“The Land That He Saw Looked Like a Paradise. It Was Not, He Knew”: Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park

Abstract

This essay explores the issue of masculinity in John Cheever’s somewhat critically overlooked novel, Bullet Park (1969), so as to call attention to the inevitable conflict between the conformist ideologies of the postwar corporate world and the dormant desires of the atomized male suburbanite. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous sociological and psychological theory, this essay foreparts the dysfunctional dimensions of masculine dejection as being derivative of suburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the very impossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” it represents. A detailed interpretation of Cheever’s use of the doppelganger narrative will moreover allow for an assessment of the dislocation at the heart of the postwar suburban experience. Bullet Park may be read this way as not only critiquing the prevailing cultural view of suburbia as a pillar of postwar American security, stability, and social adjustment through its portrayal of a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability and maladjustment, but also as directly addressing the fractured principles of America’s traditional values and beliefs. Considering this late sixties text by Cheever as such, this essay hence works to highlight in what ways, and to what extent, the author’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui in Bullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism, whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources of masculine dissatisfaction in their more true and underground origins.