What do you think?
Rate this book
Complete Novels
Published to coincide with editor Blake Bailey’s groundbreaking new biography, here are the five novels of John Cheever, together in one volume for the first time. In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly— and often grotesquely and hilariously—cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the dark suburban drama Bullet Park (“a magnificent work of fiction,” John Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems. A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the largest edition of Cheever’s stories ever.
960 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2009
4 people are currently reading
175 people want to read
About the author
John Cheever
297 books1,072 followersJohn Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.
His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both--light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 13, 2018
In my opinion, not all Library of America anthologies are run-out-and-buy-it bargains, but here's one that is. It contains nothing but Cheever's novels:
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (1957)
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL (1964)
BULLET PARK (1969)
FALCONER (1977), also
OH, WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS (1982), which at 112 pp of standalone is really a novella.
Of the novels, the two WAPSHOT volumes have pleased me immensely over the years, especially in the way SCANDAL builds on and deepens the themes brought up in CHRONICLE. BULLET PARK was written at the height of the "God, isn't suburbia awful" movement among even fine writers like John Cheever and John Updike, but it has its defenders. FALCONER is an opus in itself and again IMO, Cheever's best novel. OH, WHAT A PARADISE is not really a novel, as I said, but is quite readable.
If the Cheever enthusiast, established or budding, buys this volume and also The Stories of John Cheever (which has been in print ever since it was published), s/he will have the lion's share of Cheever's fictive material, and certainly the best. This volume has 960 pages, all told, and at current retail prices comes to about three cents per page. Bargain!
As a topper, I very much recommend Blake Bailey's 2009 literary biography, Cheever, which manages to be thorough, penetrating and sensitive too -- rare in even the best literary bio's, of which his is one.
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE (1957)
THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL (1964)
BULLET PARK (1969)
FALCONER (1977), also
OH, WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS (1982), which at 112 pp of standalone is really a novella.
Of the novels, the two WAPSHOT volumes have pleased me immensely over the years, especially in the way SCANDAL builds on and deepens the themes brought up in CHRONICLE. BULLET PARK was written at the height of the "God, isn't suburbia awful" movement among even fine writers like John Cheever and John Updike, but it has its defenders. FALCONER is an opus in itself and again IMO, Cheever's best novel. OH, WHAT A PARADISE is not really a novel, as I said, but is quite readable.
If the Cheever enthusiast, established or budding, buys this volume and also The Stories of John Cheever (which has been in print ever since it was published), s/he will have the lion's share of Cheever's fictive material, and certainly the best. This volume has 960 pages, all told, and at current retail prices comes to about three cents per page. Bargain!
As a topper, I very much recommend Blake Bailey's 2009 literary biography, Cheever, which manages to be thorough, penetrating and sensitive too -- rare in even the best literary bio's, of which his is one.
February 21, 2017
THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE & THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL : ***** & ****1/2. Two parts of the same whole, sort of - first, you'd have to believe that Cheever's madness had a method. The rising and falling fortunes of the Wapshots, a New England family whose members struggle and strive to make it in the fickle and absurd world of 1950s and 60s small towns and suburbias, meander through the fads and follies of the time and several more universal ones - including the horrifying carelessness and pettiness of those in power, the excitement of forbidden love (extramarital and homosexual alike), and the universe's ambivalence towards wealth, status, and those other constructs which center our lives. Read 10/11 & 6/14.
BULLET PARK: *****. Derided in its time, this novel delivers on the mad, magic-realist promise of the WAPSHOT novels and Cheever's slowly petering-out short fiction career in a bizarre gothic novel with an absolutely bonkers, virtuosic middle section which makes this a must-read. Read 12/14.
FALCONER: ****1/2. Cheever's late-career bestseller is as bizarro as anything else from the previous four decades of his best work but not any less poignant. Gets additional points for its passing focus on midcentury queer life and its criminalization, making it an important entry in the LGBTQ canon. Read 6/14.
OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS: **. Cheever's last-published work is slight, sparse, and never quite satisfyingly puts together all of its ideas - which is a shame, because a book that could effectively combine environmentalism, NIMBY foolishness, and late-in-life queer romances should be excellent. Read 8/15.
BULLET PARK: *****. Derided in its time, this novel delivers on the mad, magic-realist promise of the WAPSHOT novels and Cheever's slowly petering-out short fiction career in a bizarre gothic novel with an absolutely bonkers, virtuosic middle section which makes this a must-read. Read 12/14.
FALCONER: ****1/2. Cheever's late-career bestseller is as bizarro as anything else from the previous four decades of his best work but not any less poignant. Gets additional points for its passing focus on midcentury queer life and its criminalization, making it an important entry in the LGBTQ canon. Read 6/14.
OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS: **. Cheever's last-published work is slight, sparse, and never quite satisfyingly puts together all of its ideas - which is a shame, because a book that could effectively combine environmentalism, NIMBY foolishness, and late-in-life queer romances should be excellent. Read 8/15.
November 8, 2014
The Wapshot Chronicle
I used to sneer at the Library of America covers when I saw them at the bookstores: black with the author’s photograph featured across the cover, a signature font used to depict the author’s name. But having read Cheever’s Wapshot novels for the second time in three years, I find the editions to be enlightening, well-edited, and a bargain. For $31.50 you get all five of Cheever’s novels: $6.30 apiece, three-and-a-half cents a page. Each LOA edition offers so much more: fine editing, in this case by Bruce Bailey, noted Cheever scholar and author of Cheever: A Life (see my BG review); a chronology of Cheever’s life; and notes that gloss Cheever’s allusions to past events, historical and literary.
Cheever uses a very sly but clever point-of-view in which readers believe they are witnessing a third-person narrative until they see the word “we” and it shifts to first-person plural for a sentence or two:
Funny that Cheever should mention Hawthorne—because he is another author who employs this method (in The Scarlet Letter), as if the speaker is the author peeking out from his sheaves to draw us in, or is it an unnamed resident of St. Botolphs luring readers into this long, long tale that will cover two tomes before it is finished? Readers feel as if they are in cahoots with Cheever, peering over a valley to see what the story is all about. And the tool is quite effective.
The thirty-seven chapters seem, at times, to fit together incidentally. The novel is largely linear though some chapters seem out of order. Cheever might write about one character—Honora, the spinster cousin, for example—and then not mention her until many chapters later. She appears throughout both novels, the child of a long lineage of Wapshots, but by the end (of The Wapshot Scandal) an eccentric dowager who’s time to die has arrived. Cheever seems to have a feel for the whole of humanity, never judging his characters—almost as if he himself has at one time or another been inside the skin each one of them. Male. Female. Old. Young. Smart. Thick. Heterosexual. Homo. Sexually active. Not. Drunk. Sober.
The Wapshot Scandal
This novel seems to be more developed in many ways than Chronicle, Cousin Honora particularly. Seems that for years, both as sort of a Libertarian and as one who doesn’t care, she fails to pay her federal income taxes. In Chapter XVII she solves the problem by withdrawing all her money from the bank and fleeing to Italy. The chapter is a pleasant stand-alone narrative that makes a great short story, one of Cheever’s greatest gifts. On board she befriends a young man who turns out to be a stowaway. When she catches him stealing her money, she tries to talk him out of it. When that action fails, she strikes him on the head with a lamp and drags him into the corridor. She leaves to find help, but when she returns the man’s body has disappeared. She’s positive she’s killed him, but later as she debarks the ship, she spots him with another of the ship’s matrons. The chapter begins and ends with Honora blowing the ship’s circuit breakers by plugging in her antiquated curling iron. Is Cousin Honora too much for the world, blowing circuits wherever she goes, forging her way as does an icebreaker in the north Atlantic? Seems so, and such a quality makes her a delicious character (she might even be a distant relative of Strout’s Olive Kitteridge discussed in my review of that book).
As Chronicle was otherwise about Leander Wapshot and his wife Sarah, Scandal is largely about their sons, Moses and Coverly, and Moses’s wife Melissa and Coverly’s wife Betsey. The novel seems to limn the Wapshots as typical New Englanders (mostly British or Scottish stock): aloof, fiercely independent, and as eccentric as they come. Yet the Wapshots are softies, too, never really hurting or maiming one another or their fellow citizens. Cheever can’t seem to kill off his characters unless they die of natural causes, as Cousin Honora does near the close of the novel, returning to the United States—knowing she, as the daughter of missionaries, has lived quite a fulfilling life. The novel ends with the reappearance of the first-person narrator, and I can’t for the life of me figure out who is speaking. Cheever? An anonymous Botolphsian? God? Someone tell me, please.
Bullet Park
Famed satirization of American suburbia. It is still fresh though it is forty years old. The end is satisfying because one is led to believe that Hammer intends to murder Eliot Nailles. When he arrives at a party, Tony Nailles, Eliot’s seventeen-year-old son, is parking cars as he is wont to do. Hammer arrives extremely drunk and inveigles Tony to enter the car, whacks him over the head, and takes him to Christ Church to murder him. No explanation is offered as to why he takes Tony instead of the intended Eliot except for the sot’s drunkenness. One believes the kid is surely going to die, but due to very believable circumstances, Eliot is able to break into Christ Church and literally save his son from dying in a funeral pyre. Hammer is sent to an insane asylum. It is a satisfying end. Good wins over evil, but not by contrived manner, deus ex machina. It is totally real and unsentimental.
