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 least some vision of dignity, and to write what might be his last statement on the wall seemed to him an undue exploitation of a bizarre situation.

With the exception of organized religion and triumphant fucking, Farragut considered transcendent experience to be perilous rubbish. One saved one’s ardor for people and objects that could be used. The flora and fauna of the rain forest were incomprehensible, but one could comprehend the path that led to one’s destination.

Farragut killed the time easily at the top of his methadone high. Time was new bread, time was a sympathetic element, time was water you swam in, time moved through the cellblock with the grace of light.

“I guess it was during the ball game. Some dude blew me while I was watching the ball game. I don’t know who it was. I mean if I’d known who it was I would have killed him, but I was so interested in the game that I didn’t notice. I love baseball.”

kindle and Audible audiobook. 225 pgs. 6 July.