Reviews for Bullet Park

The average rating for Bullet Park based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-14 00:00:00 Tovise Haynes Extraordinarily bizarre novel with some gorgeous, hilarious sections of writing. I prefer THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLE, which has all the weirdness of this book with more interesting characters. Try to avoid the back jacket copy, or any summary, because the lesson here is in the (insane) delay of plot - it's a 220 page preamble, then 20 brief pages of action, and if you know what's coming it will take away most of the fun. The first half of the preamble belongs to Nailes, and is told in a roving 3rd person that details the happenings in Bullet Park and the corresponding dissolution of the protagonist's psyche I read it as a Richard Ford pastiche, which was often great: "Vital statistics? They were of no importance. The divorce rate was way down, the suicide rate was a secret; traffic casualties averaged twenty-two a year becasue of a windign highway that seemed to have been drawn on the map by a child with a grease pencil. The winters were too inclement for citrus fruit but much too clement for the native white birch." The second half belongs to Hammer (yes, Hammer and Nailes), and is told in an odd, tight stream-of consciousness first person that has a good deal of surreality, sometimes to its detriment. This section is faster, more character driven, and less good, as the voice loses Cheever's lyricism. The narrative hook comes in very close to the end of this section, and is quickly resolved in a climax that seems way too easy. And I think that's on purpose. One gets the feeling (as with the Wapshots, to a lesser extent), that Cheever is mocking the expectations we have for novels as he revels in them. Think of this more as a loose series of vignettes, accompanied by a narrative scaffolding that Cheever doesn't really care about. It's also worth mentioning that this book is tremendously preoccupied with homosexuality. Nearly every character (five different characters!) has a gay panic moment or three, and the male body is fetishized throughout. There is also a commensurate amount of character-driven homophobia, and this feels like that rare case where knowing about the author's personal life - Cheever's famous bisexuality - helps explain something that would otherwise be a flaw. Mainly, as always with Cheever, the writing, the writing: "There seemed to be some metric regulation to the pace of the talk. it was emotional, intimate, evocative and as random as poetry. They had come from other places and would go to other places but sitting against the light at four in the afternoon they seemed as permanent as the beer pulls."

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-07 00:00:00 Colin Case So Very Sixties A bizarre book full of absurdities and unfathomable details of travel and personal description. An upper middle class New York suburb is chosen by an apparent psychopath for the location of a senseless murder. The target is the son of a local resident, undistinguished except for his smug racism, boredom and moderate alcohol and drug dependency. The motive appears to derive from a suggestion by the murderer's estranged mother that "...nothing less than a crucifixion..." will wake the world. A metaphor for the perceived attack on or deterioration of middle class values during the 1960's? Possibly but then why would Cheever put such an attack in the mind and hands of another middle class nutcase? And what do the repeating tropes, like the white threads on clothing, the yellow room, allusions to homosexual panic, and the unaccounted for drowsiness of both would-be murderer and his victim, signify? Locations - Rome, the Italian Alps, Switzerland, Cleveland - come and go without need or apparent purpose. Historical events - a political assassination, the translation of an Italian poet - are mentioned without context or consequence. If this book had been written 30 years later, I would have pegged it as authored by an experimental AI programme. Perhaps Cheever was prescient enough to anticipate the technology. But I'm doubtful. Clearly I need someone to give me a skeleton key to Bullet Park.