Falconer
As I’ve now read four of Cheever’s five novels, I see he sets up situation after situation of comparing/contrasting brothers. And usually one has a great hatred for the other. Also read “Good-Bye, My Brother,” by chance while reading Falconer. Both hated brothers meet with violence at the hands of younger brother. In “Good-bye” the younger brother is injured but escapes unscathed. In Falconer the younger brother goes to prison for murdering his brother. In the journals Cheever speaks of his brother, but one doesn’t get the sense of hatred that the fiction fulfills. Some great prose. End seems a bit pat, perhaps tame.
However, I find that I do like Cheever’s endings. All the unimportant issues (whodunit stuff) fall away, and all that remains is what is important to the story he has told. One has to have a satisfying ending, but it need not be neat and orderly to be satisfactory or satisfying, either one.
In Falconer Cheever has lost his disdain for the “homosexual,” the “queer.” However, he sets up a situation in which men often participate in homosexual behavior because of the absence of women—not out in the world where such a character would be attacked. [In Blake’s biography, we learn that Cheever was quite jealous of his brother when younger, but later in life he showed great affection for him.]
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
[Will update this review when I find my place where the marking ribbon is.]
I used to sneer at the Library of America covers when I saw them at the bookstores: black with the author’s photograph featured across the cover, a signature font used to depict the author’s name. But having read Cheever’s Wapshot novels for the second time in three years, I find the editions to be enlightening, well-edited, and a bargain. For $31.50 you get all five of Cheever’s novels: $6.30 apiece, three-and-a-half cents a page. Each LOA edition offers so much more: fine editing, in this case by Bruce Bailey, noted Cheever scholar and author of Cheever: A Life (see my BG review); a chronology of Cheever’s life; and notes that gloss Cheever’s allusions to past events, historical and literary.
Cheever uses a very sly but clever point-of-view in which readers believe they are witnessing a third-person narrative until they see the word “we” and it shifts to first-person plural for a sentence or two:
“Looking back at the village we might put ourselves into the shoes of a native son (with a wife and family in Cleveland) coming home for some purpose—a legacy or a set of Hawthorne or a football sweater—and swinging through the streets in good weather what would it matter that the blacksmith shop was now an art school?” (16).
Funny that Cheever should mention Hawthorne—because he is another author who employs this method (in The Scarlet Letter), as if the speaker is the author peeking out from his sheaves to draw us in, or is it an unnamed resident of St. Botolphs luring readers into this long, long tale that will cover two tomes before it is finished? Readers feel as if they are in cahoots with Cheever, peering over a valley to see what the story is all about. And the tool is quite effective.
The thirty-seven chapters seem, at times, to fit together incidentally. The novel is largely linear though some chapters seem out of order. Cheever might write about one character—Honora, the spinster cousin, for example—and then not mention her until many chapters later. She appears throughout both novels, the child of a long lineage of Wapshots, but by the end (of The Wapshot Scandal) an eccentric dowager who’s time to die has arrived. Cheever seems to have a feel for the whole of humanity, never judging his characters—almost as if he himself has at one time or another been inside the skin each one of them. Male. Female. Old. Young. Smart. Thick. Heterosexual. Homo. Sexually active. Not. Drunk. Sober.
The Wapshot Scandal
This novel seems to be more developed in many ways than Chronicle, Cousin Honora particularly. Seems that for years, both as sort of a Libertarian and as one who doesn’t care, she fails to pay her federal income taxes. In Chapter XVII she solves the problem by withdrawing all her money from the bank and fleeing to Italy. The chapter is a pleasant stand-alone narrative that makes a great short story, one of Cheever’s greatest gifts. On board she befriends a young man who turns out to be a stowaway. When she catches him stealing her money, she tries to talk him out of it. When that action fails, she strikes him on the head with a lamp and drags him into the corridor. She leaves to find help, but when she returns the man’s body has disappeared. She’s positive she’s killed him, but later as she debarks the ship, she spots him with another of the ship’s matrons. The chapter begins and ends with Honora blowing the ship’s circuit breakers by plugging in her antiquated curling iron. Is Cousin Honora too much for the world, blowing circuits wherever she goes, forging her way as does an icebreaker in the north Atlantic? Seems so, and such a quality makes her a delicious character (she might even be a distant relative of Strout’s Olive Kitteridge discussed in my review of that book).
As Chronicle was otherwise about Leander Wapshot and his wife Sarah, Scandal is largely about their sons, Moses and Coverly, and Moses’s wife Melissa and Coverly’s wife Betsey. The novel seems to limn the Wapshots as typical New Englanders (mostly British or Scottish stock): aloof, fiercely independent, and as eccentric as they come. Yet the Wapshots are softies, too, never really hurting or maiming one another or their fellow citizens. Cheever can’t seem to kill off his characters unless they die of natural causes, as Cousin Honora does near the close of the novel, returning to the United States—knowing she, as the daughter of missionaries, has lived quite a fulfilling life. The novel ends with the reappearance of the first-person narrator, and I can’t for the life of me figure out who is speaking. Cheever? An anonymous Botolphsian? God? Someone tell me, please.
