The first thing the reader notices in The Wapshot Chronicle is the novel’s paradoxical tone, a mix of comedy and tragedy, darkness and light. John Cheever is intent on imitating the richness and the paradoxical, unpredictable nature of life, full of joy, silliness, humor, love, hate, pain, and frustration in combination.

The lack of structure and logic in people’s lives is reflected in the structure of the novel, where narrative coherence, cause and effect, and meaning are subservient to the anecdotal. Just as in real life the significance of events is not always immediately clear or indeed remains obscure forever, the interpretation of what befalls Cheever’s characters is often left to the reader. The narrator’s whimsical, capricious, and arbitrary presence may be seen as analogous to God’s role in people’s lives—if one thinks of the deity as one who determines the flow of events without reference to justice, logic, or clarity. The narrator in The Wapshot Chronicle reports, sometimes with tongue in cheek; the narrator does not steer the characters from one well-structured event to the next.

A central theme of the novel is what life may mean—what people are to learn from the sum of their experiences and how they are to react to turns of events that they do not expect and over which they have no control. The Wapshot Chronicle ends with the touching description of Leander’s funeral, to which his sons have returned to honor him in his hometown of St. Botolphs. Amid his tears, Coverly reads the passage from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) that Leander wanted read at his funeral. The passage from Shakespeare emphasizes fragility—that people are all actors in some grand drama, actors made only of dreams. If there is a fundamental message in the novel, it is what Leander affirms in the notes he made in a book of Shakespeare’s work that Coverly finds while going through his father’s things after the funeral. These rules to live by, the final words in the novel and apparently the sum of Leander’s experience, are simple, very practical guides for the most part: Never sleep in the moonlight, never make love with one’s pants on, and take a cold bath every morning.

The list of rules ends with more general affirmations—that the world is to be admired, that the love of a good woman is to be relished, and that people should trust in God, after all. Hence the novel ends on a note of positive closure: Moses and Coverly have come home, and Honora has honored her promise to endow them as her heirs, now that they have produced sons. Moses and Coverly have evidently weathered their trials and learned their own lessons.

The Wapshot Chronicle is presumably a parody of histories, as suggested by the word “chronicle.” The novel tells about the distinction between what is apparent and what lies beneath the surface of personalities and events. In this regard, the novel’s narrative mocks the stature and dignity of New England and its figures (Honora, for example, is often seen in public in a three-cornered hat). The narrator also remarks that the ladies of the Wapshot clan always eat daintily in public but stuff themselves like animals at home. The history of St. Botolphs is less a story of continuous prosperity than one of decadence. In an image that illustrates the novel’s skewed tone, Honora heads for Boston shortly after Leander’s funeral to take in a Red Sox baseball game. The narrator describes her, in her three-cornered hat, as a pilgrim, gallant and absurd, who is nonetheless confident of her country’s noble power and endurance.