Bullet Park is in the heart of the Cheever country, landscaped with
$65,000 houses, with gardens and golf courses and swimming pools,
with empty bottles and full ashtrays, as well as the less definable
malaise of the mid-century middle class man. It will be familiar to
his readers. So are his characters, stubbing their toes on
immaterial manifestations, the startled victims of a world they
never made but inherited along with comfortable assurances of
affluence and the moral fixity of God and family values. Until
sooner or later there's the misgiving that something has been lost.
Or someone. Like Eliot Nailes' son Tony who takes to bed with a
depression no doctor can cure - only a swami of dubious origins on
the wrong side of town. Or perhaps like Paul Hammer, a bastard who
has been circling the world in an alcoholic haze chasing chimera,
who doesn't belong anywhere - not even in the bed of his new young
wife. It is Paul who finally decides to fulfill his mother's last
mad words - that a crucifixion in Bullet Park can shake the world
loose from its torporous apathy and the bought releases which make
it bearable (television for youngsters like Tony, tranquilizers for
his baffled father). Cheever's novel, loosely and somewhat
artificially structured, is as fragile as the world it conveys.
Behind every well tended rosebush lurk the frustrations and fears
of modern man. A twilight tale filled with the sweet, sad, muffled
mystery of existence and there will be recognitions and
reverberations for everyone. (Kirkus Reviews)
Eliot Nailles loves his wife and son to distraction; Paul Hammer is a bastard named afer a common household tool. Neighbours in Bullet Park, the two become fatefully liked by the mysterious binding power of their names. Sharp and funny, BULLET PARK is a hymn to the dubious normality of the American suburb.
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