Customer Reviews

Bullet Park

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The realm of much of Cheever's fiction is the affluent suburban sprawl of Thruway-threaded upstate New York, Westchester County and environs. Like the infamous Shady Hill of his short stories, Bullet Park is a whitebread outpost for white-collar professionals who commute daily to the city and drink heavily on weekends, and often weekdays. In a comfortable house on a comfortable street in this town lives Eliot Nailles, a chemist whose specialty is mouthwash and who plies his craft with the conviction that bad breath can lead to global destruction, a respectable family man devoted to his wife Nellie and his teenage son Tony, and an avid churchgoer, although more out of a sense of duty than piety.

Tony's privileged status as an only child and a middle class Baby Boomer has bred an adolescence painful both to himself and to his parents, and he still continues to teeter on the brink of knuckleheadedness. With the insight of a child psychologist and the wisdom of an embattled father, Cheever recounts Tony's various phases: his addiction to television, his threat against his French teacher, his strange sudden interest in poetry, the brash older woman he invites to his parents' house for lunch, and especially his mysterious depression which confines him to bed for weeks and requires the healing power of a "swami" whose idea of therapy is to repeat mantras.

One day a man named Paul Hammer and his wife Marietta move into Bullet Park and befriend the Nailleses. Through first person narration, Paul reveals his colorful past: The illegitimate child of a wealthy, sculpturally ideal father and an eccentric, bookish mother, he uses his Yale education to drift drunkenly through life, translate the work of an Italian poet, and search for the perfect home -- one with a room with yellow walls. His mother's hatred of American capitalism inspires him to murder a well-to-do suburbanite as some kind of statement against bourgeois complacency -- and the man he chooses happens to be Tony Nailles.

The climax is quite surprising and arrives at a moment of the highest suspense and tension, an unusual technique for Cheever, who tends to use dialogue, thoughts, and impressions rather than action to resolve his characters' conflicts. But Cheever's fiction is always full of surprises, even though his subject matter seldom changes; his talent lies in his ability to imagine fascinating stories lurking behind the bland facades of American suburbia and crystallize them with his reliably brilliant prose. "Bullet Park" is a satire and a comedy; it patiently observes suburban provinciality and materialism, and even raises a question about oyster etiquette, all while holding up a distorted mirror to an anticipated readership that lives in places very much like the one it describes.

I remember reading this book when it came out, and feeling disappointed that it wasn't a more powerful, apocalyptic novel. Those were the 60s after all, a time when we still looked to our novels for the answers to the day's problems. Cheever wasn't interested in solving problems. As we now know, he was torn in a psychic split between different parts of his identity--the average family man, colorless and yet possessed by a love divine, vs. the bisexual swinger who lives for sensation and the authenticity of the gutter.

BULLET PARK represents this conflict in allegorical terms, and now I can see that the two neighbors and antagonists, Nailles and Hammer, form two halves of the same person. Well, that's a crude way of putting it, but at any rate reading back into the biography they perhaps represent two of Cheever's warring personalities, and in their conflict over the future of Tony Nailles, the appealing teenage son, they are going to war themselves. At stake is nothing less than the future of American literature.

I always thought this would have been a good movie--back in the day I wrote Cheever a note asking him to make sure that Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would play Hammer and Nailles in the film version. He was polite but non-committal. And I don't know who would be good among today's actors. I picked Lancaster and Douglas because those two, who of course made many pictures together, gave off the almost untangible sensation of somehow having been made for each other, like the way Plato wrote that we are all looking for the other half of the soul we were once part of. Thus even when they were playing antagonists, Lancaster and Douglas still seemed to be seeking each other out, not in an erotic way especially, but in a search for meaning that would never end.

John Cheever, the master chronicler of suburbia, wrote a great novel of the odd suburb Bullet Park. As John Updike said, "It took an effortlessly moral nature to imagine fall and redemption in that realm of soft lawns and comfortable homes." It is a simple story, but its greatness lies in its telling. From the first sentence, "Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark," Bullet Park ensnares the reader in its strange web. It also contains some of the most wonderful sentences ever written, such as this one, "Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman's breasts and the applecore she has left in an ashtray."

This is an engaging story. It takes on suburbia and treats it poetically. It tells the story of two men, Hammer and Nailles. Really, it is two novellas, the first about Nailles. There isn't much interaction between the two men until the end. It looks like a rather simple story with much subtle humor (like the two men's names) at the beginning and gets darker and more twisted as it moves forward.

