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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Violence And The Suburban Cocoon,
By
This review is from: Bullet Park (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)
The line on John Cheever is that he was a great short story writer who faltered down the stretch. Nothing about "Bullet Park", one of his few novels, makes one think otherwise.
Published in 1969, "Bullet Park" resonates with Cheever's Westchester County-based concerns about substance abuse, suburban conformity, and what it all means in the end. Picking up where his famous short-story "The Swimmer" left off, we meet this time two desperate men, a functional alcoholic who merchandizes mouthwash named Nailles and a rootless new neighbor named Hammer. As the names imply, when Hammer meets Nailles, it's bad news for someone. What "Bullet Park" has going for it is great prose. The opening chapter lays it out beautifully by shuttling us randomly to various pillars of Bullet Park society, drunks and suicides and a couple whose violent domestic disputes don't interfere with their busy social calendar. "When they arrived at a party they would be impeccably dressed but her right arm would be in a sling. He would support a game leg with a gold-headed cane and wear dark glasses. She had sprained her arm in a fall. He had broken his leg in the winter and the dark glasses concealed a mouse that had the thrilling reds and purples of a late winter moon, cloud-buried and observed by some yearning and bewildered youth." Violence is at the heart of what "Bullet Park" seems about. The book jacket describes it as "where the American Dream went crazy", though Cheever in a Paris Review interview shortly after the book's publication pointedly shrugged off that theory. However, violence was then tearing the American Dream down, and violence is what's on display here, a boy threatening a teacher, a father swinging a putter at a son, a shotgun blast smashing into a giant turtle, and a final act involving immolation and a chainsaw. It sounds exciting, but it's really not. Nailles's story goes through so many non-sequitur episodes one gets dizzy trying to track it all. Cheever channels Nailles' pill-pooped stream of consciousness before moving on to Hammer and an even more baroque, entirely unrelated tale involving a Socialist socialite and a man who puts the moves on a soused widow so he can idle his life away in a house of yellow walls. "It was emotional, intimate, evocative, and as random as poetry," Cheever writes of a conversation at a bar, and that goes for the book as well. Sometimes I enjoyed the randomness, as when a barfly tells a story about his ex-wife and a missing diaphragm. But that's in part a function of "Bullet Park's" plotless center. The two stories do come together, suddenly and inexplicably, in a way that reminded me of "American Beauty", though without the good parts. Theories aside, whatever Cheever was trying to get at was lost on me. Stretch out a couple of short stories, I guess. It wasn't successful, but I did enjoy the man's company.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping.,
By Yaakov (James) Mosher (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Bullet Park (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)
"Bullet Park" is funny, sad and poignant. John Cheever is a latter-day Mark Twain. This 1969 work better describes the Generation Gap (see the relationship between Nailles and son Tony) than anything I've read. A superb slice of post World War II Americana.
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