Salvation in the Suburbs

John Cheever, cheerful believer in suburbia, champion of the upper middle class in lower middle age. He invokes the muse merely to describe a railroad station, then confidently explains that “the setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads.” America’s essence rides the commuter train.

St, Botolphs, Shady Hill, and now Bullet Park the setting is indeed at the heart oi the matter, and Cheever’s genius is the genius of place, so much so that in this novel the first prison we meet is a real-estate agent. Here are the $50,000 and $60,000 homes, each with its toilet seat cover of “pink plush" and its “telephone directory bound in pink brocade,” each with its suffering, hangoverridden commuter recovering from the weekend: “Finally he dresses and lacked by vertigo, melancholy, nausea and fitful erections he boards Ins Cethsemane the Monday-morning 10:48.”Crucified middle class indeed; the main characters of this novel are named Hammer and

Naillcs. And Hammer, who is insane, intends to immolate brutally an arbitrarily chosen member of the middle class, on the altar of a suburban church, to awaken the world to the sins of suburbia.

According to Cheever, suburbia is the trickiest paradise since Eden, full of traps and falls, demanding much of its inhabitants. One exemplary couple, the most successful social movers in Bullet Park, take their recreation so seriously that it coilcc is a steady toll of their flesh and blood: “When they arrived at a party they would be impeccably dressed but her right arm would be in a sling. He would support a game leg with a gold-headed cane and wear dark glasses,” Their countless accidents in the cause of sociability merely add to their success. Survivors of the good life wear scar tissue like medals. The penalties seem rather high, but there are also rewards for Cheever characters: swimming, trout fishing, and cutting wood— these seem to be lasting, soothing occupations that belong by right to them and temporarily make their scuds whole. Religion, though dilute enough to add to their guilt feelings, can be another reward, curiously tied to the other delights just mentioned. “The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming.” The “holy smell of new wood” is mentioned in an earlier story: in Bullet. Park the holy man burns sandalwood for incense and is also a carpenter: Nailles thinks of scriptural quotations as he cuts down dead trees whose fragrance reminds him of “cold churches in Rome”; and even madman Hammer is free from his demons while he trims hack the deadwood behind his house. When Nellie Nailles smells wood shavings, she asks herself, “Which came first, Christ the carpenter or the holy smell of new wood?” When Cheever appeared on the cover of Time a lew years ago, we found that he was indeed both a churchgoer and a worker with chain saw’ and ax. What Pioustian undercurrent rims here?

Bullet Park

by John Cheever (Knopf, $4.95)

Early one morning Nailles successfully defends his carefully

clipped lawn against an enormous snapping turtle, and though the man has a shotgun, it is his persistence rather than his power that finally triumphs, the same persistence that claimed Bullet Park from the reptiles in the first place. This heroic perseverance is a characteristically middle-class quality, for the middle class must walk a very difficult and narrow path, a thin edge between two pits, bodkin between indifference and obsession. This is the way we live, with persistence and a rough temperance, rationing our cigarettes and counting our drinks. John Cheever is not interested in teetotalers or lushes, but in the human need to establish a shaky equilibrium, the desperate paradise of two-sided man, ticking along like a bad clock, passing the time through pendulum swings to either side, and perpetually in need of adjustment.

Nailles’s son Tony tends to get stuck on either side: first he becomes obsessed with television, then indifferent to his French course and obsessed with football, then so indifferent to the world that he cannot he roused from bed. Doctor, psychiatrist, and physiologist all try to put Tony together again, but only a Negro guru can jolt Tony from his ennui. This contemporary holy man effects cures on wounded psyches by a process so simple it embarrasses him to perform it: he repeats hopeful words or phrases. Mis first cure consisted of repetition of “valor.”The nobility and absurdity of man is that lie responds to such an empty, but potentially full, word as though it were already stuffed with essence. At the end of “A Vision of the World,” an earlier story seminal to this novel, the narrator awakes from a dream and ext laims, “Valor! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendor! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!” and announces that “the words seem to have the colors of the earth, and as I recite them I feel my hopefulness mount until I am contented and at peace with the night.” It is ihis hopefulness that is instilled in Tony, the belief that these abstentions do exist and justify suburban life. For here is what the commuters live for, not the pink plush that so lamely represents the ideal.

In the discrepancy between reality and the vision, reality tends to become dreamlike. The wife in “A Vision of the World” has the feeling that she is “a character in a television situation comedy.” “I mean I’m nice looking, I’m well-dressed, 1 have humorous and attractive children, but I have this terrible feeling that I’m in black-and-white and that I can be turned off by anybody.” It is a frequent feeling in Cheever, one that. Nailles experiences in looking at his family at the breakfast table ("they seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip”) and that drains his son Tony of all resolution until he decides to stay in bed ("I feel as if the house were made of cards”). Suburban existence seems threatened with meaninglessness from all sides. Mrs. Nailles is deeply disturbed by the nudity in offBroadway theater, by homosexuals fructifying on the bus, by the psychiatrist’s questions about her family’s moral norms: “ ‘We are honest and decent people,’she said angrily, ‘and I’m not going to he made to feel guilts about it.’ ” Their life is continually on the defensive. Nailles suddenly finds that he can no longer face his commuter train in the morning without massive doses of

tranquilizers. While the Nailles family desperately persevere, they dream of a simpler past. It is John Cheever’s special ability to view our healthy suburbans as a noble and dying race, their unique virtues soon to be extinct.

Checver is placed just before

Chekhov, another fine writer of short I stories, in the fiction section of your I public library, and the tempting I criticism of the Wapshot novels is I that they sometimes seem to be pasteups of minimally connected stories. Bullet Park, a novel with a clean plot line, the convergence of hammer and nail, resists this temptation to digress. We are nevertheless ultimately disappointed, for while Cheever’s writing retains its brilliance. his plot is not at all convincing, depending as it does upon the motivation of Hammer, a most unsuccessful character. Hammer’s madness is apparent only in his plans for an absurd murder. Can it be Cheever’s intention to argue that murder involves little aberration in a man’s personality, or is there a previously unsuspected limitation to Cheever’s imagination? This lack is made far ; more obvious when Hammer, for a third of the novel, tells his own story. From Poe through Faulkner and Nabokov, American authors have delighted in projecting variant images of the world through the eyes of the child, the idiot, and the lunatic. Yet the world of Hammer is pretty much the same as the world of Cheever in the rest of the novel. Nothing seems to have been gained through that first-person interlude, and a lot has been lost, including our confidence in the motivation of the character most crucial to the plot. No doubt. Cheever intends to show that experiences today are fragmentary and that people no longer possess—if they ever did—a unified personality, yet if Hammer has only the vaguest of notions about why he wanted to commit murder, and discusses his actions with both detachment and distaste, we may justifiably ask why we should listen to him at all.

Curiously, the novel is more than half finished before the main plot and the character of Hammer begin to be important, and this first half is the more pleasant parr. It is always strange to read a novel that weakens toward the end: we blame ourselves for its deterioration. Highly recommended for those who never finish one book before they start another.