Bullet Park by John Cheever
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So Very Sixties

A bizarre book full of absurdities and unfathomable details of travel and personal description.

An upper middle class New York suburb is chosen by an apparent psychopath for the location of a senseless murder. The target is the son of a local resident, undistinguished except for his smug racism, boredom and moderate alcohol and drug dependency. The motive appears to derive from a suggestion by the murderer's estranged mother that "...nothing less than a crucifixion..." will wake the world.

A metaphor for the perceived attack on or deterioration of middle class values during the 1960's? Possibly but then why would Cheever put such an attack in the mind and hands of another middle class nutcase? And what do the repeating tropes, like the white threads on clothing, the yellow room, allusions to homosexual panic, and the unaccounted for drowsiness of both would-be murderer and his victim, signify?

Locations - Rome, the Italian Alps, Switzerland, Cleveland - come and go without need or apparent purpose. Historical events - a political assassination, the translation of an Italian poet - are mentioned without context or consequence.

If this book had been written 30 years later, I would have pegged it as authored by an experimental AI programme. Perhaps Cheever was prescient enough to anticipate the technology. But I'm doubtful. Clearly I need someone to give me a skeleton key to Bullet Park.

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