Bullet Park

by John Cheever

Book Overview

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 John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: Eliot Nailles, a nice fellow who loves his wife and son to blissful distraction, and Paul Hammer, a bastard named after a common household tool, who, after half a lifetime of drifting, settles down in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679737871
• ISBN13: 9780679737872
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

"Paint me a small railroad station, then"

I remember reading this book when it came out, and feeling disappointed that it wasn't a more powerful, apocalyptic novel. Those were the 60s after all, a time when we still looked to our novels for the answers to the day's problems. Cheever wasn't interested in solving problems. As we now know, he was torn in a psychic split between different parts of his identity--the average family man, colorless and yet possessed by a love divine, vs. the bisexual swinger who lives for sensation and the authenticity of the gutter. BULLET PARK represents this conflict in allegorical terms, and now I can see that the two neighbors and antagonists, Nailles and Hammer, form two halves of the same person. Well, that's a crude way of putting it, but at any rate reading back into the biography they perhaps represent two of Cheever's warring personalities, and in their conflict over the future of Tony Nailles, the appealing teenage son, they are going to war themselves. At stake is nothing less than the future of American literature. I always thought this would have been a good movie--back in the day I wrote Cheever a note asking him to make sure that Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas would play Hammer and Nailles in the film version. He was polite but non-committal. And I don't know who would be good among today's actors. I picked Lancaster and Douglas because those two, who of course made many pictures together, gave off the almost untangible sensation of somehow having been made for each other, like the way Plato wrote that we are all looking for the other half of the soul we were once part of. Thus even when they were playing antagonists, Lancaster and Douglas still seemed to be seeking each other out, not in an erotic way especially, but in a search for meaning that would never end.

button down fiction

This is an engaging story. It takes on suburbia and treats it poetically. It tells the story of two men, Hammer and Nailles. Really, it is two novellas, the first about Nailles. There isn't much interaction between the two men until the end. It looks like a rather simple story with much subtle humor (like the two men's names) at the beginning and gets darker and more twisted as it moves forward.Stay away from reading the book's jacket. It gives away too much of the story.

Superb suburban saga

The realm of much of Cheever's fiction is the affluent suburban sprawl of Thruway-threaded upstate New York, Westchester County and environs. Like the infamous Shady Hill of his short stories, Bullet Park is a whitebread outpost for white-collar professionals who commute daily to the city and drink heavily on weekends, and often weekdays. In a comfortable house on a comfortable street in this town lives Eliot Nailles, a chemist whose specialty is mouthwash and who plies his craft with the conviction that bad breath can lead to global destruction, a respectable family man devoted to his wife Nellie and his teenage son Tony, and an avid churchgoer, although more out of a sense of duty than piety. Tony's privileged status as an only child and a middle class Baby Boomer has bred an adolescence painful both to himself and to his parents, and he still continues to teeter on the brink of knuckleheadedness. With the insight of a child psychologist and the wisdom of an embattled father, Cheever recounts Tony's various phases: his addiction to television, his threat against his French teacher, his strange sudden interest in poetry, the brash older woman he invites to his parents' house for lunch, and especially his mysterious depression which confines him to bed for weeks and requires the healing power of a "swami" whose idea of therapy is to repeat mantras. One day a man named Paul Hammer and his wife Marietta move into Bullet Park and befriend the Nailleses. Through first person narration, Paul reveals his colorful past: The illegitimate child of a wealthy, sculpturally ideal father and an eccentric, bookish mother, he uses his Yale education to drift drunkenly through life, translate the work of an Italian poet, and search for the perfect home -- one with a room with yellow walls. His mother's hatred of American capitalism inspires him to murder a well-to-do suburbanite as some kind of statement against bourgeois complacency -- and the man he chooses happens to be Tony Nailles.The climax is quite surprising and arrives at a moment of the highest suspense and tension, an unusual technique for Cheever, who tends to use dialogue, thoughts, and impressions rather than action to resolve his characters' conflicts. But Cheever's fiction is always full of surprises, even though his subject matter seldom changes; his talent lies in his ability to imagine fascinating stories lurking behind the bland facades of American suburbia and crystallize them with his reliably brilliant prose. "Bullet Park" is a satire and a comedy; it patiently observes suburban provinciality and materialism, and even raises a question about oyster etiquette, all while holding up a distorted mirror to an anticipated readership that lives in places very much like the one it describes.

Cheever's best book

This is Cheever's most maligned and underrated novel, and sadly, the only one that's out-of-print. The Wapshot books were staggeringly rambling and at times annoying, but "Bullet Park" proved that Cheever can write novels as well as he did the short story. The narrative and prose in this book are nearly pristine--as he would also imbue the latter, slightly less successful "Falconer"--and there are prose of astonishing beauty, one of which the commentor below illuminates. Do not let this one slip by your reading list. It is his best book, I tell you. Also, I would like to add that the John Updike quote was not for "Bullet Park"; rather it was in reference to a Cheever story entitled 'The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".

Bullet Park is John Cheever's fine novel of suburbia.

John Cheever, the master chronicler of suburbia, wrote a great novel of the odd suburb Bullet Park. As John Updike said, "It took an effortlessly moral nature to imagine fall and redemption in that realm of soft lawns and comfortable homes." It is a simple story, but its greatness lies in its telling. From the first sentence, "Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark," Bullet Park ensnares the reader in its strange web. It also contains some of the most wonderful sentences ever written, such as this one, "Outside I could hear the brook, some night bird, moving leaves, and all the sounds of the night world seemed endearing as if I quite literally loved the night as one loves a woman, loved the stars, the trees, the weeds in the grass as one can love with the same ardor a woman's breasts and the applecore she has left in an ashtray."