Falconer, by John Cheever

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Falconer exhibits all the best qualities of John Cheever’s short fiction, worked into novella length. Based on his experiences teaching at Sing Sing prison, Falconer is also a vehicle to dissect many of its author’s darkest demons. 

 John Cheever is arguably one of the best short story writers of the late 20th century. His silken and sinuous prose reads like the product of a natural born writer, always finding the perfect adjective or metaphor. Most of his stories run along in a stream of consciousness manner and concern themselves with sex, love, middle class problems and the corrosive aspects of American society. A main theme of Cheever’s shorter fiction is American discontent despite material wealth. There is plenty of affluence and comfort in Cheever’s world, but not much happiness.
 

The two John Cheever novels I’ve read (The Wapshot Chronicles and Bullet Park) are like one of his short stories, but extended to novel length. Falconer follows this pattern, with a few interesting twists. Its short, 150 page length makes it closer to a novella and its stream of consciousness style fits more neatly with the story’s subject matter.
 

The action takes place at Falconer men’s prison and centres around Ezekiel Farragut, who has been sentenced for the murder of his brother, Eben. The novel is really built around Farragut’s turbulent inner life. We get a lot of troubled internal monologues and unique personal perspective on the world. Orbiting Farragut are the prison guards, prisoners and occasional visits from his wife. These create further dramas to the ones happening inside Farragut’s head. Falconer also deals in considerable detail with Cheever’s bi-sexuality. Farrgut has a male lover, Jody, inside the prison.
 

Cheever taught creative writing at Sing Sing prison. Obviously these experiences furnished him with the characters, argot and situations of prison life which went into the novel. There are many uncanny echoes of Jean Genet’s prison novels in Falconer. The rest is pretty much John Cheever working out his personal demons – his sexuality, marital problems, troubled family life and general pessimism.
 

My preference is still for the short stories, as Cheever simply excelled at them. Novelist and critic Edmund White suggests that the novels lack development, but maintains they are fascinating and worthy of attention nonetheless. Falconer deserves special mention as it stands more solidly as a stand alone work and better fuses his short story skills into a longer format. The Wapshot Chronicles (1957) and Bullet Park (1969) have a static feeling. As Edmund White says, you wait for something to develop, whereas Falconer has a wonderful density and intensity, showing Cheever at his most despairing and frank.

Falconer, by John Cheever. Published by Penguin. ISBN: 9780143566359   RRP: $9.95

Collected Stories, by John Cheever

Staff Review by Chris Saliba


John Cheever (1912-1982) was both a brilliant literary stylist and a shrewd observer of his own cultural milieu. In this wonderfully bulky collection of his stories from the 1940s to the 1970s, he dissects middle-class American suburbia and reveals a people who are materially well-off but spiritually poor.

Before the TV series Mad Men there were writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Sylvia Plath, lifting the veil on perky, sunnily optimistic 50s and 60s America. While highly regarded for his novels, John Cheever is most celebrated for his short stories. He is often called the Chekov of the suburbs, employing a silvery, seamless prose to describe the seething discontents of America’s middle class suburbs.

Cheever’s stories deal with the flip side of affluent suburbia’s cheerful facade: alcoholism, adultery, troubled sexuality, family feuds, and a deep-seated envy of the wealth of others. The main paradox of Cheever’s fiction is that his characters luxuriate in all the trappings of wealth, yet  remain miserably unhappy. In one story Americans are described as being a deeply envious people, living in a constant state of disappointment. The American economy, it seems, produces wealth and misery in equal measure.

While Cheever may concentrate on gloomy themes and self-absorbed characters, his urbane prose is a stylistic feast for anyone who savours the aesthetic pleasures of reading. His stories marry a born writer’s fluid style with a high intellect and shrewd power of observation. Like Jane Austen he studies closely his own immediate society, working his observations into penetrating insights on the American condition. You often gasp at Cheever’s cleverness and panache, but he never descends into showiness.

The troubled subject matter may make these stories sound morbid, but Cheever can be hilariously funny. He has a keen eye for idiosyncratic characters and bizarre situations; his style in humour is urbane and sophisticated.

The stories in this collected edition cover Cheever’s writing from the mid 1940s to the late 1970s. The early stories follow more conventional lines, although they have Cheever’s distinctive mark. By the 1970s the stories almost dispense with any pretensions to being fiction, and read like literary riffs or journal pieces. Life and art meld into one, with the act of writing as necessary as oxygen.

To read the stories of John Cheever is to experience American life under the skin, its ecstasies and disappointments. He presents a society that has every material want satisfied, but that is spiritually sick.

Collected Stories, by John Cheever. Published by Vintage Classics. ISBN: 9780099748304 RRP: $12.95

The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever

John Cheever’s debut 1957 novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, is urbane and polished in style, somewhat reminiscent of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Cheever mixes intense autobiography with a highly stylised prose to create an overripe hothouse effect. The Wapshot Chronicle is brilliant and mesmerising, but its author’s overwhelming, obsessive consciousness saps the novel of any possible natural feeling and emotion. Candid personal disclosure is hard to decipher from imaginative flight of fancy.

John Cheever (1912–1982) made a name for himself as a short story writer during the 1940s and early 1950s, before publishing his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle in 1957. It won the National Book award the following year, and was followed by a sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, in 1964.

Cheever writes in a sleek, quicksilver like prose that is almost mannered, but is saved by its wit, poetic observation and lush psychological interiors. It has been noted by some critics that Cheever is an American Chekov, and this may be true (I’ve not read Chekov), but the writer he most reminded me of was Proust. The Wapshot Chronicle reads very much like a remembrance of youth past, rich in recalled detail, brought back to life via a highly cultured imagination. Cheever dazzles and amazes with his virtuosity, but one wonders how reliable he is as a memoirist of his own past and psyche.

There is not much of a plot in The Wapshot Chronicle, with most of the story concentrating on a New England family who live by the sea. There are the two sons, Moses and Coverly, the masculine yet somewhat flamboyant father Leander and the eccentric mother Mrs Wapshot. Like the fiction of that other chronicler of affluent middle suburban America, Richard Yates, the Wapshots have their fair share of middle class problems, and aren’t particularly grateful for all that the American economy has given them. Oscar Wilde said dissatisfaction was the first step on the road to greatness, and much American writing from this period has such unhappiness in spades.

The Wapshot Chronicle is urbane and sophisticated, full of beautiful, eccentric and unhappy people, but the reader can at times feel overwhelmed by this heady and potent mix. Sometimes you wish for a window to be opened and fresh air let in.

The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever. Published by Vintage Classics. ISBN: 9780099275275