Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [328]
Up to that climactic moment, the novel proceeds in a series of eddying digressions—memories, set pieces, particularly “Browningesque monologues,” as Gardner pointed out—the last a long-standing element in Cheever's work: to give two random examples, an incidental shoeshine man in “The Superintendent” confides at length that the smell of shoe polish gives him dirty thoughts, and a military chaplain in The Wapshot Chronicle harangues Coverly about his neglected church services and other sorrows. Such outbursts serve little purpose but to remind the reader, in passing, of Cheever's most abiding theme—loneliness, the terrible need to connect—and nowhere is the device more aptly pervasive than in Falconer. “Oh my darling,” Farragut writes to “a girl he had lived with for two months when Marcia [his wife] had abdicated and moved to Carmel” (the girl is never mentioned again). “Last night, watching a comedy on TV, I saw a woman touch a man with familiarity—a light touch on the shoulder—and I lay in bed and cried. … I do not love, I am unloved, and I can only remember the raptness of love faintly, faintly.” Even his loathsome brother Eben achieves a fleeting poignance in recounting an extravagant attempt to communicate with his wretched wife by wangling an appearance on her favorite game show, Trial and Error. Having fallen off a tightrope into a water tank before a studio audience, Eben rushes home and excitedly asks his wife if she caught him on TV. “ ‘She was lying on a sofa in the living room by the big set,’ “ he tells Farragut. “ ‘She was crying. So then I thought I'd done the wrong thing, that she was crying because I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, “What's the matter, dear?” and she said, “They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!” Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can't say that I didn't try.’ “ Eben's monologue is characteristic—a futile confession of loneliness, a voice crying out in a wilderness of other tormented, self-absorbed people. (“Stop fussing with my breasts,” says the narcissistic Marcia to her husband. “I'm beautiful.”) As for the prisoners of cellblock F, one by one they speak their pieces but remain forsaken, nightly retiring to a long cast-iron urinal called the Valley, where they stand without touching and “fuck [themselves].”
Farragut's redemption begins with his love for Jody, though he worries at first that this, too, may be so much lonely narcissism (“If love was a chain of resemblances, there was, since Jody was a man, the danger that Farragut might be in love with himself “). But while Jody is both vain and loquacious, he's also “a very good listener,” and his monologues tend to be somewhat instructive—as when he lectures Farragut on the proper way to smile: “‘It has to be real. You can't fake this selling smile. … Now watch me smile. See? I look real happy—don't I, don't I, don't I, but if you'll notice, I keep my eyes wide open so I won't get disgusting wrinkles.’ “ Far from narcissistic, Farragut's love affair with Jody is all but selfless, leaving him both bereft and lighthearted when Jody flies away in the cardinal's helicopter. The rest of Jody's escape, though not ostensibly from Farragut's point of view (as is the rest of the novel), may be understood as a figment of his imagination—a hopeful fantasy foreshadowing his own liberation, which likewise will be assisted by an “agent from heaven”: “It is exciting, isn't it?” the cardinal remarks to Jody, leading him to a Manhattan clothing store and then, twenty minutes later, setting him free on Madison Avenue. “[Jody's] walk was springy—the walk of a man going to first on balls, which can, under some circumstances, seem to be a miracle.”
After Jody's departure from the novel, some forty pages of filler ensue—namely a long, mostly superfluous sequence about the riot at “Amana”