Falconer

“Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has got enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the f*** planet to pieces.”

Read this with one of my English students who had enjoyed a story by Cheever (“The Swimmer”) and wanted to try a novel. I'd never read this author before and did not know what we were in for.

Falconer is a nightmarish, phantasmagorical tale of imprisonment and escape, more of a series of vignettes than a coherent narrative, of which some or even most of the scenes may be dreams or fantasies. The protagonist, a former WASP professor who rejoices in the name of Ezekiel Farragut, has been sent to prison for killing his brother (an act he denies and which is further explained only in the final few pages of the book). Through Cheever's stylized, mannered prose, we move in and out of his current and past experiences, impressions, memories, and visions, which are comic, repulsive, pathetic, and squalid by turns.

I would not go to this book expecting realism of any kind. It's not a realistic prison exposé. It's a sort of Inferno through which Farragut must pass, coming in the end to a kind of apotheosis, but not giving us anything solid for our tidy minds to grasp. We are only left with the certainty of what another prisoner expresses in the quote above, that in the guts of man is all the explosive needed to blow up the world – but maybe also all that is needed to redeem it.

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.