I read Bullet Park by John Cheever over the past couple of days.
I’m going to have more on it tomorrow, I hope.
It’s a strange, mesmerizing book. If you intend to read it, don’t read too many spoilers. I usually don’t put that warning out there, since most of the cultural products we talk about are fairly familiar, but this isn’t, and the last twenty pages are all the more powerful when they seem to have come out of the blue – which then leads you on a hunt back through the book to figure out – did they really actually come out of the blue?
I think one’s response to a book like Bullet Park depends in part on your view of life and then what role you hope or expect art to play in life. For me, life has profound and ultimate meaning and purpose and a divinely-ordered end, but that meaning and end is usually obscured and confounded by limited human vision and seemingly unlimited human sin. Further, my vision, my view into all of that is just that – my vision: constrained and shaded, seeing through a glass darkly.
Bullet Park appealed to me because it reflects that craziness. It’s essentially a book about people doing either outright crazy things or at the very least things that don’t at all match either reality or even their own deepest yearnings. Yes, it’s about suburbia – the ultimate, demented anti-suburbia book of the genre, I’d say – but in all the exaggeration, there’s a truth that I need another day or so to articulate.
Holy Communion. Sexagesima. Nailles heard. a cricket in the chancel and the noise of a tin drum from the rain gutters while he said his prayers. His sense of the church calendar was much more closely associated with the weather than with the revelations and strictures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathias meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cleansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. Abstain from fornication. Possess your vessel in honor. Jesus departs from the coast of Tyre and Sidon as the skiing ends. For the crucifixion a bobsled stands stranded in a flowerbed, its painter coiled among the early violets. The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming. St. James and Revelations fell on the first warm days of summer when you could smell the climbing roses by the window and when an occasional stray bee would buzz into the house of God and buzz out again. Trinity carried one into summer, the dog days and the drought, and the parable of the Samaritan was spoken as the season changed and the gentle sounds of the night garden turned as harsh as hardware. The flesh lusteth against the spirit to the smoke of leaf fires as did the raising of the dead. Then one was back again with St. Andrew and the snows of Advent.
On another note:
I gave my son the Criterion Collection Bergman boxed set for Christmas. He’s watched them all and ranked his favorites – here.