View from the Big House

By R.Z. Sheppard

FALCONER by JOHN CHEEVER 211 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

In the 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."

In 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.

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.

Ezekiel has gone too far, however. He has struck and 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."

On an 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 woman.

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.

Cheever's great strength has always been his ability to charge both the ordinary and the fanciful with emotion. Falconer is strong on feelings, even though they often overflow the novel's loose structure. Farragut is admittedly a man keenly aware of the banal ironies of his life and of his own sententious observations. Yet at times Cheever imposes them on the reader as if the novel itself were a correctional institution. "We prisoners," says Farragut, "more than any men, have suffered for our sins, we have suffered for the sins of society, and our example should cleanse the thoughts of men's hearts because of the grief with which we are acquainted." Another sententious observation would be equally true: crime's victims are no strangers to grief.

Perhaps one of the most palpable feelings that Cheever conveys is of Falconer Prison as a mortal illness that must be overcome. One inmate escapes by disguising himself as an altar boy and slipping out with a visiting Cardinal and his party. That the Cardinal actually aids the man is Cheever's way of saying that miracles are still possible. In the end, Farragut himself escapes like the Count of Monte-Cristo by hiding in a body bag intended for a dead convict. Since -- unlike the Count -- Farragut has no plans for revenge, the point seems to be that survival is always a miracle and reward enough. Falconer is not a young man's book.

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