Falconer

By: John Cheever

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into his childhood. Only Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make this book such a triumphant work of moral imagination.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of John Cheever's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Blake Bailey about the life and work of John Cheever – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.©1977 John Cheever (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

" Falconer is splendid. It is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A." (Saul Bellow)

Wonderful Cheever

I stumbled upon Cheever as THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES was on the Modern Library Critics 100 List (which I really liked) then I found Cheever wrote one of my favorite short stories THE SWIMMER. So I added all Cheever Audible to my todo list.

Falconer is a very good novel, but I liked Wapshot significantly better, yet it has the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that Cheever does so well. Falconer is a very unusual story of addiction, crime, punishment, escape, recovery, and redemption. The "unusual" is that these classic story arcs don't follow any classical elements.

Saul Bellow (another of my favorite authors said "Falconer is splendid. It is rough, it is elegant, it is pure. It is also indispensable, if you earnestly desire to know what is happening to the human soul in the U.S.A."

The plot of the story isn't very interesting, but

the writing is awesome. The author artfully plays the serious and the ironic off each other.

Unsettling and beautiful

There is something both unsettling and beautiful about this compact Cheever novel. A novel of punishment and redemption, Falconer is also a story of addiction, of confinement, of an introspective man moving from his isolated past to his very human present.

It is hard to compare Cheever's style to anyone, but there were moments where I felt I was floating in the same literary river as O'Connor, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Percy. His prose is amazing, his imagination is sharp, and the depth of his soul-searching is absolutely sublime.

Jay Snyder's narration and this Audible Modern Vanguard production were nearly perfect.

Nope.

Although the narrator is terrific, I did not like this story . At. All. It jumped around too much. Other Cheever works are much better than this one in my opinion.