Word: farragut
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...speaks in a casual drawl. He has also managed to achieve a space first of sorts. He asked for-and got -grits (dehydrated) on his breakfast menu for this month's moon trip. But Duke's playfulness is deceptive. He was class valedictorian in prep school (Admiral Farragut Academy, St. Petersburg, Fla.), graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy and later earned a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from M.I.T. Married and the father of two boys, he is also the only Apollo 16 crewman who openly made a point of listing reading...