Books: The Portable Abyss

(2 of 3)

By contrast, Paul Hammer, Nailles' fated counterpart, is literally a bastard. "There is some mysterious, genetic principality," Cheever observes, "where the children of anarchy and change are raised." Hammer carries the passport of that principality. Brought up as a foundling, he becomes an unsettling, sinister figure. Rootless and rich, he is odd in some dreadful way that puts him outside humanity. A haunted, solitary drunk, he seems to epitomize the danger and disorder that lurk in self-preoccupation. A pet cat, or familiar spirit, called Schwartz, suggests that Hammer may be some sort of warlock. But in any case, Hammer sows lechery and malevolence wherever he goes.

Which of these opposing spirits—Hammer or Nailles—will decide the fate of Nailles' adolescent son Tony? 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.

He has a sort of innocence, hard to convey in fiction, or by any other means, that is bound to prove embarrassing. He is also afflicted by unsophisticated surface ills: low grades, loss of a place on the football squad, undone homework, limited television. Dad once menaces him with a putter—when the boy says he would like to drop out of school and suggests, as many American young are doing, that promoting mouthwash is not what man should be all about.

Before the book's final, and perhaps preposterous moment comes (with Tony's near-immolation) the boy's rejection of the outer shapes of his father's world—mouthwash, lawnmower, cocktails, covert sex noises from the bedroom, college, good job—is absolute. He simply takes to bed, hugging the pillow, and won't get up. All he will say to his desperate father is "I love the world. I just feel sad, that's all."

Abraham and Isaac. Beyond an unfashionable admiration for all that is chaste, honorable and orderly in the world, John Cheever has always been notable for social perceptions that seem superficial but somehow manage to reveal (and devastate or exalt) the subjects of his suburban scrutiny. Much of this book, too, is composed of his customary skillful vignettes in which apparent slickness masks real feeling.