FALCONER by John Cheever

Finished Th 5/23/24

This is one of my ancient hardbacks and I know that I have read it before, but there was nothing on the flyleaf. 

I thought the title was 'The Falconer', but it's just 'Falconer'. That is the name of the prison where the action occurs. 

An unusual take on homosexuality...."I haven't had sex with a man since the Boy Scouts". Ezekiel Farragut is the central character and he is in jail for killing his brother. Although he admits to hitting his brother with a golf club, he feels that he died because he fell and hit his head after being hit with the club. He seems to feel that there is a difference. 

A link to a review at 'Slate':

https://slate.com/culture/2013/09/john-cheevers-falconer-the-writers-prison-novel-was-his-masterpiece.html

The review at 'Kirkus':

"It is many years since we left the Steuben glasshouse world that was, so unmistakably, Cheerer country. Via Bullet Park, a gentler, more vulnerable book than this, he introduced his broader and deeper ranging metaphysics of life and death, always in mysterious tandem. They're constants here in Falconer prison where Farragut, 734-508-32, a fratricide and a drug addict, is serving a zip to ten sentence. The drug he really hopes to find is a "distillate of earth, air, water, and fire." While Farragut reflects on his mortality and courts "death's dark simples," filth and degeneracy—redolent of Genet—are all around him. The Valley, for instance, is a urinal trough where you really go to relieve other needs unless you've turned homosexual. Farragut is briefly drawn to Jody, indicted on 53 counts, Jody who talks and listens in his abandoned water tower—his own private treehouse. But in spite of the physical solace Jody provides, Farragut is alone with his thoughts or dreams or memories. Cheever's prose is an amazingly flexible instrument, moving from the scatological within these cold, granite wails to the high of the true "croyant"—the believer detached from life and racked by the prospect of Judgment Day. He's equally in sync with bitter-sentimental satire—the annual Christmas tree and color photograph with inmates, the bequest of a "fucking do-gooder. . . they cause all the trouble." As another cellmate, Chicken Two, lies dying, he says quietly "I'm intensely interested in what's going to happen next." So evidently is Cheever. It is part of the upsweep, the shackled vision of the book. Though the fate of Farragut and Falconer may be open-ended, Cheever's novel is a strong fix—a statement of the human condition, a parable of salvation."

From the book's page at Wikipedia:

"Kirkus Reviews called Cheever's prose "an amazingly flexible instrument" and summarized the novel as "a strong fix—a statement of the human condition, a parable of salvation." Reviewing the book in 1977 for The New York Times, Joan Didion wrote, "On its surface 'Falconer' seems at first to be a conventional novel of crime and punishment and redemption—a story about a man who kills his brother, goes to prison for it and escapes, changed for the better—and yet the 'crime' in this novel bears no more relation to the 'punishment' than the punishment bears to the redemption. The surface here glitters and deceives. Causes and effects run deeper."

Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005.

I liked the book and want to read more by Cheever, but this is his 'Prison Novel' and not at all like his other writing.

TOTAL CONTROL by David Baldacci

 Finished Su 5/19/24

This was a paperback that Janny loaned me.

A terrorist downs a commercial airliner. He places a packet of acid that causes the plane to lose a wing.

The entire book is a search for who did it and why. However, I knew that after 500 pages the 'reveal' would be hardly worth the effort. Baldacci is more about the chase and maintaining the literary tension.

From the internet:

"Jason Archer is a young executive at a world-leading technology conglomerate. Determined to give his wife and daughter the best of everything, he has entered into a deadly game of cat and mouse. Left behind. The grieving Sidney soon learns the job interview Jason was flying to never existed."

