Word: cheevers
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FALCONER by JOHN CHEEVER 211 pages. Knopf...
...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...
...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 (1969) and The World of Apples (1973), 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...
There is also prison loneliness, which, Cheever writes with painful accuracy, "can change anything on earth." Farragut, previously a dog breeder, becomes attached to a jailhouse cat. Farragut, previously a heterosexual, falls in love with a fellow prisoner. Loneliness can change anything...