Taker of Notes

...He is careful to show us how opposite the two men are in all crucial ways—Hammer is more than neurotic, and Nailles is endearingly sane...

...When the halves of a novel are this dissonant, they can never make a whole...

...Why he succeeds where the doctors have failed we are never told...

...Whatever substance this novel has is not to be found in savage confrontation, but in its bittersweet portrait of Eliot Nailles, a man of goodwill and robust sexuality, a touching figure of decency, foolish and naive, who "thought of pain and suffering as a principality, lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe...

...The quintessential drama of the suburb—the real estate agent displaying his wares to a prospective buyer—is enacted, or transacted, in deft, precise strokes...

...It] would never lie on his itinerary and would be unknown to his travel agent...

...Cheever's wife's name, needless to say, is Mary...

...The novel opens on the usual charmingly antiquated railroad station, thick with the amorphous nostalgia of arrival and departure "ten minutes before dark...

...Cheever has always had an extraordinarily sharp eye for the talkative kook, the odd man out, the colossally egocentric grumblers and complainers who turn up with such passionate force in his annals of the Wapshot family...

...In fact, all jokes that depend on names for their humor seem wearyingly puerile...

...Tony is a poor scholar but a good athlete, to all appearance an uncomplicated American boy...

...Then, a more ordinary doctor gives Tony a drug that rouses him to a few hours of manic frenzy, after which he collapses into even deeper apathy...

...It is hard to believe Cheever intended this, since question marks are put in or left out everywhere without any apparent consistency...

...If the answer is simply missing from the pattern of experience and character that the novelist devises, if the events and the people seem as arbitrary and accidental as a throw of dice, then for the moment this writer is being a collector, an archaeologist of curious minutiae, a taker of notes...

...There is an edgy, brilliant portrait of a couple named Wickwire ("estimated resale price: $65,000"), who "almost always appeared with some limb in a sling, some extremity bandaged, some show of court plaster...

...Of course, those of us who were properly schooled in the mysteries of modern literature know better than to look for lucid explanations, clear reasons, proper causes pinned to exactly the right effects...

...The reason...

...Couples named John and Mary, we are told, never divorce...

...A man named Nailles (the family name was originally de Noailles), a hardworking, kind, uninsistently religious, exultantly monogamous merchandiser of mouthwash, is introduced by his minister to a new neighbor and communicant named —everyone laughs—Hammer...

...but instead of using its complex possibilities for revelation, exploration, discovery of his characters—a novelist's fundamental obligation-Cheever turns his back on the rich fictional lode of Tony's ailment, and instead does a few comic vaudeville lampoons that are easy, more than a little vulgar and quite beside the point...

...He has confided only to his tape recorder how violently disturbed he is by the un-muted grunts and squeals of love that he hears so regularly from his parents' bedroom...

...I'm not sick...

...She may have reason to hate the world of Nailles, but we are given no reason why Hammer chooses to fulfill her macabre mission...

...The hard facts of shadowy weirdness that are Hammer, however, remain cold, lifeless and gray...

...And it becomes a yawning chasm in the second half of Bullet Park, when the attention shifts to the sinister history of Paul Hammer, a story at once eccentric and achingly boring, much the way other people's dreams are boring...

...Cheever's feeling for this man's rather fragile excellence is strong, in fact urgent, yet the novel's flawed nature appears even here...

...Hammer is married to a vixen, Nailles to a love...

...It gives one pause to find Cheever stumbling open-eyed into this dead end of wit more than once in Bullet Park...

...At Yale, Hammer had tried to change his name legally to Levy, but was turned down by a judge named Weinstock—a tired Jewish joke incompetently told and seriously misunderstood...

...One assumes this is just carelessness (which is not really forgivable), like the many questions throughout the book that are punctuated with a comma, giving much of the dialogue the sound of a dying fall...

...Nailles's face was the broadest and most open, Hammer's face was thin and he frequently touched it with his fingers—a sort of groping gesture as if he were looking for something he had lost...

...His dreadful, logorrheic mother, an insane expatriate who forces her dreams on her son in soporific detail, had once told Hammer that if she had to go back to America, she would single out some young man, "a good example of a life lived without any genuine emotion or value," and crucify him because "Nothing less than a crucifixion will wake that world...

