• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3856 0

of life as a Bullet Park paterfamilias. When, for instance, he finds some dirty pictures concealed in his son's dictionary, he quietly disposes of them and just as quietly informs the boy, without censure, that he has done so. Trusting as ever in appearances, he simply assumes that Tony accepts his decision as being for his own good; if, however, Nailles were to turn on Tony's tape recorder—one of the many generous gifts he delights in giving his son—he'd discover that all was not so well in their relationship: “You dirty old baboon,” the young man intones on the tape, “you dirty old baboon …” Indeed, Nailles is so shocked when his son finally reveals his true feelings—his disdain for a father who wastes his life “pushing mouthwash”—that he responds by trying to “split [Tony's] skull” with a golf putter, and so precipitates the melancholy that leaves his son languishing in bed.

Part One of the novel—concerning Nailles and the world of Bullet Park—though a bit on the desultory side, nonetheless has a kind of poetic coherence. In the first chapter we are shown around the suburb with the mysterious Hammer and his real-estate agent, while a suave omniscient narrator remarks on the lives of various characters encountered along the way. As Updike and Oates pointed out, the plot unfolds in a series of vignettes—”moments”—related by a sort of nuanced repetition. The charming Wickwires, for example, are presented as representative citizens who constantly hurt themselves with a lot of drunken accidents—then, after an exquisite four-page set piece, they vanish without a trace for more than two hundred pages; finally, as the novel is ending (and only the careful reader will remember the Wickwires at all, much less their drunken tendency to hurt themselves), they reappear, charming as ever: he with court plaster over one eye and she in a wheelchair. “I don't work with plots,” Cheever remarked in his Paris Review interview (and throughout his career in so many words). “I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts. … Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.” Fair enough. On the other hand, one can see DeMott's point about the “broken-backed” structure of the novel: Part Two—Hammer's monologue—seems a mystifying digression from all that has gone before. Nailles, the erstwhile protagonist, disappears Wickwire-like for some seventy pages, and the tone of the book is entirely different—indeed, we seem to have stumbled into an altogether different novel, or rather a string of diffuse non sequiturs. A letter from Hammer's mother rambles on for several pages, serving no discernible purpose except to establish that she is barking mad, which might have been established with a sentence or two—with, say, her assertion that she can divine the sort of person who has preceded her in certain hotel beds: “It is a simple fact that we impress something of ourselves—our spirits and desires—on the mattresses where we lie and I have more than ample evidence to prove my point.” Much attention is also lavished on Hammer's oddball father, a muscle-bound drunk who models his physique for caryatids holding up parts of various Munich hotels; when at last Hammer finds the man—passed out, naked, and wearing a necklace of champagne corks (as Cheever claims to have found his own father)—nothing comes of it. Hammer leaves. “What I wanted was verisimilitude and improbability,” Cheever explained to Litvinov, who confessed bewilderment over these episodes. “[Hammer's mother's] letters—and Taylor holding up all those buildings—are meant to seem true and false. It seems to me that conventional narrative is untruthful these days and that one has to divine an inner narrative. Oh ho.” “Oh ho” is a phrase to which Cheever often reverted; usually it implied a kind of risible doubt over the merit of his own pronouncements.

One might argue that Hammer's story is bizarre and incoherent because Hammer himself is mad, and so he proceeds according to the dreamlike logic of madness. His primary quest, after all, is to find “a room with yellow walls” and thereby cure his cafard,