I started reading a novel called Bullet Park by John Cheever, thinking that I would read a good fictional portrayal of American suburbs.

The first part of the three-part book - the Naille family's story - although it came close to meeting my expectations, the next two parts ended with a disappointing decline.

The second part - Hammer's story - although not as good as the first part, I read it with pleasure. However, the build-up to the murder plot, which took up a large part of the book's introduction, and its overall structure - in my opinion - not being able to find its place in the story remained the main thing I didn't like about the book.

Regardless of my opinion of the book, I enjoyed reading John Cheever and I plan to read the rest of his works starting with Falconer Hapishanesi.

Considero John Cheever um dos melhores contistas contemporâneos. É curioso que, mesmo quando escreve romances, ele não consegue deixar de ser um contista. Isso é bem demonstrado em "Bullet Park". Ao longo da narrativa, que é sempre muito fluída, ele cria personagens secundárias e conta histórias a respeito deles. A história que ele cria acerca da mãe de um dos protagonistas é fabulosa. Em uma carta que escreve ao filho, ela descreve a forma como passa certas noites, ouvindo sons diferenciados e sonhando com os ocupantes anteriores dos quartos que ela ocupa. Cheever é um escritor completo, com uma descrição prodigiosa de pormenores e um enquadramento completo das situações. "Bullet Park" é um livro que recomendo sem reservas, mas principalmente, Cheever é um escritor que não deve ser ignorado. Ele tem uma habilidade única para criar personagens complexos e histórias cativantes que mantêm o leitor envolvido até o final.

Capitalism offers a perfect look at the American middle class, specifically those suburbanites who commute to work in New York by train.

Work, marry a beautiful woman, have children, buy a five-bedroom house with a pool, go to church on Sundays and mow the lawn, throw a party every 15 days... It's a life we're familiar with from American movies and, in my opinion, most importantly, from "Mad Men."

Although it's connected between the first and second seasons, I think the story of Hammer in the second season is weaker. Cheever seems to be squeezed towards the end. However, the story of Nailles and his family is excellent.

I examined Bullet Park together with Richard Yates' novel "The Road to Independence": http://tembelveyazar.blogspot.com.tr/...

I prefer John Cheever when he is dealing with stories, in which he is an undisputed master.

In this novel, we always have a beautiful writing style and some remarkable passages. However, the author seems to lose a bit of finesse and rely too much on the absurd, ultimately stretching the structure of the story a bit too much.

Then, for goodness' sake, you finish a book with this sentence "The following Monday, Tony returned to school while Nailles, always on drugs, went to work, and everything became beautiful again, beautiful, beautiful, but beautiful as it had always been" and you can't help but like him. However, the flaws of the book (at least in my eyes) remain.

John Cheever's works often explore the complex and sometimes absurd aspects of human nature and relationships. While this novel has its strengths in terms of writing style and certain passages, the overuse of the absurd can sometimes detract from the overall coherence and depth of the story.

Nevertheless, the final sentence leaves a certain charm and perhaps a sense of resignation, as if life goes on in its own beautiful and yet somewhat flawed way.

Overall, despite its flaws, this novel still offers an interesting exploration of the human condition through the lens of Cheever's unique writing.

The author's journey in this piece evolves from birding to tom-catting.

The allure of the woodsy laboratory, a place where a plethora of French perfumes are meticulously crafted, remains with the reader long after the narrative concludes. It persists and haunts.

In fact, it even harks back to the start of the novel. The image of the toothpaste and shaving cream magnates deep in thought about the mysteries of life while skiing is quite captivating.

It makes one wonder about the foundry in an unknown location that formulated those products. And the question that lingers is: Where exactly do they ski?

This aspect adds an element of mystery and curiosity to the story, making it all the more engaging.

It makes the reader want to know more about the characters and their surroundings, as well as the background of the products they use.

The combination of these elements creates a rich and vivid narrative that keeps the reader hooked from start to finish.

Un Cheever tronco e amaro, whose writing seizes the reader's attention with calibrated jabs of cynicism. However, his prose seems to be a victim of the same ennui that envelopes the rich and depressed Paul Hammer. There is a stagnant, alcoholic, and unrelenting self-destructive mood that inevitably soaks the characters, making the contours of the story too crude. Nevertheless, there remains the scent of a hidden flame, the undeniable power of the writer that perhaps is left a bit loose here, emerging between one invention and another.

Nota (molto) a margine: Based on my speculations about Cheever's olfactory pallino (see review of the Wapshot), there is a delicious passage here related to the "transport of odors" of the cat Schwartz that shuttles between two masters.

