Critical Evaluation
The most immediate achievement of Falconer was its impact on the career and reputation of John Cheever. Regarded as one of the preeminent short-story writers of the post-World War II generation, Cheever was known for stories that explored with Chekhovian irony and a poetic sense of language the unhappy lives of upper-crust suburbia. By the 1970’s, however, Cheever had edged into obscurity. His brand of traditional psychological realism had fallen out of fashion in an era that emphasized highly experimental narratives. Falconer changed that. It exhibited a darker, grittier Cheever, far from the quiet streets and elegant homes of his fictional suburbia. In Falconer, for the first time in his long career, Cheever confronted in fiction the demons of his private life—his struggle with addiction (to alcohol), his estrangement from his own family (the abortion episode in the novel was apparently autobiographical), and, most significant, his torment over his bisexuality. The intensely personal nature of the subject matter gave the narrative a harrowing immediacy.
Long thought of as “just” a short-story writer, Cheever produced a novel that was lauded for the tight, parable structure it imparted to Farragut’s movement toward redemption, which drew so richly on the moral allegories of Fyodor Dostoevski’s prison narratives. Some criticized Cheever for avoiding the harsher realities of prison homosexuality and guard brutality and for incorporating patently implausible prison escapes so prominently into the narrative. Critics also pointed out that Farragut never expresses remorse or explains in any depth why he killed his brother. Nevertheless, the novel was a best seller. Newsweek, in a cover story, called it a great American novel, and in 2005 Time listed the novel as one of the one hundred best English-language novels written since 1923. His reputation revived, Cheever published his collected stories the following year and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Until his death three years later from cancer, Cheever once again enjoyed a reputation as a major American writer.
Thematically, Falconer—more than any of Cheever’s earlier works—reflects his fascination with the dynamic of the Christian fall and redemption, the tension between flesh and spirit, and the movement from suffering to joy. Himself a lifelong Episcopalian, Cheever had often cast a wary eye on his suburbia, where people unable to tap into the promise of Christian love were savaged by disappointment, carnal indulgences, and alcoholic escape. Falconer, by contrast, follows a decidedly ascendant moral arc. Initially, Farragut battles intense alienation as he adjusts to the brutal environment of the prison. To represent this environment, Cheever drew on his own experiences when he taught creative writing at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Penitentiary. He also, however, transformed the prison environment, investing his story with a sense of transcendent possibility. The novel is weighted with religious imagery, and it portrays Farragut doing more than serving time for killing his brother, and kicking his drug addiction. It portrays him redeeming his soul.
Farragut begins by discovering the difficult dynamic of love; his wife, a frustrated painter who prides herself on her beauty and her independence, has never given him the closeness of intimacy. The sexual relationship Farragut finds with the inmate Jody gives him insight into the depths of love with its attendant needs, anticipations, hungers, and consolations. The failure of his love to last leads Farragut inevitably to a higher kind of love, one that taps into the spiritual rather than the physical. In confronting his difficult relationships with his father, his mother, his son, and ultimately the brother he killed (a brother who once shoved Farragut through an open window), Farragut performs the...
(This entire section contains 1043 words.)
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Christian obligation of self-scrutiny. It is a difficult struggle; midway through the narrative, Farragut, incensed over the guards’ treatment of him, writes the three extended (and overwrought) letters of complaint that reveal the depth of his egocentricity and his stubborn pride. Farragut’s evident sensual appetite—he misses the woods and the mountains, he hankers after his fix, he relishes the release of orgasm—further reminds readers how far Farragut has to go to reclaim his soul.
Cheever’s use of Christmas imagery throughout the narrative helps prepare readers for Farragut’s reformation, his turn toward higher love, which is demonstrated most dramatically in his ministering to the dying Chicken Number Two. The old inmate—entirely abandoned by the world, his own real name long forgotten—gives up, sells his guitar, and simply wills himself to die. Cheever juxtaposes that surrender with Farragut’s contrapuntal movement toward freedom, his determination that suffering lead to joy. The novel closes with the angelic stranger promising Farragut help, even as Cheever employs images of cleansing: Farragut lingers before a laundromat and later walks in the sweet wash of a light rain.
The novel’s pat closing may be read as increasing the work’s complexity. It depicts a salvation earned by a character who has never really suffered in prison (he spends only a few months there), has never really atoned for his crime, has never actually confronted the dark demons that drove him to murder his own brother, and has never whispered remorse. Thus, perhaps the most intriguing achievement of Falconer is that Cheever undercuts his own hero’s easy (and too deliberate) movement toward redemption. The novel may be intended to underscore just how difficult it is to achieve authentic redemption by showing a character whose glib assurance of his own redemption Cheever rejects with the scathing satire that often marked his best short stories.
Farragut whines rather than suffers; he dwells in fantasies and dreams; he privileges the flesh; he is judgmental; he is secretive; and he is a schemer who rationalizes his actions. He never suffers the dark night of the soul typically necessary for moral redemption. Thus, the novel may evoke caution in readers who are unconvinced by Farragut’s improbable escape, amused by the “angel” who happens to be waiting at the bus stop for the escaped convict, and doubtful of Farragut’s too easy embrace of joy that closes the text. Cheever, himself at the close of a long and often tormented life that had taught him that redemption was anything but easy, perhaps fashions an intricately ironic parable, a complex parody of Dostoevski’s narratives of redemption.
