John Cheever  (1912 - 1983)

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Falconer by John Cheever

In a nightmarish prison a convict named Farragut--a professor, drug addict, and a fratricide--struggles to remain a man. Out of Farragut's suffering and astonishing salvation, Cheever crafted his most powerful work of fiction.  "One of the most important novels of our time . . . Read it and be ennobled."-- Los Angeles Times.

"More than just a prison novel. More than just a Cheever novel. This book transcends genre and defies catagorization. "Falconer" is the absolutely gripping story of one man's struggle with himself in an environment more brutal than you can imagine. By that, I mean emotional and spiritual brutality as much as physical brutality.

The book allows us to enter Farragut's life so completely and understand the motivations that drive his decisions. We can identify with his struggles, even his drug addiction, which he feels is "a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality." We yearn for his redemption, but we fear he may never achieve it. This is truly a profound and moving novel." -- Anonymous Review

"As implausible as it sounds, Cheever achieved literary greatness in a prison novel with its central character a college professor and murderer who is also a heroin addict and a guilty, closeted homosexual. "Oh Farragut, Farragut, why is you an addict?" asks his guard, and through flashback and reminiscence we learn how and why. One of those rare books that takes place largely in the mind but is truly gripping--and the Attica-like prison Farragut is confined to holds a few surprises of its own. It is hard to overpraise "Falconer." Honestly, if you don't like this book you don't like modern American fiction." -- Allen Smalling

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Novel by John Cheever, published in 1957 and granted a National Book Award in 1958. Based in part on Cheever's adolescence in New England, the novel takes place in a small Massachusetts fishing village and relates the breakdown of both the Wapshot family and the town. Part One focuses on Leander, a gentle ferryboat operator harried by his tyrannical wife and his eccentric sister; he eventually swims out to sea and never returns. Part Two chronicles the disastrous lives of Leander's sons, Coverly and Moses. Told in a comic rather than a tragic vein, the novel uses experimental prose techniques to convey a nostalgic vision of a lost world. A sequel, The Wapshot Scandal, was published in 1964. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever

"This second novel...about the Wapshot family is a delectable and glorious piece of fiction, especially in the three main strands of its subject matter: the pitiful lust of a well-meaning upperclass woman; the harm done by a scientist who lacks a grounding in the humanities; the humor inherent in old age. If it is a portrait of paradise, the author has included a fair leavening of serpents." --Glenway Wescott

"If you enjoyed the Wapshot chronicle, you will enjoy this, however he doesn't get into his stride until Chapter 6, or page 53. I have friends who claim they could never get into this book, and my advice to them is pick it up and start again at page 53 after which there is a great deal of the customary absurdity over which we lovers of Cheever drool. That's all, enjoy!!"  -- Anonymous Review

John Cheever (1912 - 1983)

WRITER

Cheever was a writer whose more famous novels include The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Falconer and Bullet Park.

John Cheever: Parody and The Suburban Aesthetic

By John Dyer

Excerpt:

John Cheever was able to portray the American suburbanite at mid-twentieth century as both valiant and pathetic at the same time. A character in one of Cheever's suburban tales maintains a constant balancing act between hope, ambivalence, and anxiety. He is tenuously poised between a willingness to accept his position in his genteel community and his suspicions of what might be the wrong way of life. These suburbanites are at once remarkably in control of their faculties and at the mercy of an uncertain destiny. This ability to capture this human dilemma and to combine it with one of the newest and most overlooked manifestations of the American landscape, suburbia, shows the power and insight of Cheever's art...

"The Housebreaker of Shady Hill-" Cheever's Puritanism and the Pastoral

By John Dyer

Excerpt:

"The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," from which John Cheever's 1958 collection of stories derives its name, is the best example of the author's use of the Puritan conscience and the pastoral in his fiction. The primary image in the story is that of nakedness. Cheever introduces nudity in the opening scenes of the narrative and then plays with this trope in order to make statements about his characters' feelings of innocence and guilt...

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John Cheever

American writer, who has also teached creative writing in many universities. Cheever's main themes in his books are the emptiness of life...

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