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94th out of 100 books
—
3 voters
Bullet Park
by
John Cheever
Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer meet, presumably by chance, on Sunday at church in Bullet Park. Nailles is open, no secrets. Hammer is, dangerously for him, not what he seems.
The third crucial character, Tony Nailles, is the one who holds the bag. How he got into it and how in the nick of time he appears to get out is the crux of this tale.
Paperback, 243 pages
Published
February 28th 2006
by Emece Editores
(first published 1967)
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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. Watching Cheever's instincts chafe against the novel form, and watching him accept that and willfully embrace the resulting weirdness, is pleasurable. It would be maybe awful if he didn't write everything with such exquisite style. But every sentence is musical, though the totality is much stranger. I like it.
What he seems to be at odds with is the novelist's shameless repe...more
What he seems to be at odds with is the novelist's shameless repe...more
Cheever's meandering meditation on white upper-middle-class suburban paranoia, neurosis and sexual angst is sometimes tender, occasionally darkly humorous, and at times downright tiresome. The novel is divided into three sections: the first and third are told in third-person, while the middle section is in first-person. The first section focuses on mouthwash chemist Eliot Nailles and his strained but loving relationships with his wife and son. The second section is told by wealthy young oddball...more
3 likes · like · see review
Most people I know really don't like this book. I read it at a time when I sort of identified with the central agonist...well one could argue whether the father or the son was central...but I was a teenager and similarly weird. The novel has a real redemptive (almost Biblical) beauty in the way the father breaks through societal, cultural, etc. conditioning....well there was a spoiler....soz!....to me, this is another book (like, say, Franny and Zooey, which I ADORE) in that category where if yo...more
A serious, hilarious, quirky, disjointed allegory about 1960s upper-middle-class suburbs -- a spiritual story about people who have lost their connection to spirituality. 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...more
Cheever always seems to have an interesting take on suburbia. I'm not entirely sure how this one shakes out. You have an unstably complacent suburban man and the insane anti-suburban man who attempts to kill the unstably complacent suburban man's son. The summary says that the boy is saved but the American dream dies. However, the book seems just as critical of the anti-suburban man as the suburban man. I'm not sure what to take away from that, but I never expected Cheever to be simple.
1 like · like · see review
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 a...more
What an intensely odd novel. 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 . . . uncomfortable? reading experience. Overall, it's a book that bears re-reading, once you've figured out its game. The novel opens with an odd, lyrical, tense-shifting passage that fades into a typical past-tense third-person narrative. Early on it becomes clear this is highly satirical, though this becomes a bit of...more
I agree with many of the reviewers here- this is a curious book. I still don't have a fully formed view of it. That said, it was entertaining. Humorous, and sad in parts. But, having read a number of the reviews here I did note a number of comments suggesting the story was some kind of attack on suburbia or a metaphor of suburban decay. I did not think so- it does not seem so simple, and it seems Cheever had other things in mind too: "I believe that Hammer and Nailles were thought to be social c...more
I have to laugh at the lurid come-on printed on the first page of my 1988 Bantam paperback of this book: "HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED A MURDER?" Anyone who buys this book hoping for a gruesome "there's a killer in all of us" potboiler is destined for disappointment.
However, if they're open to it, they might find something infinitely more interesting. "Bullet Park," like most great books, establishes itself in the first line: "Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark." As soon...more
However, if they're open to it, they might find something infinitely more interesting. "Bullet Park," like most great books, establishes itself in the first line: "Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark." As soon...more
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“Dunque, vorrei avere davanti a me un quadro con su dipinta una stazioncina dieci minuti prima che cali la notte” : intorno case bianche con pianoforti a coda che nessuno suona, camini fumanti, scaffali di libri (vuoti o sui quali giace un solo volume, l’elenco del telefono rilegato in broccato rosa), famiglie “normali” riunite nel salotto di casa come la famiglia Nailles, Eliot, Nellie e il loro figlio Tony. Così inizia Bullett Park.
“..e tutto di nuovo ridivenne bello, bello, bello ma bello com...more
“..e tutto di nuovo ridivenne bello, bello, bello ma bello com...more
I actually think this is Cheever's best book. A lot of verbal pyrotechnics going on here in relating the story of Hammer and Nailes as if Cheever felt the story itself would not be enough to sustain the reader's interest. But Cheever was the rare bird of writers wherein the more extravagant he became as a stylist the greater his acuity became. The complaints I hav eabou tthis book are as follows:
!. The suburbs as hell on earth by the time this book was written was played out. See Richard Yates'...more
!. The suburbs as hell on earth by the time this book was written was played out. See Richard Yates'...more
The last paragraph of this Rumpus review of Bullet Park pretty much nails it. Oprah's been off the air for a year now, but look at what books our culture prizes these days and it's clear we still live in an age where the greatest endorsement a book can get is from TV. There's no question that our highest literary praise is still reserved for all that is slick, polished, and cinematic.
