The author of this novel is best known as a Hollywood screenwriter,
his claims to fame including the latest movie in the John Travolta
revival campaign, Phenomenon. In Cheevey, he continues
true to form, producing a novel that is tailor made for a silver
screen adaptation. Ideal, in fact, for the currently prevailing
genre in American film of ‘poignant tales of family life’ and
the oft exploited fascination for the turmoil that lies beneath
the veneer of respectable surburban existence. Cheevey
is the first person narrative of an American teenager, on the
brink of his twentieth birthday, and of adulthood. Its eponymous
hero provides the only channel of communication within his highly-strung
and disfunctional family. His sister Mari describes the various
members of the Cheever family as ‘five fingers without a hand’.
It is Cheevey’s self-assigned role to become that hand, to provide
that vital connection between the various constituents of a collapsing
unit. And whilst dealing with his reticent, violent brother, his
sister’s neurotic alcoholism and the destructive silence of his
parents’ marital breakdown, Claude Cheever must cope with his
own young adulthood and his own vulnerability.
Di Pego takes us through Cheevey’s relationships with his family
and with the women towards whom he directs his adolescent lust.
And of course with his best buddy, at which points in the novel
the dialogue degenerates into the moronic post-modern discourse
of Bill and Ted or Beavis and Butthead. The various conversational
relationships in the novel are emphasised as a central theme.
Cheevey’s parents are uncomfortably silent, his brother limited
to violent expletives and his sister, a failed academic cannot
stop talking. When Cheevey falls in love, it is with the easy,
affectionate and fluid utterances of an ‘older woman’. His yearnings
fluctuate between wanting to be her lover and needing to be her
surrogate son and in this Di Pego captures the archtypal instability
and confusion of adolescence. Cheevey fails, however, in
that its narrator does not progress far beyond the archetype.
Some of its minor characters are much more fully realised. Mari’s
struggle between her role as a mother, the demands of her husband
and her own intellectual ambitions is complex and engaging. The
quiet and hypochondriac Mrs Cheever is possessed an unexplained
Francophilia and the picture of a lonely middle-aged woman living
only for her dreams of France is one of the novel’s most enduring
images. Di Pego has peopled his novel with an imaginatively constructed
and sympathetically drawn cast, but one cannot help but feel that
each of them is left somewhat incomplete.
The publicity notes adorning the gaudy sunset of the novel’s
cover proclaim Di Pego’s work to be comparable to Catcher in
the Rye. Such attempts to confer immediate canonical status
on a new novel should always be treated with suspicion, and this
proves to be no exception. There are obvious thematic similarities
between the two texts but Di Pego’s attempts to create a Holden
Caulfield for the Nineties seems somewhat forced. Whilst Cheevey
is by no means a two-dimensional character, he fails to live up
to his prototype, for Di Pego’s prose lacks Salinger’s fluent
and artless poignancy. Cheevey’s story is undoubtedly compelling
and the tragedy that is the novel’s climax is both moving and
explosive. But herein lacks the essential difference between Di
Pego’s novel and Salinger’s masterpiece. Cheevey is an
‘action’ novel, swiftly paced and packed with ‘events’. Its hero
is pawn-like, manipulated and pressurised from all sides, but
good and essentially stable. Holden Caulfield’s tragedy is internalised
– things do not so much happen to him as happen within him, and
it is for this reason that his lonely wanderings in New York do
much more than make an immediate grab for the reader’s emotions.
Once read, they stay with us and have an effect, no matter how
subtle, on the way we view the world. Cheevey is a novel
to be enjoyed and then forgotten and it has this in common with
most contemporary American cinema. Gerald Di Pego could never
write a novel like Catcher in the Rye because he could
never make a Hollywood blockbuster from it. But read Cheevey
if you fancy a couple of hours of undemanding weepy prose. Then
sit back and wait for the movie.
Reviewed by Polly Rance
