Bullet Park

By John Cheever

From "a master American storyteller" (TIME), Bullet Park traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and the man who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in Bullet Park with one objective—to murder Nailles's son.

Welcome to Bullet Park, a township in which even the most buttoned-down gentry sometimes manage to terrify themselves simply by looking in the mirror. In these exemplary environs Pulitzer Prize winner John Cheever delivers a lyrical and mordantly funny hymn to the American suburb—and to all the dubious normalcy it represents—written with unparalleled artistry and assurance.

“A magnificent work of fiction.… A novel to pore over, move around in, live with." —The New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307760395

John Cheever

John Cheever, best known for his short stories dealing with upper-middle-class suburban life, was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912. Cheever published his first short story at the age of seventeen. He was the recipient of a 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship and winner of a National Book Award for The Wapshot Chronicle in 1958, the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Stories of John Cheever, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award. He died in 1982, at the age of seventy.

Reviews for Bullet Park

[bookmarque · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It’s difficult now to read what was probably a ground-breaking novel when published. The themes seem unoriginal and overdone. While reading this I was put in mind of the movie The Ice Storm with Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Klein, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Tobey McGuire. The same kind of surface perfection exists, but beneath is corruption, violence, sex and betrayal. Everyone seems to be a deviant, a fuck-up or both. Cheever’s attitude towards sex and alcohol are at once permissive and embarrassed. It was jarring to have the word faggot used so liberally. The whole Tony sickness is just bizarre. An extreme case of ennui? Drugs? Withdrawal? Abuse? Who knows, but it takes the “magic Negro” trope to get him out of it. I love dad’s denial though. What did he say it was, mononucleosis? Yeah, that’s good. When Hammer decides to kill him, I almost expected him to go quietly, but no, it took a blow to the head. Nailles gets to be the hero at the end though, which is surprising given the fact that he’s pretty much stoned all the time. Not much in the way of women in this novel, although Nailles’s wife does get a few minutes of pen time. Despite Eliot’s ardent devotion and sexual appetite, she strays and in such a blase way that if he ever became aware, it wouldn’t touch him. Not really. I’m not sure if I’ll read more Cheever, but I’m glad I read this even if I don’t think I’m the right generation to appreciate it. Such angst about external appearances is foreign to my experience. Buried hangups that grind a person into drug and alcohol abuse just seem weird to me. Let your freak flag fly is how we do it now and damn what the neighbors think. They’ve got their own flags. I guess this is a good illustration of that and maybe what started making everyone realize that it’s not just them.

[kirstiecat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 quotes


pg 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."

[icolford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bullet Park is quite possibly Cheever's (deeply flawed) masterpiece. No two ways about it, this is a difficult and frustrating novel that defies catagorization and will try the patience of the naive reader expecting a story about suburban bliss. Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer clash in Edenic Bullet Park, but it is a clash that comes about because of a chance encounter with a magazine in a dentist's office, and the madman's motiveless crime fails because he puts off finishing the job to smoke a cigarette. Cheever seems to be saying that life is a perilous journey that can end at any moment. But redemption and deliverance can also occur at the drop of a hat. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to live with some kind of moral clarity. Needless to say, this is essential reading.

[eamonn12 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was through reading Raymond Carver I got to reading John Cheever, who was something of a mentor to Raymond. Cheever's short stories interested me both for their intrinsic merit as well-written short stories and also because their subject was, in many cases, suburbia. It was American middle-class suburbia of the 1960s and quite 'upmarket' in comparison to the housing estate where I lived (and am still living) which Cheevers' people referred to (negatively) as 'the developments'. The houses were a lot bigger, the families wealthier, the jobs they had were more prestigious... say Blackrock, or Dalkey or Castleknock, and I don't mean the sprawling housing estates, like mine, that appropriated the name because they were built (somewhat) near Castleknock. I mean the bigger houses near the Phoenix Park, home of Irish political dynasties. (Well, one anyway).But there were similarities. The closeness and the distance inherent in living side-by-side. The ever-present awareness of neigbours watching. The small disagreements over kids. The Washing of the Car on Sunday. The Hosing of the Lawn.The over-indulgence in alcohol (and, later, drugs). The coming home from work each evening-- from office and/or professional work, of course. The petty snobberies, the ... well, suburbia. It may be that this scenario of detacheds and semi-detacheds has been written about better by other writers, but if so I haven't found them.So it is that I always take up a John Cheever book knowing that I and my kind are in there somewhere. As with 'The Wapshot Chronicles', 'Bullet Park' did not disappoint. I prefer his short stories because he keeps himself on a tighter reign and his writing is therefore more focused. In these novels he allows himself some largess and indulges in that episodic 'picaresquesness' so beloved of the Americans since Mark Twain. Being rather simple-minded I prefer my stories neater and in a straight line. But that's me.

[shawd63 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love Cheever, and this is one of his great novels. Please don't be misled that Cheever was just writing about the "horrors" of suburbia. His portrait is more complex than that, but unfortunately that image has been so overdone by Hollywood that it's become standardized.

[janeeyrezombiehunt_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brilliant, disturbing, enjoyable novel about the small horrors of suburban life

[downstreamer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What can you say about Cheever that hasn't already been said? OK, here goes: if Garrison Keilor were a deeply melancholic alcoholic with repressed homosexual tendencies, he would be John Cheever. It's Americana through a glass darkly. I started the book yesterday and I will finish it today. I can't put it down. I have read most of Cheever, and it's just the thing for this time of year. It's sad, beautiful, elegiac, funny, and true. It chronicles the dissipation of an unsustainable lifestyle. It's set in the suburbs, and it's a glimpse into a time that I remember vaguely - that time when it was still possible to just about remember what it was like to not be completely immersed in consumer culture. Here's a quote:“The Ridleys were a couple who brought to the hallowed institution of holy matrimony a definitely commercial quality as if to marry and conceive, rear and educate children was like the manufacture and merchandising of some useful product produced in competition with other manufacturers. They were not George and Helen Ridley. They were “The Ridleys.” One felt that they might have incorporated and sold shares in their destiny over the counter. “The Ridleys” was painted on the door of their station wagon. There was a sign saying “The Ridleys” at the foot of their driveway. In their house, matchbooks, coasters and napkins were all marked with their name. They presented their handsome children to their guests with the air of salesmen pointing out the merits of a new car in a showroom. The lusts, griefs exaltations and shabby worries of a marriage never seemed to have marred the efficiency of their organization. One felt that they probably had branch offices and a staff of salesmen on the road.”Of course, this seems like broad caricature, and it is, but it's a set piece in the novel which serves as a springboard to deeper mysteries and profound observations on the ephemeral and fragile nature of what we assume to be our well maintained lives. Cheever links his characters to the cycles of nature, but only to show how far they have diverged from what really matters. They long for meaning, but don't find it. Nowadays we labor under the “accountability” paradigm: No Child Left Behind, Work Harder, Work Longer, Compete Globally. We've take it for normal. We need to read Cheever and see how we got into this mess. The heart has its reasons of which the bean counters know nothing..... from a review on downstreamer....