Falconer Is . . . Good

One of the things that I have loved about this reading project is that I know that every book I pick up is going to be a thrill in some way.  Even when I read a book I don’t particularly enjoy, like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for example, there is always something there for me to admire about the prose, the depiction of characters, or the narrative structure.  If I am going to invest a dozen and more hours reading a book, I’d prefer to enjoy myself and read something rewarding.  Additionally, I’d rather sing a book’s praises than play the critic and suggest its shortcomings.  When reading a renowned book, I can start from the premise that the author told the story that she wanted to tell in the way that she wanted to tell it, that each decision was a purposeful one.

I was very excited to pick up John Cheever’s Falconer as the next book on my list.  I am familiar with Cheever’s name but have never read anything by him before, and I was entirely unfamiliar with Falconer.  I was immediately taken in: the novel begins with Farragut, a 48 year old professor from New England arriving at the gates of Falconer Correctional Facility, having been convicted for murdering his only brother.  He is put in cellblock F and we meet his fellow inmates and the wardens who guard them.  The writing is enjoyable and the characters are interesting, and Farragut is a great main character, an educated well-to-do man who is an opiate addict and a convicted murderer, though he claims that wailing on his brother with a fire iron was an “accident.”

But beyond these interesting elements, the story as a whole failed to resonate with me, and the cumulative punch of the narrative is sadly lost on me.  The novel reads more like a handful of short stories set in the prison with the same characters, or like a set of episodes in a television series.  One chapter is devoted to Farragut’s opiate addiction, another to his and other’s homosexual encounters in the prison, and another to a possible prison riot for the prisoners to seize control of the jailhouse.  So the novel has something to say about addiction and something to say about male relationships and bisexuality and love and something to say about power and the control of one set of people by another or by the state, but there does not, for me at least, seem to be anything unifying or awe-inspiring in the novel as a whole.

My general and vague disappointment is countered by the statements on the covers of my Vintage edition.  In the blurb on the back, I am told that Falconer is “Stunning and brutally powerful,” that it “tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back to childhood.”   I definitely don’t see this as a narrative about the abuses of state power and the attempt to crush the humanity or manhood out of prisoners.  It is no Orange is the New Black, shining a light into prison culture and validating the status of prisoners as human beings.  Then a quote from Saul Bellow tells me that he feels the book is “indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A.”  Wow!  That is some serious stuff right there, but if Cheever is meditating on the human soul in America, I am missing it.  Finally, the cover quotes the New York Times, informing me that Falconer is “One of the most important novels of our time,” and urges me to “Read it and be ennobled.”  Again with the wow and the serious stuff!  I want to be ennobled by a great work of literature, but this was not the book to do it for me.

As I indicated in my opening paragraph, I trust that Cheever wrote exactly the book that he wanted to, so I do not fault him or his novel for my experience with Falconer.  Clearly, I am out of sync with Cheever and those who find this book to be overflowing with profundity and insight into the heart of humanity.  And that’s okay.  As I said in my post about Doctorow’s Ragtime, sometime a book just speaks to you; the flipside of course is that sometimes it doesn’t.  To those of you who share the same philosophical pitch with Cheever, you will undoubtedly find yourself vibrating sympathetically and seeing what I saw as merely clever and strong writing as profound and moving and hilariously brilliant.  I envy you your experience.  If you don’t know if Cheever is your man, reading Falconer would be a good way to find out.  The book is not overly long, and even if you don’t feel yourself ennobled by the experience, you should at least have a good time immersing yourself in his world.