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By Root 3920 0

abruptly, just as Gottlieb said—the novel is over. We are told with slapdash brevity that Hammer confessed to attempted homicide and was quoted in the newspaper as explaining that he meant “to awaken the world” (but why, given that he'd asserted earlier that he accepted the world for what it is and rather was motivated by his victim's “excellence”?), and so we are brought to the final sentence: “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.” Now, if this be irony—and four “wonderful's” would seem to suggest as much—then we must surmise that life is not wonderful in Bullet Park and never was, and besides Nailles still needs to take tranquilizers just to get through the day. So nothing has changed; but if that's true, then what's the point of the whole triumphant rescue? What, for that matter, is the point of the novel? As Joyce Carol Oates concluded her review, “Irony so pervades Cheever's writing that one cannot tell where whimsy [ends] and a real nastiness, a profound nastiness, begins. Is everything wonderful in Bullet Park? It may well be.” If one of our most prominent novelist-critics (and an “ideal reader” of Cheever to boot) was perplexed, it's safe to assume a lot of general readers were, too.

But at the time, the reader whose opinion mattered most was Benjamin DeMott. After he “dumped on [the book] in the Times,“ said Cheever, “everybody picked up their marbles and ran home.” Knopf stopped advertising, and sales petered out at just over thirty-three thousand copies—a little better than dismal, given all the advance hype and Cheever's reputation. Still, he affected to take it in stride. After all, he'd made enough money to last him at least two years, he said, “and one couldn't ask for more.” But how long was two years, under the circumstances? Cheever had taken four years to write Bullet Park, and perhaps five times as long to work his way to some acceptable version of The Wapshot Chronicle, and never mind that he was now an almost hopeless alcoholic who felt only the faintest impulse to write anything. Federico never forgot his own sense of dread that Thanksgiving, when he overheard Lehmann-Haupt say to his father—who nodded benignly (“Oh, really?”)—that the novel didn't really hang together and DeMott had been right.* Behind the insouciant façade, though, Cheever fully shared his younger son's dread. Before long, he decided he didn't like Bullet Park either (“I think something misfired”), and was only a little cheered, two and a half years later, when John Gardner wrote a long vindication of the novel for the Times Book Review, declaring that its detractors had been “dead wrong”: “Bullet Park is a novel to pore over, move around in, live with. The image repetitions, the stark and subtle correspondences that create the book's ambiguous meaning, its uneasy courage and compassion, sink in and in, like a curative spell.”

Perhaps, but at the time it seemed too little, too late—at any rate there was no particular resurgence of interest, and Cheever continued (for the rest of his life, really) to brood over the DeMott review. Sometimes he agreed with the man, agreed with Lehmann-Haupt, and went on thinking the book was a botch; at other, more spirited moments, he accused DeMott of “plugging for tenure at Amherst,” and meanwhile his loathing for academics—considerable at the best of times—became even more pronounced. A year or so after Bullet Park had quietly disappeared, Cheever responded to some pompous remarks from one of his wife's Briarcliff colleagues by hurling a glass of bourbon at the man. “I aimed for the head but I got him in the stomach,” he wrote Litvinov. “He is a frustrated professor of English and I have come to consider frustration a most dangerous human condition.”

* The pool was built, of course, and Cheever made the most of it. During his visits he held court there almost every afternoon—often in the nude, despite the relative modesty of certain peers. Hortense Calisher, for one, never forgot