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had been blacklisted, Lehmann-Haupt went ahead and reviewed Cheever's “extraordinary new novel” himself: “After a first reading … I could report that I had devoured it hungrily, marveled at the grace of its prose, been given nightmares by its early passages, and come away from it with a sense of a world set right.” That left Joan Didion's front-page notice in the Times Book Review of March 6, and although Didion had never been anything but lavish in her praise of Cheever, he worried all the same (“the rivalry between novelists is worse than the rivalry between sopranos”). But she, too, thought Falconer an “extraordinary new novel”—its author a consummate artist, whatever the ethos of his fiction. “‘Falconer’ is a better book than the ‘Wapshot’ novels, a better book even than ‘Bullet Park,’ for in ‘Falconer’ those summer lawns are gone altogether and the main narrative line is only a memory.”

A few days later Newsweek hit the stands (“A Great American Novel: John Cheever's ‘Falconer’”), and demand for the book exploded—unfortunately, there were no copies available. The first printing of twenty-five thousand had already sold out, and Knopf had yet to fill orders for forty or fifty thousand more. Cheever expected his agent to intervene, but Donadio was slow on the uptake. “My agent's brain seems gravely damaged,” he angrily reflected. “I may call Knopf this morning and break my relationship but very little would be accomplished.” Instead he decided to get rid of Donadio, albeit with such exquisite politeness that the woman hardly knew what hit her—only that Cheever was suddenly cool on the telephone, and eventually wrote her a gracious note: “I have neglected to thank you for your part in FALCONER. … It was you who got me the advance that let me imagine the book, it was your restraint that saw me through two heart attacks as well as drugs, alcohol and suicide without a nagging letter and it was your confidence in the book that helped it through its rather confused reception at Knopf.” Having written as much, Cheever hired a lawyer to sever the connection; Donadio (“a Jewish den-mother,” he once described her) was “devastated”: “We did like each other a lot for a long time,” she later mused, proposing that she'd been fired because she knew too much about her client's bisexuality, and not (as Cheever explained to a friend) because she'd “gone completely insane.”

All's well that ends well. Gottlieb saw to it that eighty thousand copies of Falconer were rushed to the stores, and the novel spent three weeks at the top of the Times best-seller list—ultimately selling almost eighty-seven thousand in hardback and over three hundred thousand in its first paperback edition. While it was still number one, Cheever wrote his daughter a note: “The lesson let us help one another was not lost on you.”

“I LIKE TO THINK of Falconer as the sum of everything I've ever known and smelled and tasted,” Cheever told Newsweek, and this may be as good a way of explaining the novel as any. Beyond the elaborate prison metaphor—flawlessly detailed yet oddly dreamlike, as in much of Cheever's best fiction—Falconer is perhaps his most deeply personal work: a tabulation of his own singular afflictions, ordered as a parable of sin and redemption. That said, the narrative bristles against the logic of a pat allegory (or pat anything), and readers who attempt to fit Falconer into any kind of formula are liable to be a little confused. “Tentatively—very tentatively—one would have to say that it is about coming to terms with humanity through the medium of homosexual love,” Lehmann-Haupt awkwardly ventured, while John Leonard (who'd managed one of the most ingenious critiques of Bullet Park) pretty much threw in the towel: “Sentence by sentence, scene by scene, Falconer absorbs and often haunts. As a whole, it confounds.”

As with Bullet Park (“Paint me a small railroad station then”), Falconer opens with a resonant image:

The main entrance to Falconer … was crowned by an escutcheon representing Liberty, Justice and, between the two, the sovereign power of