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"In a hugger-mugger attempt to follow up his bestselling Absolute Power (1996), Baldacci pits a young widow against corporate villains who want her silenced at all costs. When her husband Jason apparently dies in the crash of a jetliner bound from Washington to L.A., Sidney Archer's near- perfect world implodes. A high-powered attorney working on the latest merger planned by Triton Global (a high-tech multinational that employed Jason on hush-hush computer projects), she can't accept that the beloved father of her precocious little daughter Amy is dead. Sidney's subliminal faith is not misplaced. Jason, who had shopped his company's darkest secrets in an effort to make a quick financial killing, switched planes before takeoff and is alive but not well in Seattle. On the day of his funeral, Sidney hears from him via phone. She keeps her own counsel, but Lee Sawyer (an FBI agent assigned to the case) is suspicious because available evidence suggests that Jason not only sabotaged the downed aircraft but also engineered a megabuck embezzlement. Presciently, however, the missing man had encrypted his proof of Triton's misdeeds on a duplicate disk that he mailed to himself before disappearing. Eager to get a printout that could clear Jason, Sidney sets out on a roundabout odyssey that takes her from suburban Virgina to Manhattan and points north. Although Triton's corrupt CEO and his murderous, stop-at-nothing minions are on her trail, clever Sidney foils them at almost every turn. With help from a besotted Sawyer, the pistol-packin' mama also begins unraveling the mystery of her mate's vanishing act. In a violent climactic confrontation on the stormy coast of Maine, the two learn the truth about an immense conspiracy in which Jason's fate is but a sideshow. A talky, tedious tale of an unlikely heroine's desperate life on the run, longer on confusion than suspense or narrative coherence."

THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy

Mo 5/13/24 Went on to something else {'TOTAL CONTROL' by David Baldacci}

I got this book from the library as an E-book via Hoopla. I read almost 200 pags and then decided to drop it. 

It wasn't bad, just not good. I really want to read 'THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy.

***As I was typing this entry I noticed that 'THE MOVIEGOER' is on sale at Amazon for under six bucks. I ordered it immediately. 

' The Last Gentleman' concerns a young 'good' man who is befriended by a strange family. Some interesting incidents and some nice writing, but I just ran out of steam. 

From the book's page at Kirkus Reveiws:

"Walker Percy's The Moviegoer was the rather unexpected National Book Award winner in 1961. His last gentleman suffers from the same contemporary malaise — a kind of dislocation. He is Bill Barrett, an amiable, anomalous young man from an old Southern family. He had gone North to find himself equally homeless and aimless. Some of this is externalized by the fact that he has "fugue states," amnestic spells, as well as moments of deja vu. They are all just symptomatic of his ambiguity and detachment. Whereas his moviegoer prowled, Bill is a "watcher, a listener and a wanderer." In moments of greater clarity or resolution he thinks about marrying Kitty and settling for the happy, useful life. Meantime he becomes involved, insofar as he can, with Kitty's family, the Vaughts: her predatory sister-in-law Rita; her younger brother, Jaimie, who is dying of leukemia; and Sutter Vaught, Rita's husband, a doctor whose casebook provides some savage soundings on civilization— religion, race, concupiscence, sin, etc. These give a harder satiric edge to the book than was achieved in the earlier one; so does the final scene, the death watch over Jaimie, which is certainly powerful. But there are times when following Walker Percy is a little like trying to catch your shadow. On the other hand he writes about his elusive young man and his elliptical world in such matter of fact prose and with seemingly random details which are actually, intentionally, a commentary on modern life and all its flimsy props. This gives the book much of its contrast and interest.... Attention seems assured if agreement over some of the implications less likely."

THANATOS SYNDROME by Walker Percy

Finished We 5/8/24

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I'd never read. It was a little difficult to follow, but great ideas and concepts. 

From GoodReads:

"The 1990s. Euthanasia and quarantines for AIDS have become the norm. But can even this world sanction a substance that "improves" people's behavior and so reduces crime, unemployment and teen pregnancy? A riveting bestseller by the author of The Moviegoer."

