Bullet Park – John Cheever, 1969 ★★

Leading Lives of Unquiet Desperation

Was John Cheever an elegant miniaturist out of his depth when writing longer fiction? Or do I need to expand my reading horizons and allow for some suburban surrealism divorced from narrative constraint as long as it is ennobled by fine prose? I go back and forth after this, my latest venture into the tangled hollows of Bullet Park.

Published in 1969, Bullet Park resonates with Cheever’s Westchester County-based concerns about substance abuse, middle-class conformity, and existential angst and dread. In it, we meet two sad residents of said community, a pill-popping chemist reduced to merchandizing mouthwash named Nailles and a rootless new neighbor named Hammer. As the names imply, when Hammer meets Nailles, it’s going to be bad news for someone.

What Bullet Park does have going for it is sparkling prose. The opening chapter lays it out beautifully by shuttling us to various pillars of Bullet Park society, litterbugs 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.

Is violence at the heart of this book? There are some violent deaths sprinkled through the fitful narrative, and the climax involves a truncheon and a chainsaw. The book jacket pushes this idea, calling Bullet Park “where the American Dream went crazy.” A boy is arrested for threatening a teacher, a man shoots a giant turtle with a shotgun, and a commuter is suddenly swept into oblivion by a passing train.

Yet Cheever in a Paris Review interview shortly after the book’s publication pointedly shrugged off that theory. In Bullet Park, he explained to the interviewer, “I’d done precisely what I wanted,” which he explained had to do with the book’s conclusion as well as the dual narrative he employed to get there.

If there is an overarching theme to the novel, it is ennui. Right at the outset, Cheever describes a hillside of desolate-seeming homes as filtered through the perspective of a rebellious teen, unnamed here though it may be Nailles’s introspective son Tony:

The lights of Powder Hill twinkled, its chimneys smoked and a pink plush toilet-seat cover flew from a clothesline. Seen at an improbable distance by some zealous and vengeful adolescent, ranging over the golf links, the piece of plush would seem to be the imprimatur, the guerdon, the accolade and banner of Powder Hill behind which marched, in tight English shoes, the legions of wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, booze-fighting spiritual bankrupts.

I didn’t notice any wife-swapping or raging anti-Semitism, though Bullet Park is certainly swimming in alcohol. Hammer drains bottle after bottle: When I went into a bar I would wait until the bartender turned his back before I tried to get the glass up to my mouth.

Later, he meets a woman who matches his thirst: She was, I saw, one of those serious drinkers who prepares their utensils as a dentist prepares his utensils for an extraction.

Drinking is understandably a big concern in Bullet Park; Cheever himself was in the habit of getting sauced to the point it triggered a near-fatal pulmonary edema a few years after the novel’s publication. He beat his problem in the 1970s and stayed sober thereafter, but you sense here it must have been a near thing.

John Cheever photographed by Nancy Crampton for Paris Review. He made his home in Ossining, New York, a suburban community not unlike the setting of Bullet Park. Image from https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3667/john-cheever-the-art-of-fiction-no-62-john-cheever. 

Nailles’s restless conformity is challenged by his own addictions, his mother’s senile catatonia, and his son’s sudden bout of extreme depression which lays him up to the point of bedsores. This is the main drama of the novel’s first half, though Cheever concludes it abruptly after teasing it out for many pages. A lot of ideas get this treatment in Bullet Park, rendering it more a mosaic of impressions than anything coherent. Characters come and go after delivering long monologues about life and love.

Hammer’s own fitful narrative includes unloving parents and a deep melancholy, a “cafard” which can only be doused by living in a room of yellow walls.

His situation is further complicated by a quiet insanity he apparently inherited from his socialist, self-isolating mother. Taking up one of her suggestions, he decides what society needs is a “crucifixion.” With a name like Hammer, he is just the man to deliver it. Who better to receive same than a stranger with a name like Nailles?

Hammer’s reasoning for this plot is par for the course in this odd novel: Conscientious men live like the citizens of some rainy border country, familiar with a dozen national anthems, their passports fat with visas, but they will be incapable of love and allegiance until they break the law.

The names are a problem for those like me who prefer fiction follow some recognizable laws of nature or sensibility, not the kind that made Don DeLillo possible. But the tone is just as much of a problem. It’s off-putting, discursive, and recondite to the point of extreme navel-gazing.

Nailles’s story goes through so many non-sequitur episodes one gets dizzy tracking it all. After a while, you realize there is no point trying. The book itself is organized as a pair of novellas, the first focused on Nailles and the second on Hammer, with a short Part 3 that ties up their separate stories in a big finale that, despite its author’s expressed satisfaction in Paris Review, strives a little too hard for effect. Individual chapters read like loosely-connected short stories, each teasing out some idea about suburban life and its myriad disappointments before petering out with a shrug.

“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 only came after I made peace with Bullet Park’s plotless center.

The quality of unreality grates early and persists throughout. It’s hard for me docking Cheever for writing such absurdities, since I know the man had a reputation for it which won him many fans. This is, after all, the author of a famous story about a man who decides to swim all the pools in his neighborhood one after another like a climber assaulting Everest. For years, Cheever was credited with having a line on everyday living that earned plaudits from contemporaries like John Updike and Joseph Heller, of pulling off masks and exposing hypocrisy in ways that were both honest and comic.

Some comedy is sorely needed in Bullet Park, however. Hammer fixates on his long-absent father’s legendary physique, which endures in the form of sculptures he once posed for that now decorate edifices on both sides of the Atlantic. Only thus can he have any presence in his son’s life. Nailles ponders his penis, “a domesticated organ with a love of home cooking, open fires and the thighs of Nellie,” she being Mrs. Nailles, who is more tempted to stray but always pulled back by fate. You get a feeling Cheever was having some fun with names, anyway, maybe too much.

When Nellie sees a play in Manhattan, she is shocked by the sight of a male actor disrobing and displaying himself before the audience: She seemed to have glimpsed an erotic revolution that had left her bewildered and miserable but that had also left her enthusiasm for flower arrangements crippled.

Cheever’s handling of women is both arresting and risible. They come off as either shrinking violets or harpy queens. Hammer’s wife Marietta throws a housewarming party and then berates Hammer as too gutless to have an affair until their guests flee. Marietta is described as a woman entirely driven by the weather, albeit in reverse. Thunderstorms render her docile and loving; sunlight provokes her temper.

Hammer, who certainly has his own issues, understands: The woman who dreamed of a mink coat – Hammer thought – had more common sense than the woman who dreamed of heaven. The nature of man was terrifying and singular and man’s environment was chaos.

There are so many inspired observations like this that I found myself wanting to like this novel more than I did. In a New Republic review of Bullet Park, Anatole Broyard lays out its core problem better than I can: “It is as if, in doing his little numbers, in running through the catalog of his many talents, Cheever loses interest in his characters and his story. He’s like a brilliant talker whose sentences are so full of inspired digression and incidental felicities that he forgets what he has set out to say.”

Certainly it feels so when it comes to the central story, of Hammer’s final encounter with Nailles. When it finally happens, it does so quickly and nonsensically, as if to tease out some grander statement about the futility of life as lived in a fictionalized Westchester County. We are told at the book’s end that “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles – drugged – went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.”

The sarcasm of that final line manages to come off both thick and hollow, for me unearned by the fact I was never able to warm to Bullet Park’s characters as people, however diverting their foibles may occasionally be.