Bullet Park
Famed satirization of American suburbia. It is still fresh though it is forty years old. The end is satisfying because one is led to believe that Hammer intends to murder Eliot Nailles. When he arrives at a party, Tony Nailles, Eliot’s seventeen-year-old son, is parking cars as he is wont to do. Hammer arrives extremely drunk and inveigles Tony to enter the car, whacks him over the head, and takes him to Christ Church to murder him. No explanation is offered as to why he takes Tony instead of the intended Eliot except for the sot’s drunkenness. One believes the kid is surely going to die, but due to very believable circumstances, Eliot is able to break into Christ Church and literally save his son from dying in a funeral pyre. Hammer is sent to an insane asylum. It is a satisfying end. Good wins over evil, but not by contrived manner, deus ex machina. It is totally real and unsentimental.
Falconer
As I’ve now read four of Cheever’s five novels, I see he sets up situation after situation of comparing/contrasting brothers. And usually one has a great hatred for the other. Also read “Good-Bye, My Brother,” by chance while reading Falconer. Both hated brothers meet with violence at the hands of younger brother. In “Good-bye” the younger brother is injured but escapes unscathed. In Falconer the younger brother goes to prison for murdering his brother. In the journals Cheever speaks of his brother, but one doesn’t get the sense of hatred that the fiction fulfills. Some great prose. End seems a bit pat, perhaps tame.
However, I find that I do like Cheever’s endings. All the unimportant issues (whodunit stuff) fall away, and all that remains is what is important to the story he has told. One has to have a satisfying ending, but it need not be neat and orderly to be satisfactory or satisfying, either one.
In Falconer Cheever has lost his disdain for the “homosexual,” the “queer.” However, he sets up a situation in which men often participate in homosexual behavior because of the absence of women—not out in the world where such a character would be attacked. [In Blake’s biography, we learn that Cheever was quite jealous of his brother when younger, but later in life he showed great affection for him.]
Oh What a Paradise It Seems
[Will update this review when I find my place where the marking ribbon is.]
July 10, 2020
I enjoyed The Wapshot Chronicle the most of the novels, by a considerable margin. I like Cheever and I appreciate his critique of (mostly) postwar suburban life. The Wapshot Chronicle has the added and delightful angle of WASPish New England decay, and his characters are at least compelling if often a touch ridiculous and unsympathetic. Parts of The Wapshot Scandal continued some of the best threads of its predecessor, but the remainder seemed to blur with Bullet Park and Oh What a Paradise It Seems as a shot at suburban Cold War consumerism and its attendant banality. Cheever's characters are constricted by suburban life, by materialism, by sexual mores, and in the case of the Wapshots by echoes of the past. It's interesting that the time he profiles is now held up by one political persuasion as the pinnacle of America's economic achievement and by another as the pinnacle of our social and communal life (*actual experiences may vary) but to Cheever and Richard Yates and even Philip Roth both aspects of postwar life are skewered. Whether it was an American Golden Age or not is debatable (see also James Baldwin), but the aspects held up for scorn are probably the facets of life that in hindsight look the best. Cheever's is not, by and large, a critique of racism, and while homosexuality is an undercurrent in four of the novels and arguably a theme in the fifth the communities in his books are not uniquely hostile to same-sex coupling. Rather it is suburbia itself that is skewered; neighbors are enemies or objects of sexual seduction/conquest; church, governmental, and civil society groups are dysfunctional or hollow; few of the marriages and/or families are functional; kids - and his children and adolescents are more accessories and plot devices than characters - are depressed; jobs are unfulfilling.
So while I understand the esteem in which Cheever is held, and I share it in reference to The Wapshot Chronicle, I found less to admire in the rest of the collection.
So while I understand the esteem in which Cheever is held, and I share it in reference to The Wapshot Chronicle, I found less to admire in the rest of the collection.
April 8, 2018
There is no one better than Cheever at describing the utterly bizarre and borderline surreal decay and degeneracy of the American upper classes. From his hysterical portrait of the Wapshots to the environmental horrors of Janice, these five novels are fantastic peeks behind the facades of suburbia.
May 3, 2025
Very entertaining stuff about American life after WWII. I read the Wapshot Chronicle and Wapshot Scandal, then decided I'd had enough of Cheever for a while. I enjoyed reading this most of the time, but found the novels a little episodic.
December 30, 2010
The first two books were great, the middle book was good, and the last two were average to poor. His characters actually remind me a lot of Saul Bellow's characters, but his writing style is quite a bit different. He spends a lot less time making obscure literary and historical references and allusions and a lot more time advancing the story.
September 7, 2009
A great compact book making it very portable. I love the ribbon bookmark that The Library of America includes with its editions
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews