Cheevey

by Gerald DiPego

Book Overview

In the tradition of "Virgin Suicides" comes an enchanting, critically acclaimed novel of a young man's coming of age in the '90s. Claude Cheever--Cheevey--is about to turn 20 and his family is disintegrating around him. But as he begins to spread his wings and experience adulthood, Cheevey learns that there is a price for letting go too soon--and not soon enough.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0446673099
• ISBN13: 9780446673099
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A young man comes of age in SoCal

Cheevey is turning twenty and occupying the same psychological space in his family unit as he's always had, he's the baby of the family, a little spoiled, a little used, he's grown up happily free of some of the pitched battles his older brother Phil and his sister Mari used to have with their Mom and Dad, who by the time Cheevey came along had rather given up on life. Dad runs a TV store downtown, where Cheevey works, while Mom longs to go to France. I kept thinking that "Mom's" story was the invention of a Hollywood screenwriter and didn;t ring true. Outside of that, the only false note was DiPego's suggestion that a streert person prominent in the storyline might actually be a famous recluse whom another character in the book has been trying to find all along. This is Ross Macdonald territory and even he could hardly ever carry out such a preposterous plotline. I liked Cheevey, he is an admirable young man, decent in every respect, thoughtful, kind, loyal, and good at heart. His horndog crushes on two older women are appealing. You'll laugh out loud at the one part where one of them enters the bathroom where he's taking a shower and in distress he turns his back on her, waiting for her to leave. "You turned your ass to her?" exclaims his best friend, later on, while Cheevey tries to explain himself. "What could I do? What d'you think, I flashed her?" The brother, Phil, and the sister, Mari, carry around most of the psychic baggage of the parents' miserable alliance. Like a good younger bro, Cheevey tries to help each of them as they enter their own crises, while trying to minimize the pain he's feeling too. When Mari's little boy, Ballyhoo, develops some troubling symptoms of neurosis, Uncle Cheevey is the first to spot the ways in which the cycle of abuse keep coming on over and over again if unattended and unspotted. The book will make you laugh and will make you cry. DiPego, who wrote the Hollywood programmers ANGEL EYES, INSTINCT, and THE FORGOTTEN, shows here that he is capable of something on a higher scale, a "worthy" work of literature.

coming of age in southern california

This is a great book, a must read. Cheevey is dealing with his world falling apart as he nears his 20th birhtday. He's a good kid trying to be grown, while at the same time trying to keep all the people in his life (family and friends) functioning. While he doesn't quite make it, it's a fun read and a moving book.

"Cheevey" was a sad book, and somewhat depressing.

"Cheevey took me a while to get into. I didn't exactly understand everything that was going on. Cheevey and his whole family are messed up. Cheevey is at his 20th birthday, and his whole family is falling apart. His parents are divorcing, his brother's an alcoholic, and his sister is obsessed with the subject of her thesis. Cheevey is the one who is trying to hold his family together, and it isn't working. I thought this book was sad, and I couldn't read it for a long time because I got depressed. "Cheevey" is definitely not light reading.

A deeply moving coming of age story.

"There are families and anti-families. . . . Families are dense and produce gravity, Anti-families are hollow and therefore without gravity, and mine is exploding outward into the universe."This statement is central to Gerald DiPego's Cheevey, a novel that poignantly portrays the miscommunication and tension among members of a quintessential American family, a topic that is currently receiving a great deal of attention in this election year. DiPego has not, however, filled this book with 1950ish scenes of a happy family being broken apart by modern American tensions, but instead focuses on a much more subtle force, the inability of most family members to properly express their love, or any emotions for that matter, for each other. The novel follows the experiences of Claude Cheever--Cheevey--just prior to and following his 20th birthday. The reader watches Cheevey, a remarkably caring and empathetic character who, as the youngest of three children, deals with the tensions of young-adulthood while attempting to hold his family together. As his sister says, he tries "to be the hand" that will connect the five separate fingers of the family. The family, however, seems intent on breaking apart: his frugal father retreats into a television set while his mother goes "to France," the term for her study where she dreams and plans for her eventual escape to the actual country; Phil, the angry eldest son, drinks heavily, picks fights, and rarely speaks to either parent, forcing Cheevey to serve as his messenger; and Mari, the most caring and communicative of the family, attempts to balance the demands of her doctoral dissertation, the motherhood she feels emotionally unsuited for, and her miscommunicative, troubled marriage. As Cheevy nears adulthood, the emotions his parents have been "tunneling" since his birth finally begin to emerge and reshape into bitter, seething anger and resentment. Deeply pained, Cheevy seeks for a method to resolve the hatred between his parents, whose stares clash across the dinner table like "crossed swords." In Cheevey's exploration of relationships, love, and communication, the reader becomes deeply involved, hoping that Cheevy will find a way to hold his family together, or at least be able to remain intact himself; whole, against situations that appear bent on emotionally fragmenting him as completely as the novel's other characters. As powerfully as Cheevey is portrayed, however, the most sympathetic character in the novel is his sister, Mari. She struggles against her own sense of fragmentation caused, in part, by memories of her parents's earlier battles, before their "tunneling," and against her current marriage to a man who constantly shouts at her to "grow up." Despite her fragmentation, Mari's wit and insight make up much of the novels's force. She always utters the right phrase to humorously and pointedly describe a situation, but remains unable to fully find