MAY 2019 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 179
REVIEW BY JULIET RIEDEN.
Reading
room
THE
ChipCheek,43,
was born in Georgia
and raised in
Houston, Texas. He
remembers being
“a happy, solitary
child who much
preferred reading and
daydreaming to playing with other
children”, and wrote his first novel
aged eight. Following college, Chip
moved to New York to work in
corporate communications and
quickly realised he longed instead
to write fiction. Following a creative
writing course, he was awarded
various scholarships and Cape May
is his debut – published – novel.
Chip now lives in LA with his wife,
Katie, and daughter Audrey, and is
planning his next book.EDITED by JULIET RIEDENAbouttheauthor
Cape May
By Chip Cheek, HachetteIt’s September 1957 and the end
of the season in Cape May, the
slightly faded seaside resort at the tip
of southern New Jersey where the
Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic. Naïve
newlyweds Henry and Effie are here on
their honeymoon, both virgins embarking
on their life’s journey to get to know each
other. But the thrill of their marriage is
already wearing off and settling into their
future is falling far short of the fantasy as
the couple mooch around the deserted
holiday haven. They are about to leave
early when they come across socialite
Clara, an old school friend of Effie’s
whom she loathed as a girl, and her
glamorous set of pleasure seekers.
Clara is hosting an endless party in her
parents’ home with a changing cast of
guests, and against their better natures
Henry and Effie are sucked in. Leading
the alcohol-fuelled romps is the trio of
Clara, her older lover, Max, and aloof
Alma, his bolshie half-sister.
And so the stage is set for author Chip
Cheek’s intoxicating romance, laced with
an anxious tension which crescendos
against a background of racy eroticism.
At its heart the novel is the study of a
marriage; can love overcome betrayal?
But it’s also about the destructive
danger of desire and lust. Because of
the setting and ambiguous morality of
Clara and Max, there is an obvious
comparison to The Great Gatsby and
there are elements of the decadent
jazz age, albeit several decades later.“I love The Great Gatsby and have read
it several times, so I’m sure it was an
influence, in the faded glamour, in the
party scenes – but it wasn’t intentional,”
Chip Cheek tells The Weekly. “Henry is
certainly a version of me,” he adds. “In
writing him, I tried to imagine who I might
have been if I’d grown up in that place
and time, and how I might have acted in
the situation in which Henry finds himself.
As for Effie, my favourite character to
write, she’s an amalgam of all the tough
Southern women I grew up with – my
mother, various aunts, my sister-in-law.”
Amid skinny-dipping and dancing
there is a great deal of sex, which Chip
confesses he found “extremely difficult”
to write. “I felt an exhilarating thrill
writing those scenes, and I wrote them
in a fever, but then in revision I had to
try to make them actually good and
not embarrassing or gratuitous, and so
I suffered over those passages. It made
me never want to write about sex
again – but I bet I’m not done with it as
a subject. It’s such a fraught, immensely
complicated action, and as a writer
I find it endlessly interesting.”
The result is dark, turbulent and
ultimately thought-provoking, with an
ending that echoes around your head.