Falconer

Falconer
by John Cheever
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels

Falconer is the kind of book that prompted me to start this blog.  It's more of a novella than a novel, and reading it shortly after Infinite Jest and The Executioner's Song, it would be easy for it to be shuffled aside in the old memory bank.  It has elements of those books.  Like Infinite Jest, Falconer has a theme of finding peace and freedom from drug addiction) in the daily structure of a regimented environment - in this case, prison.  Like Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, Ezekiel Farragut is a troubled man who finds his best self after committing murder and being punished by the justice system.

The element that struck me most about Falconer was its subtlety.  Very little is spelled out, and while we spent a lot of time with Farragut we rarely get in his head.  Was he in love with the prisoner he had the homosexual relationship with?  Did he still love his wife?  Does he want to try to get together with either of them when he gets out, or start a new life entirely?  Does he repent of murdering his brother?  Why do the other inmates (like The Cuckold and Chicken Man 2) confide in Farragut?  Is he glad when he's able to overcome his drug addiction?  Why does he want to escape, and what he is escaping from, and what is he escaping to?  Farragut himself seems to be either ignorant of or perhaps afraid of the answers to these questions.