Word: cheevers
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BULLET PARK by John Cheever. 241 pages. Knopf...
...spring holds less flamboyant promises, as well. John Cheever has finished Bullet Park, a chronicle of fathers and sons and the communications chasm in suburbia. Kurt Vonnegut has found a subject that will support any amount of black humor and white rage, fire-bombing of Dresden-which he lived through as a war prisoner. In Pictures of Fidelman, Bernard Malamud writes of an impoverished painter who outwits a gang of forgers who force him to turn out a new Titian. From Paris comes The Fruits of Winter, the new Prix Goncourt winner that was the occasion for enough scheming...
...that the magazines, entirely dependent on the energies and whims of their editors, tended to be nomadic. Secession, for example, moved in succeeding editions from Vienna to Berlin to the Tirol to Florence, finally folded in New York City in 1924. Story, which published the first works of Cheever, Capote, Salinger and Mailer, shifted from Vienna to Majorca to Paris to New York, where it, too, folded...
...make a novel-sized picture, Cheever's skeletal story had to be fleshed out. Scenarist Eleanor Perry and her director-husband Frank (who made David and Lisa) have done so by turning the gothic into the baroque. A little boy cannot be a symbol of innocence by himself; he must be playing a pipe like Pan. To give Merrill's mental anguish an exterior, a vanilla-colored, bikini-clad girl companion is added. To increase the audience's anguish, Merrill is made to out his hand on her stomach and quote The Song of Solomon: "Thy belly...
There are a few reflections of the acrid, desolate quality in Cheever's original-notably when Merrill is maligned by a series of well-cast bit actors playing the tradespeople and servants he once abused. But, like its main character, the project at bottom is a parody of its essential self. "When you see The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?" ask the ads. The chances are that the viewer will talk to himself during the long, embellished stretches that, sadly, make up most of the film...