Exhaustion

John Cheever’s fiction burned like swimming pool chlorine: high in the sinus maze. He ran a mown world; the little hand got stuck at cocktail hour; elegiac sunset light glazed patios. I felt upwardly mobile reading Cheever: I thought I’d have to declare him on April 15. Yet afraid: electric hedge clippers had the killing sound of a BAR; there were unfound pungi traps on your lawn. Of course no one ever died in a Cheever. People, um, left. (Recall that Bullet Park commuter who is dematerialized, all but his shoes, by the speeding express train? Mass transit.) Cheever spoke to us about death as a parent might speak about run-over pets: kind euphemisms that terrify and confuse more than blooded fact. After Wapshot, gentle dread moves into suburbia: implicit murder and violence and sexual hostage-taking. So subtly, though, that no Cheever person can separate terror from paranoia or from the terror of paranoia. Expressionism, I suppose: Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie. Subconscious middle class fears get thrown up on the screen: a home slide show. Yet that juxtaposition—horror and martinis— seemed futile, self-indulgent, comic. What did all this have to do with Vietnam or affirmative action: with important matters: UNESCO, for instance? Nothing; and it was a blest relief.

The new novel is Cheever upside down. Falconer has been transferred to a different neighborhood—Falconer Penitentiary—where real violence hangs out. John Cheever is uneasy with real violence; real violence means real guilt, and Cheever, a gentleman, just can’t bring himself to indict. Evil in Falconer isn’t expressionist, it’s expressed: Cheever will try to airbrush it over with shadow and dream, but the effort doesn’t quite come off. Farragut, his protagonist (fratricide, heroin addict, college teacher—that last crime carries the heaviest sentence), Farragut is an immigrant from Cheever’s land of fanciful suburban ambushes. Halfhearted, half-assed attempt after halfhearted, half-assed attempt has been made on Farragut’s life: by brother, father, wife. In comparison the hardcore, honest crime of Falconer is welcome. Welcome, but not very intriguing.