Maybe I’d like Falconer better if I had a penis.

That might seem obscene (not to mention absurd), but if you’d read this book, you’d understand that my bringing it up isn’t out of the blue. Farragut, the limp and apathetic protagonist of this novel, mentions his dick with stunning regularity. I might not mind so much but he finds a way to connect it to every anecdote, memory, and conception of himself, that it felt alienating at first and then just flat-out ridiculous. So maybe if I had a penis, I’d understand Farragut’s bizarre obsession with his own, how it busts in to deflate otherwise poignant recollections—but, seeing as I don’t, I can’t judge whether he’s got some sort of strange fixation or whether Cheever’s just writing a realistic male character. I might be generous if it weren’t for phrases like these:

“...he had been skeptical about his sensual responsiveness ever since he had, while watching the approach of a thunderstorm, been disconcerted by a wet and implacable erection.”

“Considering the fact that the cock is the most critical link in our chain of survival...”

“Considering the sovereignty of his unruly cock, it was only a woman who could crown that redness with purpose.”

I’ve known some women who speak of their genitals as “life-giving” and “magical” and whatever and I find it similarly stupid, but it’s undeniable that, in the Western world at least, Farragut’s brand of phallocentrism has been the dominating dogma for centuries, so I find it more difficult to be charitable here, especially when it actively got in the way of some of Falconer’s more clear-headed moments.

But enough about dicks. The dick-worship wasn’t my main problem with this novel. My complaint is the complaint of high-schoolers everywhere forced to slog through “the classics,” of reviewers of your favourite book that you hate-read late at night, of the child with nothing better to do than read some old dusty tome found on their grandpa’s shelf... This book is boring.

That’s really all it comes down to. Maybe it sounds infantile to say it so bluntly, but: It’s fucking boring. I won’t deny Cheever’s talent; there are some wonderful passages here, but they’re few and far between, and bogged down by the utter flab by which they’re surrounded. Farragut is self-absorbed, sex-obsessed, apathetic, irresponsible, immature, and classist, but on top of that, he’s boring. I don’t mind reading about a protagonist who’s not particularly likeable, but god, they have to be engaging at the very least, and Farragut is about as engaging as a piece of stale bread. A piece of stale bread with a dick.

The critical response to this novel is baffling to me; the glowing blurb from Newsweek stares out at me from the cover like that shaft of morning light that cuts between your blinds to burn right into your eyes and wake you up. I’m glad so many people got so much out of this book but frankly I can’t imagine what they got. I found it lifeless, ridiculous, boring, and, that dread adjective, pretentious. I felt that it was assuming a profundity and an insight that it frankly didn’t have, and in addition to boring me half to death it just made me roll my eyes.

This is my first foray with Cheever in decades, the last being Bullet Park, of which I have no real memory. Falconer shares with the little Updike I've read that quality of describing bourgeois suburban marriages and their particular material and emotional concerns in a way that dulls any sympathy I might feel toward the characters. No one is this story is especially winning or admirable or singular.

Neither the prisoners nor their guards nor even Farragut himself inspire any real empathy — I want simple humanity for all of them but otherwise can imagine no kind of meaningful life for any of them outside Falconer's walls. Probably I'm poisoned by popular entertainment to want at least one character with whom I can relate, for whom I have a rooting interest — not strictly speaking an innocent man, because who among us? — and yet Cheever firmly denies us that character.

Cheever does, however, open Chapter 3 with a spellbinding, almost transcendent description of addiction with whose prose I wish the rest of Falconer shared more in common. There is the occasional paragraph or scrap of dialogue or turn of phrase that excites the reader for a moment, but it never again approaches the heights of Chapter 3. It merely trudges along, as one presumes prison itself does. Maybe that's the point.

John Cheever’s Falconer tells the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and heroin addict, who has been imprisoned at Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Whilst in prison, Farragut ruminates on his life thus far: his failed marriage, his child, his addiction, his sexuality. The latter of which I was quite taken with as the novella is incredibly frank and explicit in its discussions about homosexuality (and, briefly, lesbianism) and sex in general. One scene in particular that stands out describes how some of the prisoners participate in public, group masturbation, ejaculating into a trough; an act that the narrator describes as an 'utter poverty of erotic reasonableness.’ I think it’s important to note here that whilst Cheever himself was gay (although he was married with children), he was incredibly homophobic (no doubt an internalisation of his shame). Without getting too psychoanalytical, it would perhaps not be amiss to suggest that this scene, and the book in general, is about these internalised feelings. In fact, whilst Falconer is often considered to be a prison novel, some have suggested that it is actually a novel about being closeted, whereby the setting of the prison represents being trapped in ones sexuality.

I’ve never read any Cheever before but had obviously heard a lot of great things about him given that he is considered one of, if not the, greatest short story writers in American fiction and has earned him the title of ‘the American Chekhov’. Yet, I found this novella a real slog to get through, despite it being only 150 pages long. I wouldn’t say his writing style is particularly hard to read, but I struggled to connect to this text and often found my mind wondering whilst reading, although this probably speaks more to me and my fuzzy dissertation brain than to the quality of Cheever’s storytelling. I also found the ending slightly cheesy - but as to not ruin it for anyone who might pick this, I won’t say anymore about it! I will probably re-read this at some point because I think a lot of it went over my head. I also want to read some of his earlier work which sounds a bit more me.

Like most of the great American novels of the 70's and 80's, Falconer suffers from a bit of literary pretension that makes one feel as if the Emperor weareth no clothes...

Cheever is a masterful storyteller and his prose never suffers though his subject matter drags it through the mud. Farragut is a new inmate at Falconer Prison. Wait, make that Falconer Correctional Facility. A drug addict in for accidental fratricide, he is a man with a painful family history, a dysfunctional marriage, and an overwhelming lust for every woman he meets and, now, some men.

Thus Cheever takes us along on the semi-thoughtful journey of a well-educated, once wealthy man as he slowly detoxes, nearly loses his mind to boredom and solitude, interacts with the erratic liars in Cell Block F, and slowly comes to terms with the extreme reaches of dysfunction in every element of his own past.

This story would have been a lot more impactful if it weren't so intentionally shocking with sexual details and prison life grotesqueries. To some extent, that may be the point for a novel about a man locked up in a modern prison. But with little growth or change felt in the main character, it begins to feel like a shock-and-awe parade of horrible memories and horrifying experiences is all Cheever can offer, with little that transcends in such a promising premise.

Not as engaging as Oh What a Paradise it Seems , and definitely a little at odds with its own sexuality, but when it works it works. The best moments are the moments of surprising sensualness.

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.

Cheever does not cease to impress me.

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.

This was a quick read that kept me engaged, but felt, hot take, easily forgettable. Farragut, a drug addict, has been jailed for fratricide in Falconer prison. He goes through prison life recounting his former life , his below average marriage, his troubling relationship with his brother and his attempts to fight back against his imprisonment and subsequent dehumanization. Cheever raps on themes like crime and punishment, freedom, solitude, redemption, education and the class system, sex, love, pain and the living dead of the prison system, the fall of man, the bounds of mortality and prison reform.