Commuting seems to have become a fact of life in the US before it developed anywhere else. John Cheever (1912-1982) is one of the giant figures of American literature, and many of his short stories are among the finest ever written. His genius lies in a balance of graceful prose, exasperated black humour and genuine despair. First published in 1969, Bullet Park is a classic - and for far more than the dazzling scene in which Harry Shinglehouse vanishes under the 7:56. The story of Eliot Nailles, a man obsessed with his wife and son, examines suburbia, its petty pretentions, aspirations and sexual fantasies, with an understanding shared only by Updike. Eliot's son Tony, now a teenager, has developed a strange illness which has left him bedridden. Desperate to cure him, his parents hire a witch doctor. But years before this, is the famous sequence in which Nailes outraged by the nine-year-old's devotion to TV, carried the set, "kicked open the screen door and fired the television out into the dark. It landed on the cement paving and broke with the rich, glassy music of an automobile collision". Possibly the best of Cheever, and that is saying a great deal.
