Photo by Andrea Thompson
Mad Lit: Felicia Sullivan
Issue #35
How many readings of John Cheever’s Bullet Park does it take to purge WASP envy? The editor of Small Spiral Notebook keeps count. (The uncut version)
By Ling Ma
Published: March 31st, 2008 | 3:30pm
Felicia Sullivan has been helping others tell their tales for years. As founder and editor of the recently discontinued lit journal Small Spiral Notebook, she set up a forum for some of the most promising younger writers around. Now the writer-editor-blogger is exhuming her own story in the riveting memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here, which traces her unrooted upbringing with her single mother.
Of all the options, what’s a young girl looking for a stable environment to do? One answer: Cultivate a cold case of WASP envy at an impressionable age. Namely, the sort of upper-middle–class purgatory depicted in John Cheever’s Bullet Park. We asked Sullivan to cast an eye back at the influential read.
Bullet Park is about: a spiritually bankrupt suburban family, whose world is comprised of cocktails and commuting, and the madman who’s determined to bring them ruin.
I chose this title because: growing up in Brooklyn, the suburbs, and the suit-wearing, perfectly coiffed gentry, were foreign to me. They were mere images on a television screen. In Brooklyn, we heard about the rich people – stock markets and Wall Street – we saw them buy houses on Long Island with three-car garages, and we wondered, What about us? Where were our cable boxes and sprinkler lawns? When I moved to Valley Stream, Long Island in the eighth grade, I was disoriented, terrified. Surely we spoke the same language, but why did it seem softer, richer, coming out of their mouths? Why were girls preened and carrying Liz Claiborne handbags while I slung a backpack over my shoulder? And why were my neighbors so careless with their beautiful things? I grew up pinching quarters from cushions while mallrats (there were no malls in Brooklyn!) were dropping cash on banana clips, slouchy socks, and expensive denim. Here, every weekend was Christmas.
After six months, I determined that I was in The Twilight Zone and I needed to learn about these characters, this place, fast! So I engulfed all the books about suburbia that I could find – novels and short stories by J.D. Salinger, Richard Yates, and John Cheever (granted, these writers were telling stories about a more affluent society than Valley Stream, but to me, irregardless of one’s zip code, money was money), and I started to discover that there were hazards to good breeding. Suddenly I felt less alone. These books were not only my education about a world so removed from my own, but also they outlined a life I would become desperate to lead.
In Bullet Park, Cheever creates an absurd vision of a family desperate for the American Dream and how their pursuit of this dream is slowly killing them. This family is living in a state of suffocating melancholy; they’re self-medicators, every conversation beyond small talk is a potential landmine, and ironically, salvation comes in a terrifying form: a man named after a household tool.
John Gardner observed that Cheever “sees the world in its totality – not only the fashionable existential darkness but the light older than consciousness, which gives nothingness definition.” At fourteen, I didn’t know what Gardner meant, but I kept feeling that this book was about nothing, a family falling with no ground in sight, and the fall was endless. It made my transition from urban to suburban easier, especially when I was ridiculed for my accent, frizzy hair, and no-name jeans.
But why did I choose this title? I chose it because it was an entrée to a new world in my teens; it became a world I coveted in my twenties, and then it became a world from which I’d flee in my thirties.
The first time I read it, I was: 14 years old.
I’ve read it: twelve times, although I haven’t returned to it in years. Perhaps I’ve had my fill of self-medicating WASPS who live comfortably uncomfortable lives.
One free-associative personal memory I have of this book is: of a birthday party I attended in Westchester with my then-boyfriend in 2003. My boyfriend, a self-loathing Jew, was drinking the WASP Kool-Aid. Scotch-drinking bankers, Dartmouth men, women donning pearls and everyone rallying over a game of cricket surrounded me, judging me. Talk about Bullet Park. But I dressed the part in a preppy pink cashmere vest and played the part by passing out drunk and stoned on Valium on the couch. On the train back into the city, I kept shouting that this was not the life I wanted. “Those people were something out of fucking Bullet Park,” I cried out. To which my boyfriend at the time shouted back, “What the hell is Bullet Park? And what is so wrong with those people?”
My favorite part is: the end. It’s caustic, honest, hilarious, disturbing and profoundly sad all at once. A father rescues his depressed son from a fire (an attempted murder). You think that would actually change the family, bring them closer together, give them goddamn perspective, but no. Nothing changes. I love Bullet Park because it is frighteningly realistic – it’s possible that people do not change in the wake of tragedy, that people will continue to be miserable and complacent, living quiet lives of emotional paralysis.
My favorite line is: “Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles – drugged – went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.”
My favorite character is: Hammer because he is what he’s going after. And I can relate to a narcissistic mother who manipulates her child for her own amusement. Hammer’s desire to awaken society from rampant consumerism and drug abuse is admirable, a noble want, but extreme acts don’t always deliver the message.
If I ever met the author, I would: ask him how his life would have played out had he not been an alcoholic.
After reading it, this book caused me to: unravel.
One unresolved question I wondered about is: none.
You should read it while listening to: crickets.
You should read it when: you need an anesthetic.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more