The short stories of John Cheever have long been a blindspot in my fictional reading, even though his reputation often precedes him. Given the sharp and incisive nature of Cheever's writing about mid-twentieth-century bourgeois American life, this is an oversight I must correct in the coming years. After spending much of the year attempting to read fiction by new-to-me authors and having relatively few truly exciting discoveries, the language Cheever employs in his fiction makes it all worthwhile.

The plot here is straightforward – that is, it would seem flimsy and improbable in the hands of a less skilled writer than Cheever. The self-assured Eliot Nailles, a mouthwash salesman who fancies himself a chemist, and his wife live in the community of Bullet Park, a prosperous neighborhood complete with an average of 2.3 children per household, white picket fences, and a sense of bland self-satisfaction. Much of the first part of the book, which focuses on Eliot and his family, details their efforts to deal with their son Tony's sudden and inexplicable mental illness, which confines him to his bed for weeks. The second part of the book is dedicated to a Bullet Park newcomer named Paul Hammer. I know, I know... Hammer and Nailles. I groaned too. Why Cheever insisted on this bit of awkwardness is a bit cringe-worthy, but it can otherwise be forgiven for the strengths the book offers. Paul has wasted much of his young adulthood traveling aimlessly around the world, being a flaneur, and translating the poetry of Eugenio Montale while in a self-induced alcoholic stupor, only to arrive – miraculously – at Bullet Park. It is only here that Paul decides to turn his mother's final words about the salvific power of crucifying someone in Bullet Park into a reality.

Despite being fifty years old, this book reads very much ahead of its time. The way it coldly and clinically diagnoses the problems of modern American life spares no one in its bitterness and cynicism. Eliot requires tranquilizers to get through the day. Tony can only find a cure by having his mother seek out an Eastern swami-cum-guru (which I can only interpret as Cheever's mordant take on the perniciousness of "New Age" philosophy that began to enter American culture in the sixties). Tony also spends hour after hour glued to a flickering television, to the detriment of everything else. The only way to make his affliction more modern would have been to foresee cat videos on YouTube or the ubiquity of video games.

The biggest flaw, or at least the aspect I liked least about the novel, was that the conflict between Nailles and Hammer occurs in the very last pages of the book, almost as an afterthought. We are given the biographical backgrounds of both Nailles and Hammer, and then the climax comes, seemingly out of nowhere. The enmity between the two characters should have been better explained. I can't help but think this is Cheever's way of suggesting that evil rarely announces itself with fanfare and theatrics. Instead, it has a banality that makes it all the more dangerous. Cheever is more interested in chance and caprice than in raw intent.

Other than that, this was a transformative pleasure to read. There is a pathological joy I derive from writers whose eye for social commentary is as acute and attuned as Cheever's. Just like in the novels of Richard Yates, you might be initially drawn in by the well-manicured begonias and faux-marble caryatids adorning the sunny porches of Anywhere, U.S.A. But you stay for the fears, frustrations, and quiet Weltschmerz that are so expertly and clinically explored in the lives of Cheever's characters.

Well, this is truly random.

I found myself struggling at times to fully comprehend Cheever's constant flitting between different times and characters. However, that struggle paled in comparison to my efforts to understand the actual point he was attempting to convey.

Is the idea that wholesomeness is dull, yet there's not much we can do about it? Or perhaps that people hurt and love for a myriad of reasons, without any rhyme or reason?

I mean, his tone is relatively easy to decipher, but the essence of his point completely eludes me.

I must admit that I did find a significant portion of the book to be highly readable, and I mostly enjoyed breezing through it.

However, I can't honestly say that I think it was truly worth my (albeit short) time or my £8.99.

It was occasionally amusing, often interesting, but more than anything else, it was baffling. This one is a bit of a "what the f***" moment.

The first part, which describes the absurd daily lives of the family consisting of Nailles, Nellie and Tony, was good. The second part, where Hammer, who resembles the talented Mr. Ripley, is described, was a bit dull. The scene where Tony, who hasn't gotten out of bed for days, is cured by a shaman, and the scene where Nailles' travel companion in the suburbs is swallowed/pulled by the train tracks is exactly the details one would expect from Cheever. Also, Hammer putting a diamond he bought from Walmart into a cocktail to deceive the friend he invited to his stingy mistress's house and the man's surprise made me laugh for a long time.

