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Title: try his stories instead
Review: Somehow, this piffling little wifty novel won a National Book Award in 1958. The, supposedly, tragicomic story of the decline of the Wapshot family--father Leander, a ferry boat captain, & his sons Coverly and Moses--left me totally unmoved and uninterested.N.B.--I'm writing this two years later (May 2000) and I've figured it out. Cheever was a master of the short story (see Orrin's review of The Stories of John Cheever) and the Modern Library panel simply rewarded a bad novel in an attempt to acknowledge him as a writer. The book's still dreck, but it makes a little more sense that it made the list.GRADE: D
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