 From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Dr. Thomas More, Feliciana Parish psychiatrist, bad Catholic, boozy and allergic, makes a return in Percy's quasi-sequel to Love in the Ruins (1971)—and though the apocalypse seems just as certain now as it did then, things in this near-future seem somewhat calmer than were the earlier book's race wars. Euthanasia (both of helpless children and helpless oldsters) is general, AIDS and Alzheimer's patients are quarantined, and Dr. More himself has spent some time in Federal prison in Alabama for selling amphetamines to long-haul truckers (Percy's not one to put too glamorous a sheen on his heroes). But out on parole now, More notices odd findings in some of the few patients he has left, as well as in other people (including wife Ellen). They seem increasingly affectless, mindlessly well-balanced, given to specific information but not abstraction—and, weirdest of all, they are exhibiting primate-like behavior: public grooming, rear sexual presentation by females, etc. What's going on, it turns out, is a little bit of rogue socio-medical engineering by a bunch of local research doctors who are feeding heavy sodium ions into the drinking water of selected Feliciana Parish populations, and achieving spectacular results: no crime, no rape, no unemployment, no existential terrors, no alcoholism—at the price, however, of turning these people into monkeyish robots. And More—of the old school, someone who appreciates the up as well as down side of a good spiritual malaise—tracks down this Nazi-like experiment and endeavors to do something about stopping it. Percy has it all at his fingertips—the lovely character details, the ambiguous heroism of More, the fond eroticism—but maybe a little too much so: the thriller-like core of the book, tracking down and closing up the heavy-sodium project, has twice the this-and-then-that procedure it needs, half the novelistic shading; you get a sense of Percy bespelled by his own facility at writing low-brow in a high-brow framework. And like later Waugh, the comedy relies on types rather than on individual rascals (the exception is the wonderfully venal chief of the heavy-sodium doctors, Bob Comeaux). Love in the Ruins held together better, but a continuation of that book's specifically moral and at the same time antic lope is no bad thing at all; Percy fans will find it very agreeable, despite the thinness." 

I want to read more by Percy and I borrowed 'THE LAST GENTLEMAN' from the library through Hoopla @ Kindle. 

THE DARK HOURS by Michael Connelly

 Finished Tu 4/30/24

This is a paperback that Janny loaned to me. It's very late in the Bosch series and features Renee Ballard.

The title refers to 'the night shift'. Renee Ballard likes to work without a lot of people and 'late nights' are just fine.

TWO CASES:

1) A man is shot during a New Years celebration. Because so many people fire guns into the air, at first it was thought to be an accident. It was really one of his partners who wanted to take over the business. It seemed that this was an 'inner-city' business and a group of white dentists wanted the enterprise.

2) Midnight Men rapists- A team of rapists are preying on women. The tip-off is that they disable the street lights in front of the victims' homes. Renee learns that these men are contacted on 'the dark web'.

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Meet today’s LAPD, with both good and bad apples reduced to reacting to crimes defensively instead of trying to prevent them, unless of course they’re willing to break the rules.

New Year’s Eve 2020 finds Detective Renée Ballard, survivor of rape and Covid-19, partnered with Detective Lisa Moore, of Hollywood’s Sexual Assault Unit, in search of leads on the Midnight Men, a tag team of rapists who assaulted women on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve without leaving any forensic evidence behind. The pair are called to the scene of a shooting that would have gone to West Bureau Homicide if the unit weren’t already stretched to the limit, a case that should be handed over to West Bureau ASAP. But Ballard gets her teeth into the murder of body shop owner Javier Raffa, who reportedly bought his way out of the gang Las Palmas. The news that Raffa’s been shot by the same weapon that killed rapper Albert Lee 10 years ago sends Ballard once more to Harry Bosch, the poster boy for retirements that drive the LAPD crazy. Both victims had taken on silent partners in order to liquidate their debts, and there’s every indication that the partners were linked. That’s enough for Ballard and Bosch to launch a shadow investigation even as Ballard, abandoned by Moore, who’s flown the coop for the weekend, works feverishly to identify the Midnight Men on her own. As usual in this stellar series, the path to the last act is paved with false leads, interdepartmental squabbles, and personal betrayals, and the structure sometimes sways in the breeze. But no one who follows Ballard and Bosch to the end will be disappointed.

A bracing test of the maxim that “the department always comes first. The department always wins.”