Novel: Falconer

Synopsis
Ezekiel Farragut, once a comfortably middle-class university professor, enters Falconer prison after a violent episode that leaves his brother dead. Stripped of his social roles and comforts, Farragut confronts the habits and appetites that have defined his life: alcohol, vanity, and a private, corrosive anger. The narrative follows his days and nights within the prison's walls as he endures brutality, boredom, and the slow accretion of small mercies that force him to examine who he has been and who he might become.
Prison furnishes Farragut with an unforgiving mirror. Interaction with guards, fellow inmates, and visitors exposes layers of guilt and longing he had long avoided. The novel traces his tentative moves toward vulnerability, the painful awareness of his own culpability, and the search for a kind of spiritual redemption that never feels facile or assured.

Characters and Relationships
Farragut is the book's central focus, but the novel orbits around the people who inhabit Falconer with him: fellow prisoners who are alternately brutal, tender, comic, and inscrutable; guards whose routines are both petty and ominous; and a few visitors from the outside whose presence refracts Farragut's past life. Among these relationships are intimacies that challenge the protagonist's assumptions about desire, shame, and companionship, pressing him to reconfigure how he understands love and responsibility.
Rather than sketching one neat redemptive friendship, Cheever renders a network of connections that are messy and contradictory. Acts of kindness occur beside acts of cruelty, and moments of clarity are often undercut by recurrence to old behavior. These relationships illustrate both the human capacity for empathy and the persistence of patterns that are hard to uproot.

Themes and Symbolism
Falconer explores guilt, confinement, and the possibility of moral transformation. The prison itself functions as a potent symbol: a place of punishment that paradoxically offers a space for self-examination. Themes of masculinity and sexual identity run through the novel, treated with psychological nuance rather than polemic; Cheever probes the ways private longings collide with public shame and how intimacy can become a catalyst for change.
Bird imagery and the evocation of flight subtly permeate the book, invoking freedom and its opposite. The title suggests both mastery and captivity, hinting at the tension between human aspiration and the constraints of circumstance and character. Throughout, Cheever interrogates the costs of denial, how a life built on suppression and performance can finally demand reckoning.

Style and Legacy
Cheever's prose in Falconer combines the crystalline observation of his short stories with a darker, more sustained moral seriousness. Sentences move between understated wit and wrenching lyricism, balancing detailed realism with moments of symbolic heft. The narrative voice keeps a steady attentiveness to interior life while never losing sight of the social and institutional forces around the characters.
Published late in Cheever's career, Falconer stands as a compact but powerful novel that enlarged his reputation beyond the domain of the suburban short story. It remains notable for its unflinching look at suffering and desire, and for the humane, often ambiguous way it treats the possibility of redemption without dissolving the novel's moral complexities.