Stay away from reading the book's jacket. It gives away too much of the story.

This is Cheever's most maligned and underrated novel, and sadly, the only one that's out-of-print. The Wapshot books were staggeringly rambling and at times annoying, but "Bullet Park" proved that Cheever can write novels as well as he did the short story. The narrative and prose in this book are nearly pristine--as he would also imbue the latter, slightly less successful "Falconer"--and there are prose of astonishing beauty, one of which the commentor below illuminates. Do not let this one slip by your reading list. It is his best book, I tell you. Also, I would like to add that the John Updike quote was not for "Bullet Park"; rather it was in reference to a Cheever story entitled 'The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".

If you have read Don Dellilo's "White Noise", and thought it was great, you are in for a shocker. The unintended sillyness of Dellilo's very flawed novel on suburbia pales in comparison to "Bullet Park". I do not know if you have read the Reader's Manifesto in "The Atlantic", but I can say that when you compare "White Noise" to "Bullet Park", it is like comparing Pepsi to Vintage Port. Unfortunately, today's fiction is in even worse shape than it was in the mid-eighties which is when "White Noise" was written. Cheever is a genius.

The opening is genius, and it grabbed me and took me straight to the conclusion. That suggests a gift for storytelling, and most writers don't have it. For that alone, anything less than four stars seems unfair here.

It's an uncomfortable subject-that alone guarantees some negative reviews here. But he tells a story so well-not perfectly, but who has more than brief moments that may be perfect-that he belongs on a short list of writers worth reading.

"Bullet Park" (1969), John Cheever's third novel, continues his string of novels portraying life, especially life in the suburbs, in a light that becomes darker and darker with each succeeding book. Unlike his first two novels, both featuring the Wapshot family, "Bullet Park" does not use humor to soften Cheever's vision or message.

Bullet Park is every bit the typical 1960s northeastern United States suburb. It is populated by white-collar professionals whose wives are left at home each morning when the men head to the train station and a day's work in the city. It is a place where image is important, where one's children are expected to succeed, where being seen in church on Sunday mornings is still important, and where adultery and drinking too much are common.

Cheever tells his story from two distinct points-of-view, beginning with Eliot Nailles who lives comfortably in Bullet Park with his wife and son. No matter how comfortable they might appear to be, however, no member of the Nailles family is particularly happy, or even content, with life in Bullet Park. Eliot still considers himself a chemist but works on nothing more exciting than the formula for his company's latest mouthwash; Tony, his son, is reacting badly to poor high school performance; and Nellie, his wife is unhappy about Eliot's reaction to their son's problems.

The second part of the novel is narrated by Paul Hammer, a newcomer who moves to Bullet Park with his wife, and feels drawn to the Nailles family by the strange conjunction of their family surnames. This part of the novel deals almost exclusively with Paul Hammer's memories of his past rather than with any interaction between the two families, making the novel's thrilling climax an even bigger surprise to the reader than it otherwise might have been.

In "Bullet Park," Cheever has created a surreal neighborhood filled with eccentrics and troubled cynics where anything might just happen - and often does. It is such a biting piece of satire, in fact, that one has to suspect that it reflects a lifestyle that Cheever found to be particularly meaningless.

This town feels so typical at first -- the suburban couple, husband with misc. job and wife who's good at parties. The gem in Cheever's writing is to render these people and their neighbors with the true unique humanity and quirks we all possess. Sometimes Cheever's work can seem stereotypical, everyone drinking gin and having weird suicidal urges. This book, though, is a masterful blend of truly normal people and the creepy backstory that lives next door.

What's lurking just next door, around the corner, down the street? Those nice couples that you meet at the playground, at church and at parties, there just like you and me, right? Or can you sense the insanity bubbling just behind the facade of polite scotch and water cocktail parties and rotary club meetings?

That's the theme behind Bullet Park, and Cheever explores it deftly and accurately. Some of the characters here are content with their place in the world and their neatly manicured lawns. Some are desperate and psychotic, and some are deeply depressed. Their interaction is the crux of the novel.

I see alot of Cheever influence in David Lynch's work, although admittedly Cheever's stories are much more lucid. This is my first experience with Cheever, and I am off to the library to get all the Wapshot stuff. If they are half as entertaining as Bullet Park, well then, there goes my weekend :-)