Once upon a time the Wapshots of St Botolphs were distinguished for their unshakable good opinion of themselves. But in John Cheever's simultaneously poignant and hilarious companion volume to The Wapshot Chronicle, the family members drift far from their New England village - and into the demented caprices of the mighty, the bad graces of the IRS, and the humiliating abyss of adulterous passion. The Wapshot Scandal is a novel of a large and tender vision, filled with pungent characters and outrageous twists of fate and, above all, with Cheever's luminous compassion for all his hapless fellow prisoners of human nature.