Word: parkes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BULLET PARK by John Cheever. 241 pages. Knopf...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Coach Loyal Park will try several experiments with his pitching staff this weekend as the Harvard nine travels to Columbia today and Army tomorrow for two all-important Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League games...