The Portable Abyss

BULLET PARK by John Cheever. 241 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

After the final melodramatic act of John Cheever's new novel--in which a boy barely escapes being turned into a gasoline-soaked torch on the altar of an Episcopal church--the reader is assured that everything is going to be "as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been." Lest it be thought that this is an attempt to fill the current American prescription for a tragedy with a pain-killing happy ending, it should be made clear that Cheever means by his four "wonderfuls" very much the same bitter things conveyed in the famous five "nothings" of King Lear. There are no dizzy precipices edging the smug suburban surface of Bullet Park. There is, however, the "portable abyss" of the commuter's 7:46 a.m. to Grand Central.

John Cheever's title, in the most obvious way, is intended to suggest that it is possible to die just as dead and be as swiftly damned among movers and cocktail shakers as ever it has been among the cockroach-infested retreats of the materially disadvantaged.

Insistence on that point is not new for Cheever. He has always been something of a Christian soldier in mufti, a man more kin to John Bunyan than to John Updike. Cheever's formula for circumventing disorder and the Devil has never strayed far from the New England legacy of his first full-length character, old Leander Wapshot. "Bathe in cold water every morning," Leander counseled his sons. "Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." Yet literary means, like wars and prices, tend to escalate. In Bullet Park, trying to cope with up-to-date exurban alarums and filial excursions--including creeping despair and the generation gap --has widened farther than ever the consistent gap between Cheever's surface realism and the bizarre events and distorted perspectives of the moral allegories he pursues.

Befuddled Blessedness. Structurally the book seems simple: a narrative about the struggle between suburban neighbors unabashedly named Hammer and Nailles. The latter, Eliot Nailles, is an apparently commonplace industrial chemist who now sells a spiffy mouthwash. A churchgoer, country clubman, volunteer fireman and commuter, Nailles, in most modern literary hands, might emerge as a figure of fun. Cheever loves him, however, and sees in his dominant character istics--passionate monogamy, joy in small things, and especially in his inarticulate love for his teen-age son Tony--a kind of befuddled blessedness. It is a quality not unlike Billy Budd's, all the more vulnerable because it is unaware of evil. "Nailles thought of pain and suffering," Cheever writes, "as a principality lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe."

By contrast, Paul Hammer, Nailles' fated counterpart, is literally a bastard. "There is some mysterious, genetic principality," Cheever observes, "where the children of anarchy and change are raised." Hammer carries the passport of that principality. Brought up as a foundling, he becomes an unsettling, sinister figure. Rootless and rich, he is odd in some dreadful way that puts him outside humanity. A haunted, solitary drunk, he seems to epitomize the danger and disorder that lurk in self-preoccupation. A pet cat, or familiar spirit, called Schwartz, suggests that Hammer may be some sort of warlock. But in any case, Hammer sows lechery and malevolence wherever he goes.

Which of these opposing spirits--Hammer or Nailles--will decide the fate of Nailles' adolescent son Tony? Before the answer is given, Tony is sketched by Cheever as a gentle but largely predictable symbol of his generation. Unlike Salinger's Holden Caulfield, with his torrential garrulity, the boy does not get to tell his own story. But his silent vote is profoundly disapproving of Bullet Park and its frangible felicities. He has few dramatically contemporary hang-ups. There is little pot, porn, trans-sex, unisex in Tony's scene.

He has a sort of innocence, hard to convey in fiction, or by any other means, that is bound to prove embarrassing. He is also afflicted by unsophisticated surface ills: low grades, loss of a place on the football squad, undone homework, limited television. Dad once menaces him with a putter--when the boy says he would like to drop out of school and suggests, as many American young are doing, that promoting mouthwash is not what man should be all about.

Before the book's final, and perhaps preposterous moment comes (with Tony's near-immolation) the boy's rejection of the outer shapes of his father's world--mouthwash, lawnmower, cocktails, covert sex noises from the bedroom, college, good job--is absolute. He simply takes to bed, hugging the pillow, and won't get up. All he will say to his desperate father is "I love the world. I just feel sad, that's all."

Abraham and Isaac. Beyond an unfashionable admiration for all that is chaste, honorable and orderly in the world, John Cheever has always been notable for social perceptions that seem superficial but somehow manage to reveal (and devastate or exalt) the subjects of his suburban scrutiny. Much of this book, too, is composed of his customary skillful vignettes in which apparent slickness masks real feeling.

Despite such touches, Bullet Park is an experiment for Cheever, a thrusting out from rational story telling to the presentation of linked fragments of life which, both in themselves and as symbols, must compel the reader. On that level the book is outwardly crude, yet mysteriously provocative. Its theme suggests sources as far back as the story of Abraham and Isaac, with a youth seen as a sacrificial lamb. Readers who care, moreover, may read into Hammer and Nailles either two parts of one American character or two opposed aspects of commercial, ceaselessly mobile U.S. society. Perhaps, too, Cheever is invoking the endless confrontation between the simple, orderly, unimaginative and fruitful of this world, and its articulate, nervous, itchy, deadly and driven personalities who seem now to be in the ascendant. Cheever offers sympathies--but no final answers about the outcome. It is clear though, that he feels that order and simplicity stand in perpetual peril, and seem today singularly ill-equipped to defend themselves.

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