Review of the Day: Falconer by John Cheever
John Cheever is now criminally underread. Let me commend this book about a man named Farragut, serving time in Falconer prison for killing his brother. The language is remarkable: You see, I’m in cellblock F. It’s sort of a forgotten place. Like Piranesi. His cock, so recently ready for fun, retreated from Waterloo to Paris and from Paris to Elba. Obscenity worked on their speech like a tonic, giving it force and structure, but the word “fucking,” so much later, had for Farragut the dim force of a recollection. Farragut had seen the cats of Luxor, Cairo and Rome, but with everybody going around the world these days and writing cards and sometimes books about it, there wasn’t much point in linking the shadowy cats of prison to the shadowy cats of the ancient world. He could write his indictment on the wall and then commit it to memory, but some part of his background and its influence on his character restrained him from using the wall for a page. He was a man, he preserved at ...
