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.

Not Ragging On Ragtime

*Warning: spoilers lie ahead like American flags lining the main street of Smalltown U.S.A.  Read on at your own risk.*

I love reading the first chapter of a new book.  Everything is new and nothing is known.  Who is the narrator?  What is the tone?  Who is this book about?  Where and when are we and why do we seem to be here?  Sometimes the first chapter is a grand struggle to make sense of the new surroundings.  Sometimes it’s like a dream, full of familiar objects in unfamiliar lighting.  Sometimes it’s like listening to a foreign language.

For me, Ragtime was like an immersion in a warm bath after a long afternoon shoveling snow.  Everything about E.L. Doctorow’s language was enjoyable and thrilling.  I knew before the end of the first paragraph (an admittedly HUGE paragraph) that I was going to love this book, and the rest of the novel fulfilled that promise.  I will detail what it was that I found so rewarding about the book, but I must first acknowledge that any love of a particular piece of literature is primarily aesthetic.  I love a detached narrator who presents emotionally powerful scenes with understated phrases.  I love a sense of irony that makes you read both what is said and what is not said.  To take an example from that first paragraph, the narrator describes life at the turn of the century: 

Teddy Roosevelt was President.  The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms.  There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people.  Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another.  That was the style, that was the way people lived.  Women were stouter then.  They visited the fleet carrying white parasols.  Everyone wore white in summer.  Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical.  There was a lot of sexual fainting.  There were no Negroes.  There were no immigrants.

Here we have what appears to be a detailing of an historical time with what is almost textbook-like generalities.  We “learn” how people gathered, how they traveled, how they “lived.”  Only when you hit the final two sentences are you shaken from the lull you fell into as a reader and realize that you are hearing about only one tiny sliver of American populace.  These are the people who could afford to holiday, who carried parasols, played the gentrified sport of tennis—in short, the upper middle class white citizens.  That’s a narrator I want to keep talking to me!  Near the end of that same opening paragraph, Evelyn Nesbit is said to have met the revolutionary Emma Goldman: “Goldman lashed her with her tongue.  Apparently there were Negroes.  There were immigrants.”  The shock and disbelieve of the italicized “were” are nothing short of delicious.

What is established in this opening paragraph is a question that lingers throughout the novel:  what is history?  To what extent is history created and sculpted?  Doctorow blurs the line between history and fiction in Ragtime, fictionalizing historical characters and events and historicizing fictional characters and events.  Historical figures are given hilarious scenes, like Freud riding through the Tunnel of Love on Coney Island, sharing his boat with Jung; or Harry Thaw waving his penis at Harry Houdini during a trick in the Tombs; or J.P. Morgan’s conversation with Henry Ford about reincarnation.  The fictitious characters meanwhile are treated like figures pulled from history, such as when the narrator discusses the “little [that] is known about Coalhouse Walker Jr.”  The point of this blurring appears to be to call into question the authoritative nature of history, to draw to our attention how history is not different from fiction, really.  Yes, things actually happen, but all things that happen are not recorded, and all things that are recorded are not given equal weight.  There is selection and creation in history.  History as we learn it is created like a narrative to move us chronologically through the story of our nation's past that leads us to today.  And who writes history?  Who decides what stories live and which are lost?  Those in power, of course.

Power is at the heart of Ragtime.  It is the thing against which Emma Goldman is fighting.  It is the thing of which Younger Brother becomes acutely aware.  Power is at issue with the factory strike in Massachusetts, with the sexualizing of Evelyn Nesbit, with the special treatment of Harry K. Thaw, and of course it is the central concern in the narrative of Coalhouse Walker Jr, a man demanding justice from a society that believes itself just but which falls far short.  The system naturally protect Willy Conklin from any repercussions of his behavior, and it naturally vilifies Walker’s attempts to achieve justice.  When all normal channels are denied to him, Walker assumes the role of a revolutionary.  Revolutionaries are of course a sub-theme in Ragtime, since they are an attempt of the powerless to attain power.  It is no coincidence that Father’s money comes from his selling of patriotic paraphernalia.  What is the American flag but the symbol of a revolution that succeeded and became the ruling power in its turn?  But of course power does not admit easily to the power of others.   After hearing of Walker’s first retaliation against the fire department, Father cannot approve: “Does he have anyone but himself to blame for Sarah’s death?  Anything but his damnable nigger pride?  Nothing under heaven can excuse the killing of men and the destruction of property in this manner?”  But Doctorow counters this sentiment with Younger Brother’s response: “I did not hear such a eulogy at Sarah’s funeral . . . I did not hear you say then that death and the destruction of property was inexcusable.”  That tension fuels our nation and the movement of Doctorow’s novel, even when the narrative feels most relaxed.

Mother, Father, and their family are at the center of Doctorow’s narrative, a comfortable white, upper middle class family who at one time in the beginning of the novel believe “that all their days would be warm and fair.”  They represent one whole sliver of American society, the group for whom “there were no Negroes” or immigrants.  But their lives collide with the rest of American society, and nothing remains the same.  By the end of the novel, Mother has married Tateh, an immigrant, and their family consists of her white little boy, his Latvian little girl, and Coalhouse and Sarah’s baby.  They are an entirely new American family, worlds apart from the family that begins the novel.  Importantly, all the characters in the family are entirely fictitious, but they are the truest portrait of American in the novel.  “True” things happen in the novel, but the truth itself lies in the fiction.  

Ragtime is funny and moving and thought-provoking.  It is imaginative and relevant and utterly compelling.  It is, in short, a fantastic novel, and I look forward to reading more by Doctorow.