Byline: VICKI L. FRIEDMAN, STAFF WRITER NORFOLK -- A team trying to make its way up against the team from Down Under. That's the matchup at Harbor Park tonight as the Colorado Silver Bullets play an exhibition game against the Australian...

Missile defense is closer than ever, and Alaska's 49th Missile Brigade is at the forefront Although the most strategically positioned U.S. state to every potential hot spot in the world, Alaska still stays off most radar screens in the lower 48. In...

When in 1969 John Cheever turned from the lovable Wapshots to the weird creatures who inhabit Bullet Park, most reviewers attacked or dismissed him. They were, it seems to me, dead wrong. The Wapshot books, though well made, were minor. "Bullet Park," illusive, mysteriously built, was major—in fact, a magnificent work of fiction. One reason the book has been misunderstood is that it lacks simple message…. Another reason is that Cheever is right about evil: it comes quietly…...

Mr. Cheever has done a strange thing in [Bullet Park]. He has taken the plot of Samuel Beckett's Molloy and transposed it to the mortgaged suburbs whose scotch-fuelled denizens he vies with John O'Hara to be the Zola of. Even stranger, he has reached into another Beckett work, the play Endgame, and lifted the conceit whereby one of his characters is named Hammer and another Nailles. Thus supplied with a hamper of borrowed stuff, he proceeds with verve to write what might have been a first-rate...

Cheever is placed just before Chekhov, another fine writer of short stories, in the fiction section of your public library, and the tempting criticism of the Wapshot novels is that they sometimes seem to be paste-ups 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, dependi...