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. When in John Cheever turned from the lovable Wapshots to the weird creatures who inhabit Bullet Park, most reviewers attacked or. Jenne begins with Joyce’s Dubliners while I flip open a novel by John Cheever, Bullet Park. I had picked it up used a few months ago after being intrigued by.
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Also, I really liked the bit about the cat. No wonder she was so absent from my childhood. It would’ve made a great Alfred Hitchcock movie with Jimmy Stewart as Nailles and either Robert Mitchum or Cary Grant as Hammer in th Carried the paperback around with me for the three or four days I read it, sneaking reads in chairs here or cars there and lines everywhere – luxuriating in Cheever’s masterful, seemingly effortless and eternally enlightening delightful descriptions of lounge light, thanatonic thunder, scary suburbia, mad mothers, fucked-off fathers, and, as always, alcoholism.
There is such torment and it is thick and ripe and you can sense and feel it with all cells of your body. The old adage that each novel teaches you how to read as you go doesn’t really ring true here; Bullet Park shifts modes at least twice, making for an. There is also a commensurate amount of character-driven homophobia, and this feels like that rare case where knowing about the author’s personal life – Cheever’s famous bisexuality – helps explain something that would otherwise be a flaw.
Bullet Park
About Bullet Park 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.
And where Mad Men is always perfect in form and style, Cheever is like a bull set loose: Looking back, I wonder how my grandmother was able to reconcile her prak way of life with the evolving modern world, how she weathered her own inconvenient thoughts and cueever.
In the bedroom closet is the black-and-white television my brother and I used to watch during concurrent bouts of insomnia. They had come from other places and would go to other places but sitting against the light at four in the afternoon they seemed as permanent as the beer pulls.
Try to avoid the back jacket copy, or any summary, because the lesson here is in the insane delay of plot – it’s a page preamble, then 20 brief pages of action, and if you know what’s coming it will take away most of the fun. Preventing from taking itself too seriously, the story centers around Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer.
I cheeved don’t feel like getting up. Reading any sentence in this book, it seems not only impossible that anyone would surpass him in ability and intellect, it sometimes feels impossible that there even exists a human being who could understand and articulate something so majestically and powerfully. A graduate of Northwestern University, she read joun throughout her life.
The second half of the book belongs to Hammer, the newest resident of Bullet Park. Jan 10, W.
But he drags and hurries too much to be called a good writer. A metaphor for the perceived attack on or deterioration of middle class values during the ‘s? That she permitted us the first half seems, in retrospect, to have been some ingenious form of punishment.
Inthe novel was adapted into a French-language film, Parc. One gets the feeling as with the Wapshots, to a lesser extentthat Cheever is mocking the expectations we have for novels as he revels in them.
Some rains seemed to buller down like a net from the guileless heavens of her childhood, some rains were stormy and bitter, some fell like a force of memory.
They were high school kids, I guess, slum kids, hoods, whatever, wearing tight pants and trick shirts and hair grease.
This is such a book. Independently wealthy and existentially depressed, Hammer has moved to the suburbs with a perverse ulterior motive: That’s the line, the line for me.
If this book had been written 30 years later, I would have pegged it as authored by an experimental AI programme. The first section of the book is devoted largely to Nailles, an earnest husband and jogn salesman struggling to reconcile the animal facts of existence with the stifling suburban milieu.
Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. View all 10 comments. Part 2, about Hammer’s itinerant life, is gripping in tone but nonsensical-bordering-on-bad-gonzo-journalism in style. Hermetic tropes include the ‘magic Negro’ faith-healer who lives par, a funeral parlor in the slums, two alchemists with different sorts of laboratories, a fairy tale bastard raised by a rich fairy grandmother, a sacrificial first-born son, the summoning of erotic spirits, a variety of impossible-to-please ‘White Goddess’ women A serious, hilarious, quirky, disjointed allegory about s upper-middle-class suburbs — a spiritual story about people who have lost their connection to spirituality.
This article needs additional citations for cheeverr. Don’t worry, these aren’t spoilers. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Well, if you want to learn the rules of how novels work, it’s good to read ones that won’t or can’t play by those rules. A teenage boy stays in bed par weeks not necessarily sick until a “holy man” shows up at the house and inexplicably “heals” him.
I wonder if the author thought through the entire book before writing, bu,let, since the last pages just barely necessitate the first I’ll read it again some time, now that I know what to expect. Think of this more as a loose series of vignettes, accompanied by a narrative scaffolding that Cheever doesn’t really care about. For some it’s just how to live a life. They had spooky voices, they seemed to pitch them in a way that made them sound spooky, and when one of them was addressing the ball another gave him a big goose and he backed right into it, making groaning noises.
Aug 07, BlackOxford rated it it was ok Shelves: The ending, too, is really strange. Hermetic tropes include the ‘magic Negro’ faith-healer who lives over a funeral parlor in the slums, two alchemists with different sorts of laboratories, a fairy tale bastard raised by a rich fairy grandmother, a sacrificial first-born son, the summoning of erotic spirits, a variety of impossible-to-please ‘White Goddess’ women alternately known as bitches.
The novel has a real redemptive almost Biblical beauty in the way the father breaks through societal, cultural, etc. My grandmother is gone and soon the house will be, too. I did find much of the book very readable, and mostly enjoyed Well. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Bullet Park by John Cheever
joyn In these exemplary environs John Cheever traces the fateful intersection of two men: In a way you feel very sorry for some of them if they were bullef unlikable with their tortoise shooting sense of entitlement. Cheever’s carries you along on a broad, smooth river of words to the violent and surprising and uplifting!
I’ve been meaning to read Cheever all my adult life, but didn’t expect to like him — suburban malaise is not a subject I need to spend a lot more time exploring. After a summer thunderstorm renders the nearby river unusable, we settle down to read.