...On the surface, this ominously named patch of suburbia is familiar Cheever territory, lost in a dream of plenty—a tree-shaded, lawn-framed stop on a branch line that stretches like a wary tentacle away from its granite heart in Manhattan...

...But in the case of Paul Hammer, the weirdness and grotesqueries seem merely random, incongruous and dissociated, unconnected by any order of thought or feeling...

...The healer who finally cures the boy is a quack Jamaican swami from the wrong side of town...

...The psychiatrist summoned by Tony's anxious parents turns out to be moonlighting in real estate, and thinks nothing of interrupting a consultation to settle a deal on the telephone...

...Nevertheless, it is hard for Nailles to suppose this, for a vital part of his decency is that he is joyously in love with life as he finds it...

...To end a statement of lyric celebration with an image of aspic is an appalling misjudgment, a tasteless distortion of meaning and motive...

...The love Nailles felt for his wife and his only son seemed like some limitless discharge of a clear amber fluid that would surround them, preserve them and leave them insulated but visible, like the contents of an aspic...

...Because not until after he had received those diplomas had he changed his name from Shitz...

...Reviewed by PEARL K. BELL Contributor, the "New Yorker," New York "Times Book Review" There is something strangely misguided and botched, fundamentally wrongheaded, about John Cheever's new novel, Bullet Park...

...Her glorious vision of fiery death on the cross can hardly be thought to persuade Hammer, since he hardly knows his mother and realizes that she is mad...

...The episodes (each of them rough notes for a short story, perhaps) that lead Hammer to this desperate act of antiheroism read like the disjointed rambling of a morbidly articulate drunk who long ago forgot why he was talking, or to whom...

...To awaken the world...

...Unfortunately, this human being never materializes—not even in Hammer's grand gesture of failed homicide at the end of the novel, when he tries to burn Tony to death on the altar of Christ's Church...

...Though Cheever perhaps intends Hammer to appear a figure of lopsided, incompetent evil, giving off the stench of motiveless malignancy wherever he turns, he remains a sagging paper bag indiscriminately stuffed with vague melancholias and disorganized biographical curiosities, a bewildering potpourri of despair and strangeness in search of a human being to give them coherence...

...Having set the scene so expertly —but by now, surely he can do this with his hands tied—Cheever then fills it with a curiously unfocused, inexplicable narrative whose purpose remains fatally vague...

...And on the in-joke goes...

...Though Nailles "had no way of judging his worth as a father," his love for his 17-year-old son, Tony, is put to its first serious test when one day the boy refuses to get out of bed...

...I just feel terribly sad...

...But the writer must still suggest some sense of the answer he has found to the question: why...

...One half of Bullet Park is rich in conviction, resonant with the lyricism of Cheever's love and grief, devotion and disappointment, as he unfolds the intricacies of a simple, admirable man...

...Undoubtedly, Cheever wants to derive more than an arch sophomor-ic joke out of the coupling of destinies forced on Hammer and Nailles by the capricious coincidence of names and place...

...He is not being a novelist, because he has no point of view...

...But what their names, their very oppositeness, are meant to convey is a murky secret...

...With the swami's freak success, the credibility gap between Cheever and reader widens dangerously...

...For if one reads it as a novel about recognizable human experience, Bullet Park is not really about Hammer and Nailles at all, though it ends in a grotesque act of melodrama that sets one against the other, like clashing swords, in a violent parody of murder and salvation...

...He does not have much of a mind, and even when the bad luck of pain and suffering does indeed appear on his itinerary, the closest he comes to any sense of tragedy is: "I hate lying and I hate falsehoods and when you get a world that admits so many liars I suppose you've got something to be sad about...

...A psychiatrist named Doheny is accused of being a fraud because there are no diplomas on his walls...

...Now, an imaginery malady is an old and honorable literary device, like fire and sudden death...

...Of course, we think the simple-minded play on names is not meant to be taken in simple-minded fashion, but just how it should be understood is unclear...

...In these shards of anecdote, we are told a great deal, but it signifies nothing because it provides no explanation of his decision to murder...