A review by nohoperadio
Falconer by John Cheever

3.5

On a page-by-page basis there’s a lot of beauty and intelligence in this short novel, and I’m not totally sure why the whole didn’t leave a stronger impression on me than it did. Let’s have some of that beauty first:

The light in the prison, that late in the day, reminded Farragut of some forest he had skied through on a winter afternoon. The perfect diagonal of the light was cut by bars as trees would cut the light in some wood, and the largeness and mysteriousness of the place was like the largeness of some forest–some tapestry of knights and unicorns–where a succinct message was promised but where nothing was spoken but the vastness.

I won’t say this is representative, because as well as lyricism like this there’s also a lot of bodily fluids in this book (I think all of them?). Our hero, who has had a luckier life than many of his fellow prisoners, has nonetheless been fucked up by: drugs, war, marriage, his parents, and of course What He Did, all of which his new life affords him plenty of time to think around-not-about. All this comes through in vignettey little flashbacks that somehow didn’t add up to much for me even when they were individually moving. Does this mean I should read his short stories, which apparently is mostly what he wrote?

Worth noting: the prison gayness here is more wholehearted than I expected, enough to send me on a not-unrewarded trip to the Personal Life section of Cheever’s Wikipedia page.