In a way, I hesitate to give this novel merely a 4 because I'm guessing that when Cheever originally wrote it in 1967, it was a great deal more astounding. Bullet Park is about a suburb of NYC where there's a very thin veneer that everything is going smoothly. The locals are suicidal, homicidal, adulterers, racist, impossibly sad, addicted to illegally prescribed medicines, TV, cigarettes and alcohol and at the end of the week they all go to Christ's Church like the good little Christians they are. In a way you feel very sorry for some of them if they were so unlikable with their tortoise shooting sense of entitlement. And, I think the point Cheever is making is that you need to look more closely at people because they just aren't as simple as they seem. Fortunately, though this point has been made multitudes of times since humans could hold pencils, he delivers in a twisted and interesting way with a commanding sense of language that helps you identify with the glimpses of these tortured moments. For some it's just how to live a life. There's no other way and there's not a huge amount of hope in the novel. Bullet Park will always exist. NYC will always exist. Homocidal maniacs that make a big hit at cocktail parties will always exist and really, what else do we have to fill the history books of America?There is such a sadness here. There is such torment and it is thick and ripe and you can sense and feel it with all cells of your body.Also, I really liked the bit about the cat.Memorable quotespg 10 "Vital statistics? There were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year because of a winding highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil..."pg. 25 "Sitting at their breakfast table Nailles and Nellie seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip, but why was this? They had erotic depths, origins, memories, dreams and seizures of melancholy and enthusiasm."pg. 36 "The opening night seemed to him to have had the perfection of a midsummer day whose sublimity hinted at the inevitability of winter and death."pg. 40 "One morning Tony refused to get out of bed. "I'm not sick," he said when his mother took his temperature. "I just feel terribly sad. I just don't feel like getting up."pg. 61 "What is the pathos of men and women who fall asleep on trains and planes; why do they seem forsaken, poleaxed and lost? They snore, they twist, they mutter names, they seem the victims of some terrible upheaval although they are merely going home to supper and to cut the grass..."pg. 79 "She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of the day."pg. 86 "The secret to keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old."pg. 117 "I'm not afraid of the dark but there are some kinds of human ignorance that frighten me."pg. 128 "All rain tastes the same and yet rain fell for Nellie from a diversity of skies. Some rains seemed to let down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory. The rain that day tasted as salty as blood."pg. 157 "I have noticed, in my travels, that the strange beds I occupy in hotels and pensions have a considerable variance in atmosphere and a profound influence on my dreams."...pg. 159 "but wouldn't you say that I possess indisputable proof of the fact that we leave fragments of ourselves, our dreams and our spirits in the rooms where we sleep?pg. 178=179 "The station was then being razed and reconstructed and it was such a complex of ruins that it seemed like a frightening projection of my own confusions and I stepped out into the street, looking for a bar.pg. 187 "Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all of the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, loved the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman's breasts and the apple core she has left in an ashtray. I loved it all and everyone who lived."pg. 196 "I can't drive safely on the goddam Jersey Turnpike sober. That road and all the rest of the freeways and thruways were engineered for clowns and drunks."
What an intensely odd novel. The old adage that each novel teaches you how to read as you go doesn't really ring true here; Bullet Park shifts modes at least twice, making for an . . . uncomfortable? reading experience. Overall, it's a book that bears re-reading, once you've figured out its game. The novel opens with an odd, lyrical, tense-shifting passage that fades into a typical past-tense third-person narrative. Early on it becomes clear this is highly satirical, though this becomes a bit of a problem at times when you realize it's not particularly funny. There are also times when Cheever falls prey to the same overlyrical, narrative-choking prose that he (and I, in my own head, have) criticized Updike for, but it isn't really flagrant or sustained, thankfully. Anyway, maybe halfway through there's an abrupt shift to the first person POV of a character who up till now has been somewhat minor. By the time you're almost done with this novella-like interlude, you realize it's been a wonderful Ford/Harrison-like meditation type thing, but by then it's too late, because we shift again to the third person for a quick summing up of the story. The ending, too, is really strange. Sure, it's a satire, but the final sentence is so dripping with irony it almost feels amateur. All this said, the novel is full of great sentences/language, and it was a relatively quick read, though structurally it's pretty thin/messy. Even within the parts things seem pretty disconnected and episodic. What was the importance of Tony's being sick, other than to move things along with a bit of suspense, for example? Still, this is the first of Cheever's novels I've read and not completely despised. I'll read it again some time, now that I know what to expect. It has that old-world charm that's evidenced in his stories, though, again, his stories are much better. Cheever was not a novelist. I've said it before. Nonetheless this was interesting and worth reading.
