Falconer

“Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has got enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the f*** planet to pieces.”

Read this with one of my English students who had enjoyed a story by Cheever (“The Swimmer”) and wanted to try a novel. I'd never read this author before and did not know what we were in for.

Falconer is a nightmarish, phantasmagorical tale of imprisonment and escape, more of a series of vignettes than a coherent narrative, of which some or even most of the scenes may be dreams or fantasies. The protagonist, a former WASP professor who rejoices in the name of Ezekiel Farragut, has been sent to prison for killing his brother (an act he denies and which is further explained only in the final few pages of the book). Through Cheever's stylized, mannered prose, we move in and out of his current and past experiences, impressions, memories, and visions, which are comic, repulsive, pathetic, and squalid by turns.

I would not go to this book expecting realism of any kind. It's not a realistic prison exposé. It's a sort of Inferno through which Farragut must pass, coming in the end to a kind of apotheosis, but not giving us anything solid for our tidy minds to grasp. We are only left with the certainty of what another prisoner expresses in the quote above, that in the guts of man is all the explosive needed to blow up the world – but maybe also all that is needed to redeem it.