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.