Falconer

By John Cheever

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Stunning and brutally powerful, "one of the most important novels of our time" (The New York Times) 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 into childhood.

In a nightmarish prison, out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307760715

John Cheever

John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.

Reviews for Falconer

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a good Wyndham novel. It was a character study, through and through, of the inhabitants of the history and the life behind the principal protagonist and what led him to his fate, describes his living, and transposes a series of events in the microcosm of the prison that is the setting.Good, but not great. 3 stars.

[presto_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Falconer, the prison where Farragut is sent to serve his sentence is the rather unappealing setting for this tale. Convicted, perhaps unjustly, for the murder of his brother, Farragut tries to make the best of his bad circumstances sharing a neglected wing of the prison with a motley crew of fellow inmates. Farragut is well educated and so at least secures an easy assignment as a clerk, but the boredom of his incarceration is relieved only temporarily when he strikes up a friendship with a young looking man, a relationship that soon becomes intimate, the two declaring their love for each other; but that is not the limit of Farragut's good fortune.While Falconer is an intelligent and perceptive novel I found it hard to become involved, mainly I suspect because the characters were hard to identify with, and certainly difficult to warm to.

[stef7sa-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Totally at a loss with this novel. Just cannot connect to the protagonist, a professor? and drug addict who has murdered his brother. It is all very improbable, illogical, inconsistent and difficult to relate to. Gave up halfway.

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read it because I'm a big fan of Cheever's short stories. I don't think on the evidence of this book that he's as good a novelist.
It's basically a prison story and, as an account of prison life, it's very well written. However, despite the flashbacks to the main character's life before prison, it was hard to engage in him as a fully drawn character and it was not made clear exactly why he committed the crime that put him in prison.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ezekiel Farragut, convicted of killing his brother, journeys to Falconer prison where he meets his fellow prisoners such as Chicken and the Cuckold, endures hostile guards and a methadone addiction, and has a love affair with a fellow prisoner.After my book club read The Night Swimmer last year, which had several quotes from John Cheever's works and notebooks, my group wanted to read one of John Cheever's novels, and this was our choice. I'm not really sure what I expected, but this wasn't quite it. Cheever can certainly craft a sentence, but I found the story and the characters mostly bleak and felt like I was missing the point at least half the time. Was there a point? I'd be hard pressed to describe a plot. I'm sure that if I were still in school, a teacher could have teased out the symbolism of confinement and imprisonment versus freedom, either of the body or the soul. But I couldn't unless I were to read it again, and I'm afraid I really wasn't captured enough myself to be so inclined.

[kirstiecat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting novel and about a subject that isn't written about too often..it takes place within the confines of a prison and there's a great deal of characterization of the prisoners and their stories as well as the philosophical thinking of the protagonist, who perhaps accidentally killed his brother and his addicted to methadone. There's some ideas of prisoner's rights as well as memories, a homosexual love affair, a clergy visit, and even a little of revolution but it leaves you with a very strange idecipherable sort of feeling throughout, including the ending, which I feel could be taken either as a literal closure or a metaphorical one.

In any case, wither when it was written in the 70s or in our present time, there aren't many authors that are really exploring the humanity of prisoners including the qualities and the flaws as well as somewhat the prison guards themselves (though more on the prisoners). Cheever brings a certain quality to the novel in terms of the way they speak and their own life histories they seem to be desperate to tell, even to the point of bribes.

I think this novel is worth reading but even more so I feel it is worth pondering because we often think of criminals in a much different way and, though this novel is only a little over 200 pages, Cheever seems to take his time developing the storyline around characters that are too easily overlooked and forgotten, and again not often the focus of the vast majority of novels.


Memorable quotes:

pg. 38 "Loneliness taught the intransigent to love their cats as loneliness can change anything on earth."

pg. 51 Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent on chance smells-grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waling in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him bearing...

pg. 80 "It was a very heavy and beautiful snow that, like some juxtaposition of gravity, seemed to set the mountain range free of the planet."

pg. 188 "I wouldn't be able to speak to you softly and with patience at this point if I did not believe that mathematics and geometry are a lying and a faulty analogy for the human disposition. When one finds in men's nature, as I do in yours, some convexity, it is a mistake to expect a corresponding concavity. Thiere is no such thing as an iscosceles man."

pg. 200 "...so I figure I must come into this life with the memries of some other life and so it stands taht I'll be going into something else and, you know what, Zeke, you know what, I can hadly wait to see what it's going to be like..."

pg. 207 "Had he raised his head, he would have seen a good deal of velocity and confusion as the clouds hurried past the face of a nearly full moon.."

pg. 208 "I got plenty of money. I been evicted because I'm a human being, that's why.

[icolford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Falconer, John Cheever's best novel, is nothing less than a 20th-century classic, a story of human failure and human redemption by one of the best fiction writers in American literature. Ezekiel Farragut arrives at Falconer prison, convicted of murdering his brother, Ebenezer. Farragut, a college professor, an intellectual, and a drug addict, has methodically cut himself off from the people in his life. He is selfish, nacissistic, aloof, egotistical in the extreme, and devoted to one thing: feeding his own appetites. But when forced into close quarters with society's dregs, he rebuilds emotional connections and frees himself of the bonds that have confined him to a prison of his own making. Miraculous things happen in these pages and Cheever sometimes strains the limits of narrative credibility. But in some ways reading Falconer is itself an act of faith because Farragut's story is transcendent and for all time. Essential reading.

[thebentley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I vastly prefer Cheever in his "suburban dystopia" mode (and I love him so much in that mode that I may have had very inflated hopes for this novel). It is actually a very good novel--especially when viewed as a dark allegory for American culture (suburban America, in particular). It is not, however, what you would call bright and uplifting. Dark, but pure quality.

[dayends · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One man's experience of a continuing drug habit and the experience of facing his own thoughts, memories and dreams inside 'Falconer' prison. An easy to read, hard to put down, darkly humorous book.