FALCONER by JOHN CHEEVER 211 pages. Knopf. $7.95. In the 19th century an American dream was 40 acres and a mule. In the
second half of the 20th it is a suburban quarter-acre and a maid. For
millions, both dreams have meant a significant step up. But for the
major characters in John Cheever's fiction, suburbia is a definite step
down. His Wapshot family, for example, traced its lineage to colonial
New England and to the patriarchal Leander Wapshot who advised his clan
to “bathe in cold water every morning. Relish the love of a gentle
woman. Trust in the Lord.” In Cheever's suburbias, trying to live up to Leander's morality usually
results in grotesquely declasse behavior. Cold water is rarely drunk,
let alone bathed in. The ideal gentle woman frequently turns out to be
a lusting destroyer of traditional order. The Lord appears to have
abandoned the lawns and shopping malls to nymphs and satyrs. With Bullet Park and The World of Apples , Cheever took
middle-class innocence and evil about as far as possible. What, after
all, are the transgressions of alcohol, adultery and the idolatries of
affluence when judged against the world's unrelenting slaughter and
injustice? Cheever's visions of guilt, despair and hope clearly needed
a more extreme situation. For his new novel, he has found one in the
image of a modern penal institution. Falconer is set in Falconer State Prison, undoubtedly inspired by Sing
Sing, which is located near the author's house in Ossining, N.Y. Yet
his hero remains undeniably Cheeverish. Ezekiel Farragut bears the
burden of an old New England family, “the sort of people who claimed to
be sustained by tradition, but who were in fact sustained by the much
more robust pursuit of a workable improvisation, uninhibited by
consistency.” Translation: like the House of Lords or the German
general staff, the Farraguts knew how to survive. Ezekiel has gone too far, however.
He has struck and killed his brother with a poker. He is also a drug
addict. The notion takes some getting used to: a 48-year-old professor
of humanities on a methadone maintenance program in a prison where he
is serving ten years for fratricide. That is just the beginning. There
are Farragut's neighbors in cell block F, with names like Chicken No.
2, Bumpo, the Stone, the Cuckold, Ransome and Tennis, who on the
outside was Lloyd Haversham Jr., two-time winner of the Spartanburg
doubles. His crime was “a clerical error in banking.” On an obvious level, Falconer Prison is a bureaucratic inferno where men
are not beaten but left to burn in their memories. Farragut's flare
periodically throughout the book. He recalls the decline of his
family's fortune and their retreat into eccentricity and shabby
gentility. He remembers the beginning of his drug addiction during
World War II. As an infantryman in the South Pacific, he got regular
rations of codeine cough medicine and Benzedrine. Drugs helped him
endure a postwar world that he felt had “outstripped the human scale,”
and sustained him in his marriage to a beautiful, cruel woman.
