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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment