Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
button down fiction, Jan 23 2004
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb suburban saga, Aug 12 2002
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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Riveting But Uneven, Aug 1 2002
For long stretches, "Bullet Park" tells highly abstract stories, such as Hammer's quest for the calming yellow room. These sections are odd but riveting, achieving emotional truth in a flat dreamy landscape. At other times, the book tells stories of dated exaggeration, such as the French's teacher's hysterical reaction to Tony Nailes. These sections are angry and a little obvious. Regardless, I nearly read this book in a single afternoon, which demonstrates that "Bullet Park" has a weird narrative power. But apart from its language, which is flat and anti-emotive (WASP suburbs, I suppose), does it really hold together?
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