Bullet Park Author:John Cheever In his new novel, John Cheever turns from the familiar haunts of the Wapshots to a landscape at once more immediate and more universal. The time is this moment, in America. The principal characters-who meet, presumably by chance, one Sunday at church in Bullet Park-are two men name Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer. — Nailles is open and nice, with... more » no secrets. Hammer is, dangerously, not what he seems. They are linked together by the mysterious binding power of nomenclature-undivorceable as ham and eggs, as life and death, as love and hate; as the two halves of the terrifying, touching, comic, cruelly overburdened American psyche.
The third crucial character, Tony Nailles, is the one who of course (he is seventeen) holds-and is in-the bag. How he got into it and how in the nick of time he appears to get out of it-despite and because of both Nailles and Hammer and the Bullet Park they all belong to-is the final fascination of a novel that is the most beautiful, most adventurous work we haVe yet had from Mr Cheever.« less