delight for those who obey the gods. He has rejected Puritanism and its "habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity and penitence" as a mere limitation of life.
His faith belongs to the lyrical sonorities of the Book of Common Prayer or the incantatory praises to life of the Song of Solomon, which delights equally in woman and God. The grace-before-meat he says in his own house is likely to pay a tribute in doubtful Latin to the quality of the roast. Like a missionary in