Books: The Portable Abyss

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BULLET PARK by John Cheever. 241 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

After the final melodramatic act of John Cheever's new novel—in which a boy barely escapes being turned into a gasoline-soaked torch on the altar of an Episcopal church—the reader is assured that everything is going to be "as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been." Lest it be thought that this is an attempt to fill the current American 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.

John Cheever's title, in the most obvious way, is intended to suggest that it is possible to die just as dead and be as swiftly damned among movers and cocktail shakers as ever it has been among the cockroach-infested retreats of the materially disadvantaged.

Insistence on that point is not new for Cheever. He has always been something of a Christian soldier in mufti, a man more kin to John Bunyan than to John Updike. Cheever's formula for circumventing disorder and the Devil has never 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.

Befuddled Blessedness. Structurally the book seems simple: a narrative about the struggle between suburban neighbors unabashedly named Hammer and Nailles. The latter, Eliot Nailles, is an apparently commonplace industrial chemist who now sells a spiffy mouthwash. A churchgoer, country clubman, volunteer fireman and commuter, Nailles, in most modern literary hands, might emerge as a figure of fun. Cheever loves him, however, and sees in his dominant character istics—passionate monogamy, joy in small things, and especially in his inarticulate love for his teen-age son Tony—a kind of befuddled blessedness. It is a quality not unlike Billy Budd's, all the more vulnerable because it is unaware of evil. "Nailles thought of pain and suffering," Cheever writes, "as a principality lying somewhere beyond the legitimate borders of western Europe."