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 novel. In Nailles and his wife we have a rich American family that lives in a limbo of spiritual emptiness without suspecting the slightest deprivation. (p. 549)
Mr. Cheever's account of life in suburbia makes one's soul ache. Here is human energy that once pushed plows and stormed the walls of Jerusalem and lifted Chartres to its pinnacles spent daily in getting up hung over, staggering drugged with tranquilizers to wait for a train to rattle one into Manhattan. There eight hours are given to the writing of advertisements about halitosis and mouthwash. Then the train back, a cocktail party, and drunk to bed. Every step one takes is on matter bought with money borrowed from a bank whose sole business is to collect the largest possible interest on the loan for the longest possible time….
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