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By Root 4025 0

” said Cheever. “Good!” said Lehmann-Haupt. “Because that's who you're getting.” To both men, DeMott had seemed the perfect fit: a Waspy Amherst professor, he'd written a judicious review of the Scandal for Harper's—applauding the novel as a witty (if episodic) evocation of the modern world's “living hell”—the sort of thing, in short, that Cheever had in mind when he remarked to an interviewer at the St. Regis, “I would rather have an informative [review] than a silly rave.” In this case, though, a “silly rave” would have done nicely, given that DeMott's review was slated for the entire front page, and would be accompanied on page 2 by Lehmann-Haupt's interview with the author. Not long before the review appeared on April 27, however, Cheever got a call from his agent: Lehmann-Haupt's sidebar piece, which was nothing but admiring, had been bumped to the back pages—a bad sign. As Susan Cheever remembered, “My father seemed suddenly very frail.”

DeMott's review (enticingly titled “A Grand Gatherum of Some Late 20th-Century American Weirdos”) faulted Cheever for everything from his “sad, licked lyricism” to his “carelessness, lax compositions, perfunctoriness” to the “broken-backed” structure of his novel:

And finally—most important maybe—there's the problem of story style vs. novel style. Except when tricked up in gothicism, fantasy or allegory, the novel is a world of explanations, and the story is a world of phenomena. … [Cheever's stories] say that nowadays a man falls in love with his baby sitter and heals himself by buying a lathe … and by the time the reader of any of them thinks to ask, What? What was that? Why? he's into the next tale in the book. No explanations offered or required.

With novels, DeMott suggested, authors are obliged to provide some explicit rationale for their characters’ behavior, and this was conspicuously absent in Bullet Park. But then, one might just as well make a similar observation about DeMott's review—that is, before the good reader can ask, What? But isn't the present novel exempt from such “explanations” precisely because it's intended as “gothicism, fantasy or allegory”?—DeMott has already clinched his argument, as far as it goes: “John Cheever's short stories are and will remain lovely birds—dense in inexplicables and beautifully trim. But in the gluey atmosphere of ‘Bullet Park’ no birds sing.” And so it went for other reviewers who judged the novel in naturalistic terms: The plot “is not at all convincing,” said Charles Nicol in The Atlantic Monthly; Hammer “is no more interesting than any other lunatic,” said Guy Davenport in the National Review (Davenport also echoed a number of his colleagues in describing the novel's ending as “false and shockingly inept”).

Granted, Bullet Park is a strange performance, and it was a bad sign that even reviewers who were nothing but well disposed to Cheever seemed a little puzzled. A few months before her review appeared in the Washington Post Book World, Joyce Carol Oates had been quoted as saying that she was Updike's and Cheever's “ideal reader” (“whatever they write I read immediately, and I read it again two or three times”), so it made sense perhaps that she and Updike were en rapport in regard to Bullet Park: neither thought the book amounted to a novel, properly speaking, but rather that it worked (as Updike wrote in the London Times) “as a slowly revolving mobile of marvellously poeticized moments,” or, as Oates put it, “a series of eerie, sometimes beautiful, sometimes overwrought vignettes.” Oates knew better than to worry whether the plot was “convincing” or not, pointing out that Cheever was if anything bent on making his plot as outlandish as possible; and yet, for all the novel's seeming absurdity, said Oates, it conveyed a sense of “terror … as deadly, more deadly, than any promised in the glib new genre of ‘black comedy’ Cheever has been writing such comedy for decades.” John Leonard, whose review appeared in the daily New York Times, also realized that conventional narrative was beside the point, and praised the novel as Cheever's