Literal-minded readers-those, say, who feel clever unmasking the novel’s “Icarus Prentice” and “The American Reader”–may still say Cheever is cashing in on the family name. But in so blatantly courting the accusation-with the title, a crucial plot turn, even the jacket, which co-opts the trademark Cheever “C” from his father’s books-he paradoxically answers it. What keeps you reading “The Plagiarist” isn’t gossip value but entertainment value: witty dialogue, memorable characters, mini-zingers ending each episode. (“All right,” says Arthur to his impregnable wife, Faith, wooing her after a Super Bowl party, “but make it quick and don’t be surprised if I throw up.”) The book moves briskly on parallel tracks: Arthur’s hat-in-hand attempts to get respect from his father, sex from Faith-and fulfillment at work. Cross Calvin Trillin’s parody of Time magazine in “Floater” with Evelyn Waugh’s parody of Forest Lawn cemetery in “The Loved One,” and you’ve got Cheever’s American Reader, with its suffocatingly pastoral compound and its overeducated editors fine-tuning such articles as “The Day My Hippie Son Cut His Hair.”
The beginning of the end (or vice versa) comes when Arthur writes a heartwarming vignette about a cat-in his father’s style. It gives Cheever fils a chance to send up Cheever pere, and aficionados a chance to play Name That Source. (Tracking down the last line of this tour de force is like looking for a bullet in a park.) For Arthur, the act of plagiarism ultimately proves liberating. For readers, it’s a small revelation: we can’t help but notice how taut and unstagy the younger Cheever’s prose is by contrast to the older’s. Like the novel itself, this parody of an Olympian father by a worldly-wise son is an affectionately bemused, sometimes snarky, always engaging declaration of independence.
