John Cheever Essay
John Cheever Essay - Cheever, John (Vol. 8)
John Cheever Essay - Cheever, John (Vol. 8)
Cheever, John (Vol. 8) Cheever, John 1912–
American short story writer and novelist, Cheever draws successfully from his middle-class suburban experience to produce a fiction that paints a disturbing picture of what is wrong with upwardly-mobile America. His major thesis is the difficulty in establishing and upholding a moral identity in a society where family life and the community are disintegrating. Cheever was awarded the National Book Award in 1958 for The Wapshot Chronicle. (See also CLC, Vols. 3, 7, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Ezekiel Farragut, the hero of … Falconer, inhabits a religious and social topography roughly bounded by the contours of his name. Voices of Old Testament prophets reverberate down the corridors of his psyche, while, outwardly, he displays both the polish and the paranoia we have come to expect from Cheever's heroes….
As the novel opens, the state is in the act of appending something new to Farragut's name—the number 734-508-32. He is being incarcerated in Falconer Prison for a crime of which he feels himself to be innocent, the murder of his brother. With this fact Cheever takes his largest risk, for aside from the sheer implausibility of it, two other problems arise out of [this] Cheever novel…. Readers are liable to expect from it either a social document, a protest of some kind over the horrors of our penal system, or, more typically, a Cheever portrait of an alienated upper-middle-class American simply translated behind bars. Both elements are in fact present, but it would be a pity to come away from this book having got no more from it than that. Those who suspend their disbelief will find that, in Falconer, John Cheever has written a stunning meditation on all the forms of confinement and liberation that can be visited upon the human spirit….
[Cheever] has incorporated into the novel a symbolic richness usually
John Cheever Essay - Cheever, John (Vol. 8)
Cheever, John (Vol. 8) Cheever, John 1912–
American short story writer and novelist, Cheever draws successfully from his middle-class suburban experience to produce a fiction that paints a disturbing picture of what is wrong with upwardly-mobile America. His major thesis is the difficulty in establishing and upholding a moral identity in a society where family life and the community are disintegrating. Cheever was awarded the National Book Award in 1958 for The Wapshot Chronicle. (See also CLC, Vols. 3, 7, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Ezekiel Farragut, the hero of … Falconer, inhabits a religious and social topography roughly bounded by the contours of his name. Voices of Old Testament prophets reverberate down the corridors of his psyche, while, outwardly, he displays both the polish and the paranoia we have come to expect from Cheever's heroes….
As the novel opens, the state is in the act of appending something new to Farragut's name—the number 734-508-32. He is being incarcerated in Falconer Prison for a crime of which he feels himself to be innocent, the murder of his brother. With this fact Cheever takes his largest risk, for aside from the sheer implausibility of it, two other problems arise out of [this] Cheever novel…. Readers are liable to expect from it either a social document, a protest of some kind over the horrors of our penal system, or, more typically, a Cheever portrait of an alienated upper-middle-class American simply translated behind bars. Both elements are in fact present, but it would be a pity to come away from this book having got no more from it than that. Those who suspend their disbelief will find that, in Falconer, John Cheever has written a stunning meditation on all the forms of confinement and liberation that can be visited upon the human spirit….
[Cheever] has incorporated into the novel a symbolic richness usually