I'm not saying that's necessarily bad: The Art of Fielding and The Rules of Civility are two refined and flawles...more
I'm not saying that's necessarily bad: The Art of Fielding and The Rules of Civility are two refined and flawles...more
A clever and hostile look at the woes and monotony of one family's suburban American life. While Eliot Nailles quietly and desperately tries to manage the unfulfilling fruits of the American dream, his son rejects his lifestyle and values (as he should) and the outsider (Hammer) tries to reconcile and remedy this wayward soulless path humanity has taken by making an example of Eliot and his family.
That's the general outline of the story, major themes aside it's Cheevers little insights and obse...more
That's the general outline of the story, major themes aside it's Cheevers little insights and obse...more
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 ci...more
I bought Bullet Park on the strength of my enjoyment of Falconer, another Cheever novel. I also love suburban novels like this and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
At first, I was miffed at the cutesy character names (Hammer and Nailles). I got over it, though, because of Cheever's enormous writing talent. He captures the wild things that a person thinks but does not say. I enjoyed most the second major part of the book, which tells the story of Paul Hammer, a world-weary wastrel too insulat...more
At first, I was miffed at the cutesy character names (Hammer and Nailles). I got over it, though, because of Cheever's enormous writing talent. He captures the wild things that a person thinks but does not say. I enjoyed most the second major part of the book, which tells the story of Paul Hammer, a world-weary wastrel too insulat...more
I've been a goodreads delinquent for some time now -- I'll admit that. Then I read Bullet Park, and I remembered how wonderful Cheever's novels could be, and I had to share it, so here I am, returned, prodigal, and feeling creatively refreshed by the twin geniuses of Paul Hammer and Elliot Nailles.
People might say that this book is about a murder, but it's not. It's about two people and the people that inhabit those people's lives. With one hand in the NY suburbs and the other in a kind of poig...more
People might say that this book is about a murder, but it's not. It's about two people and the people that inhabit those people's lives. With one hand in the NY suburbs and the other in a kind of poig...more
Great book. Part one introduces an average man, Nailles, living in an average and depressing suburb of New York. His son, Tony, becomes disillusioned with life and decides not to get out of bed. Doctors can't cure him, but an Indian spiritualist gets him excited with mantras. Part two describes a sick rich man, Hammer, who searches for happiness in a yellow room. When the room is painted, he decides to take up his mother's dream of enlightening the world by sacrificing an average WASP within a c...more
Well. This is random. I struggled at times to get my head around Cheever's flitting between times and characters, but that was nothing compared with my struggle to understand what on earth point he was trying to make. Wholesomeness is boring but there's nothing much we can do about it? People hurt and love for all sorts of reasons, yet with neither rhyme nor reason? I mean, his tone is easy enough to decipher, but his point eludes me.
I did find much of the book very readable, and mostly enjoyed...more
I did find much of the book very readable, and mostly enjoyed...more
Such an underrated author and book. Basically a suburban family's life under tension among an upper middle class East Coast community in the 60's. The tensions they deal with are the new backlashes of post-war affluence in the baby booming era, where they have a child who develops a condition that presupposes our contemporary adhd, depression and medicated child traumas. The Protagonist is Nailes and the Antagonist is Hammer (Their last names). Written by the great John Cheever of short story, N...more
Maybe I'm just over so unhappy 1950's suburbs, but I do not like this book. I am also tired of so many writers with sexual hangups.
The main thing I didn't like though, was the writing itself. When Cheever moved from one character to the next, I felt like he was never going to get back to the main story. He would go on and on about tertiary characters and we'd never really hear of them again.
This is also one of those books that 'hurries up and ends'. On one page I'm still at the build up and the...more
The main thing I didn't like though, was the writing itself. When Cheever moved from one character to the next, I felt like he was never going to get back to the main story. He would go on and on about tertiary characters and we'd never really hear of them again.
This is also one of those books that 'hurries up and ends'. On one page I'm still at the build up and the...more
Nov 06, 2010
Michelle
added it
I was hesitant to reread this because, though I remembered liking it, that was all I remembered and most of the time I can't reread books. But.......I couldn't find anything else to read, and I have always been fond of Cheever's stories, and I gave it a whirl. Particularly read in the shadow of Mad Men, this paints a very haunting portrait of suburban malaise in the 1960s, and a very sympathetic portrait of those trapped in it.