Despite the beautiful details, I didn't understand Cheever's motivation, why he designed this story as a novel. If he is examining suburban families, most of his stories are already about this theme. This novel is not about big issues, but about the conditions that create a sociopath, about the strange daily stories of a family on the verge of social climbing. Nothing more. Readers who haven't read Cheever's stories should not start with this book.

Bullet Park, the 1969 novel by John Cheever, offers a sharp and disturbing look at life in the American suburbs. It is not the idyllic middle-class paradise that promises peace and stability. Instead, it is a modern hell disguised as tranquility. Cheever strips away the superficiality and existential void hidden behind the immaculate facades and well-tended gardens.

The characters in the novel are trapped in a prison of conformity. Their lives are carefully packaged in predictable routines, and success is measured by the fulfillment of empty social expectations. Happiness is an illusion, and despair lurks behind the closed blinds of their houses.

Cheever immerses his characters in a world where the everyday becomes a source of terror. Trivial problems like a failed barbecue, pool maintenance, or the work routine carry a symbolic weight that reveals the precariousness of existence. The protagonist, Eliot Nailles, faces an imminent identity crisis and struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy in the face of emotional collapse. The terrors in Bullet Park are not visible monsters but the product of the psychological oppression of an environment that demands conformity at any cost.

Absurdity permeates every page of Bullet Park, making the characters' existence seem senseless. The novel exposes how, in the search for meaning in a meaningless world, the characters become alienated. Life in Bullet Park is absurd because, despite efforts to find order and purpose, everything feels empty and lacking in significance. Cheever articulates this absurdity through situations and dialogues that,看似 normal on the surface, reveal the absurd lack of coherence and purpose in the characters' lives.

The work culminates in an inexplicable act of violence that symbolizes the final explosion of the pent-up anguish in a world where social norms and expectations crush any possibility of authenticity. Cheever suggests that the suburb is a microcosm of the modern universe: a place where order and security are just a facade that hides despair and existential emptiness.

“Therefore, I would like to have before me a painting with a small station painted on it ten minutes before nightfall”: around white houses with grand pianos that no one plays, smoking chimneys, bookshelves (empty or on which lies a single volume, the telephone directory bound in pink brocade), “normal” families gathered in the living room of the house like the Nailles family, Eliot, Nellie and their son Tony. Thus begins Bullett Park.

“..and everything became beautiful again, beautiful, beautiful but beautiful as it had always been.” Thus ends Bullett Park.

In the middle of this picture of a quiet life in the periphery of an American suburb, there is something that could be improperly defined as “a day of ordinary madness”, improperly because madness is a constant in the existence of the protagonists of the story, Hammer and Nailles (hammer and nail, literally), it unites them and accompanies, albeit in different forms, their days, hours and thoughts. It is an obsession with different goals and objects that consumes, for one, in a short period of time, like a fire that blazes and purifies.

Cheever paints with words, fills with a stinging irony, a metaphorical place, Bullett Park, an islet that is in a corner of a wider world (ours, of yesterday and today) inhabited by a humanity drugged with whisky and cocktails of psychoactive drugs, necessary to not succumb to the terror of facing existence every day and to drive away the fears and angers that oppress them, men and women who “have emptied life of the strength, the stench, the colors and the commitment that alone can give it meaning”.

A poignant and contemporary novel, with only one thing that I didn't like so much and that left me slightly disappointed at the end, namely the lack of a well-defined plot that gives continuity to the story; however, the fragility of the novel does not take away from the skill of one of the masters of contemporary American narrative.

Eliot Nailles, a representative of the American middle class in the 1960s, lives in Bullet Park, an imaginary suburb of New York. In the same town, the extravagant Paul Hammer settles after years of wandering the world with his existential sadness. Gradually, the absurd reasons why Hammer wants to kill Nailles' son, Tonny, are revealed.

Cheever is a great storyteller, and this novel is constructed with fragmented stories in his unmistakable style. As always, he manages to perfectly depict the emptiness and decadence of the American middle class in the middle of the 20th century, their fears, prejudices, obsessions, and miseries. All of this is presented with the unmistakable aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s that the TV series Mad Men helped popularize: men and women who work in the city, smoke and drink whiskey all the time, and live obsessed with the surface and social approval. In that environment, Cheever reveals to us the failure of the American dream in the life of Nailles, and a psychological plot similar to that of Arlt or Dostoievsky in the case of Hammer.

It is not the best of Cheever, it does not reach the intensity of his stories, but it is a good book by a great writer. Well translated into neutral Spanish by the Argentine Forn, without Spanishisms, without "follar" (to have sex), without "gilipollas" (idiots) or any of those terms typical of Spanish translations.