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(based on Attica), its effect on the guards and prisoners of Falconer. (“And what do I intend?” Cheever wrote, as he entered the final stretch of work on his novel. “A story about a man of forty-six who enters prison. He falls in love with Jody, who escapes; he is visited by his wife; he suffers the agony of drug withdrawal; and he escapes. You've got to have more narrative in your bag than that. So he must have some failed escapes. Other attempts and other relationships.” The Amana scenes provide much of the latter.) These pages are diverting enough, though perhaps the only indispensable part is when the prisoners are kept from rioting by having their pictures taken beside a Christmas tree. Asked to complete a form giving the name and address of some loved one who will receive a print, Chicken Number Two writes, “Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Icicle Street. The North Pole”: “The photographer smiled broadly and was looking around the room to share this joke with the rest of them when he suddenly grasped the solemnity of Chicken's loneliness. No one at all laughed at this hieroglyph of pain, and Chicken, sensing the stillness at this proof of his living death, swung his head around, shot up his skinny chin and said gaily, ‘My left profile's my best.’ “ The compassion of the other prisoners, as well as Chicken's own blithe stoicism, prepare the reader for Chicken's role in the rebirth and liberation of Farragut.

Shortly after learning that he no longer needs his methadone fix (“You've been on placebos for nearly a month. You're clean, my friend, you're clean”), Farragut takes the dying Chicken into his cell and washes his elaborately tattooed body. Himself a somewhat priestly figure now, Chicken confesses Farragut (“Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?”), then grants him a kind of absolution, providing guidance into the mysteries of life and death:

“How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party [i.e., dying] when it's like a party, even in stir—even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. … I like you and I don't like the Cuckold and it's that way all down the line and so I figure I must come into this life with the memories of some other life and so it stands that I'll be going into something else. … I'm very interested in what's going to happen next.”

Dying, Chicken gives life back to Farragut—goading him, after a fashion, to get out of prison and start over: “Oh, Chicken,” Farragut cries, realizing he's been sitting on the dead man's false teeth, “you bit me in the ass.”

Stowed in Chicken's burial sack, Farragut leaves prison feeling a sense of boundlessness, a happy unburdening of his former self: “How strange to be carried so late in life and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh …” On the outside he is greeted almost immediately by a stranger—an “agent from heaven” who, as Chicken foretold, takes a knowing shine to him (“I like your looks. I can tell you got a nice sense of humor”) and helps Farragut re-enter the world with the gift of a new coat, a new identity. “Stepping from the bus onto the street, [Farragut] saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice.” In art, at least, all things are possible.

MAX ZIMMER HAD two younger sisters who lived in New York, and a week or so after Falconer was published—the very week when Cheever's face was on display at almost every newsstand in the country—he flew east to take his youngest sister home to Utah in a drive-away car. She was only nineteen, and recently her older sister had led the family to believe that the girl was having suicidal thoughts.

Prior to his departure, Max had accepted an invitation (“And bring your sisters!”) to lunch at the Cheevers’; he thought it might cheer things up a bit to show off his “great back-slapping friendship” with a famous author, though during the