I can't, now, even imagine what I thought of it as a child of the 196...more
I can't, now, even imagine what I thought of it as a child of the 196...more
The structure of this book reminded me of Franny & Zooey (Salinger), in that there were sections in different styles and from different perspectives. I wonder if the author thought through the entire book before writing, though, since the last 100 pages just barely necessitate the first 100. The writing is more modern than I expected, having never read Cheever before. I wish the author had spent more time with the story as opposed to 85% on character background / development, but it wasn't a...more
Very well written. Makes the seemingly unpoetic suburban life poetic. I was worried for the novel's sake when the murder plot was revealed in Part II. It was laughable in its symbolism. I'm glad (spoiler alert*) it did not go through. The novel seemed, contrary to my expectations, a vindication of the suburban man, Eliot Nailles, and his values. My least favorite section of the book was Part II. I don't understand Paul Hammer for a minute, a man who wants to awaken the people of Bullet Park. I w...more
WOW!
wow
WOW!
For most of the book, I was simply and solely fascinated by the writing style. I kept thinking about how this wasn't my type of book but, at the same time, respected John Cheever's skill and craft.
BUT THEN
I read the turning point line of the whole book (last line of Part II)
AND MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR!
This book is spectacular! Cheever has the patience to slowly build the story, characters and plot while the reader is completely unaware of his writing command. Suddenly, BOOM, it all come...more
wow
WOW!
For most of the book, I was simply and solely fascinated by the writing style. I kept thinking about how this wasn't my type of book but, at the same time, respected John Cheever's skill and craft.
BUT THEN
I read the turning point line of the whole book (last line of Part II)
AND MY JAW HIT THE FLOOR!
This book is spectacular! Cheever has the patience to slowly build the story, characters and plot while the reader is completely unaware of his writing command. Suddenly, BOOM, it all come...more
Extremely haunting. Like the reviewer below says, this book feels like a desperate (but also somehow off-hand) dispatch from someone becoming very very lost.
"this is Cheever at his most boldly archetypal, and Bullet Park is less a physical place than a state of mind. Namely, Cheever’s state of mind. The book was written as Cheever began to engage in his final, life-altering descent into alcoholism. It was published in 1969, and by 1975 Cheever was separated from his wife, creatively eviscerated,...more
"this is Cheever at his most boldly archetypal, and Bullet Park is less a physical place than a state of mind. Namely, Cheever’s state of mind. The book was written as Cheever began to engage in his final, life-altering descent into alcoholism. It was published in 1969, and by 1975 Cheever was separated from his wife, creatively eviscerated,...more
Parece que John Cheever es más conocido como escritor de relatos y que sus novelas muchas veces son consideradas simples cuentos alargados, pero lo cierto es que el mismo John Cheever prefería ser considerado un escritor de novelas y consideraba sus cuentos casi como trabajos de encargo. ‘Bullet Park’ (Emecé), que es quizás la novela más conocida de Cheever, se divide claramente en dos partes: la primera está protagonizada por un hombre llamado Nailles y la segunda por otro hombre que se llama H...more
Jeeeez. What can you say about this? Well, a while ago I read the John Cheever short story "The Death of Justina" for an otherwise very sub-par American Lit class, and decided that it was absolutely the best thing we read all quarter. Then I read Falconer and didn't really find that it had any of the same immediacy, anxiety or foreboding that Justina had (though it had its strengths). So I was a little let down by his novelry. Bullet Park, however, is all of the things which made Justina really...more
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. Bullet Park just goes to show that subject matter has little bearing on your enjoyment when the author is capital-G Great. This book is exactly what I feared about Cheever: set in a wealthy Connecticut bedroom community, the protagonist is a salaryman addicted to amphetamines, the teenage son is bedridden with depression, the wife is...more
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Aug 01, 2007
Patricia
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
literature fans; the emotionally bothered
Shelves:
fiction
It's not common that I take recommendations for reading from psychiatrists, but this was an exception. The story about the upper-middle-class Nailles who manages to survive what initially looks like a "neighborly" encounter with Mr. Hammer, is compelling even if you're not upper-middle-class, a drug addict, a father or, for that matter, male. Despite what my pschrinck said at the time, I didn't find all that much to identify with in this book (except for Nailles decreasing hold on self-control),...more
The short story is absolutely Cheever's strength, but this was still so entertaining and fun to read (I read more than half the book in one sitting). It's nice to get slightly more fleshed-out characters in the forms of Eliot Nailles and his son, Tony. Cheever gets right to the bone of people — their sentimentality and secrets and hopes and terribly mundane and hilarious thoughts — and somehow manages, wonderfully, to be both disdainful and sympathetic of them at the same time.
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John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the suburbs of Westchester, New York, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born.
His main themes include the duality of human nature:...more
More about John Cheever...
His main themes include the duality of human nature:...more
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“Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made.”
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“The secret of 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.”
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Jan 23, 2013 05:26pm