What do You think about Bullet Park (2006)?
Well, if you want to learn the rules of how novels work, it's good to read ones that won't (or can't) play by those rules. Watching Cheever's instincts chafe against the novel form, and watching him accept that and willfully embrace the resulting weirdness, is pleasurable. It would be maybe awful if he didn't write everything with such exquisite style. But every sentence is musical, though the totality is much stranger. I like it. What he seems to be at odds with is the novelist's shameless repetition of objects and ideas. Instead of revisiting objects and letting them accumulate value for the reader, Cheever instead propels the reader through a tunnel of unconnected incidents which can appear quite arbitrary but which hold together thematically, that is, abstractly, symbolically. Only later do you realize that the tunnel is descending and the grade is getting steeper, and that those seemingly haphazardly arranged incidents are forcing you towards some emotional disaster.
—Matt
E niente.Quando si usa questa locuzione non è mai davvero niente. C'è sempre qualcosa che segue, e dopo il mio niente, cioè dopo questo libro che è uno di quelli che prendi il notebook, se sei scrittore, e lo lanci dalla finestra perché tu quando mai la scriverai una cosa così, decido di fare seguire un po' di mestizia assortita. Così, tanto per distrarmi mentre vedo il notebook roteare in aria prima che arrivi sui sampietrini. Ci posso aggiungere anche un po' di livore, dicendo che il finale non è nemmeno la puzza degli altri nove decimi del libro, ma mi farei tana da solo, e allora è meglio che stia zitto e incassi questa meraviglia di Cheever.
—Sergio Donato
The last paragraph of this Rumpus review of Bullet Park pretty much nails it. Oprah's been off the air for a year now, but look at what books our culture prizes these days and it's clear we still live in an age where the greatest endorsement a book can get is from TV. There's no question that our highest literary praise is still reserved for all that is slick, polished, and cinematic. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad: The Art of Fielding and The Rules of Civility are two refined and flawless novels that both came out last year and that both sit unabashedly near the top of my list of greatest books I've read in recent memory. What I'm saying (as is the Rumpus reviewer) is that perhaps that hunger for all that is easily digestible, page-turning, and lose-yourself-in-able in literature has dulled our craving for the pleasures of reading a book that is challenging and difficult -- not ambitious works, necessarily, just works where a great writer is toiling away but not necessarily succeeding at his project. This is such a book. Cheever is breathtaking. Reading any sentence in this book, it seems not only impossible that anyone would surpass him in ability and intellect, it sometimes feels impossible that there even exists a human being who could understand and articulate something so majestically and powerfully. But the book is still a mess. Part 1, the "death to suburbia" section about Nailles's life, is a tour de force of ideas and writing, but is still a tour of the very subdivisions where it's set -- i.e., plotting-wise, it's full of dead-ends, unfinished business, meandering asides like placid yet menacing cul-de-sacs of the mind. (Perhaps it's the cul-de-sac the Drapers from "Mad Men" live on, which is called Bullet Park Road.) Part 2, about Hammer's itinerant life, is gripping in tone but nonsensical-bordering-on-bad-gonzo-journalism in style. Its presence (nay, necessity) in the emotional and allegorical thrust of the book becomes clear only pages and pages later, in the final, abrupt, cruel, bitter climax. Whatever the state of our critical faculties regarding what makes a book worthwhile, this specific book throughout remains a quick (dare I say slick?) read, full of sound and fury and signifying much more than one could capture in a web review. So I would wholeheartedly recommend this jolt to the system to any book lover like myself, who dares to calls himself an avid reader yet looks back at his Goodreads feed to find only a sea of books endorsed by stuffy prize committees, twee Brooklyn friends, and self-absorbed NPR talking heads. To quote Cheever's last lines: "wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful."
—A
