Heller's Trial by Tedium

...Writers & Writing HELLER'S TRIAL BY TEDIUM BY PEARL K BELL The plight of the American writer faced with the terrifying necessity of writing a second and different novel, after reaping the lush harvest of an extravagantly well-received first book, is a recurrent phenomenon in our culture As that poignant victim of literary success, F Scott Fitzgerald, put it, there are no second acts in American lives And John Leggett's intelligent recent study, Ross and Tom, chronicles the same brutal truth m the tragic careers of two immensely successful writers of the '40s, Ross Lockndge and Tom Heggen, each, having hit the critical and commercial jackpot on his first try, turned into a piteous burnt-out case, with nothing left to say Following the publication of his bitterly comic antiwar novel, Catch-22, Joseph Heller became the literary golden boy of the '60s But as the years succeeding the book's appearance stretched into a decade and longer, Fitzgerald's apergu must surely have begun to haunt Heller and his admirers Could he...

...In Something Happened everything is merely told, in a spiraling proliferation of remarks that begin nowhere and fall in upon themselves Quite clearly, Heller has attempted here to write a particularly contemporary major novel During the 19th century, authors aimed at showing reality objectively, by means of an omnipresent and unobtrusive narrator in absolute command of everything that occurred But today's most innovative writers have abandoned this method As though reality m our time has become increasingly incomprehensible, ungraspable, a mad world that cannot be contained within old-fashioned frames of reference assented to by novelist and reader- both, books like Herzog, Portnoy's Complaint and now Something Happened do not present life, they describe it, and they do this in one voice, from a single point of view, apparently because life no longer lends itself to a wider, more dramatic manipulation of experience But unlike Bellow and Roth, Heller has confined himself in Something Happened to a sensibility that is narrow and humorless, static and toneless, without the reverberations of variety In the end Slocum—or Heller —is talking only to himself For that reason we do not care...

...would he, flout the familiar nemesis of the one-book author—the years ot writer's block, the tauntingly empty pages, the anguished silence...

...Yossanan gave the lie to every bureaucratic claim to a soldier's patriotism, and an Army psychiatnst declared him crazy because "he has no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions ' In Heller's brilliant inversion of the military ethic, Yossanan's fears became a heightened, a manic form of sanity If he acted crazy because he didn't want to be killed, that proved he must be sane, since "a concern for one's own safety in the face ot dangers that are real and immediate is the process of a rational mind " Heller's was a vast and immovable paranoid vision of existence He was an early laborer in the vineyards that nourished as well such quintessential novelists of the '60s as Pynchon, Vonnegut, Kesey, and Burroughs, although his gusto and openness made him tar more engaging and humanly accessible than the others Yet, if the most spontaneous and delightful quality of Catch-22 was its powerful mocking vitality—untamed, extravagant, boisterously hyperbolical, coarse, raucous, bursting with irrepressible energy—the final impact ot the book was seriously weakened not only by the author's surprising blunders into bathos but, worse, by his intellectual confusion Until the end, Yossanan's enemy was the stupid and corrupt American military hierarchy, in the last episode, though...

...Heller remembered the actual enemy, Hitler, and suddenly Yossanan, the outrageous antipatriot deserting to Sweden, was replaced by Yossanan the moral idealist This strange turnabout threatened the very foundations of the novel's irreverent comic scheme, and we were left with a point of view that was blurred and contused Now 3 years later, Heller has made his way to his second act with Something Happened (Knopf, 569 pp , $10 00), and our confusion is twice compounded For I can think of no other novel that reads like such a willful, disastrous exercise in futility Throughout its almost 600 pages we are forced to listen to the turgid self-pitying, unintelligent, scandalously repetitive, childishly narcissistic, suffocatingly tedious monologue ot a faceless organization-man named Bob Slocum In especially desperate moments during my Sisyphean struggle to finish Something Happened, I felt, paranoid as Yossanan, that Heller was trying to murder me—with boredom, not bullets Enslaved by the tyrant of conscience, I persevered, discovering in the process that not until this trial by tedium had I really understood the term "bored to tears " Ironically, the novel's opening pages promise a rare feast—a minute, unrelenting and unflinching confession of the representative Man of Anxiety in the waning decades of this mad century With sharply nervous resonance, Slocum begins "I get the willies when I see closed doors Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange I wonder why " The premonitory rhythm of doom and decay is superbly sustained, for a few pages But soon we realize that the rest of the book is an endlessly repetitious movement within the same mood, circling the same unvaned ground over and over like a disonented bird In the first chapter, the dog-eat-dog pecking order of Slocum's company is descnbed in exhausting detail, in keeping with the menacing ab-stractness of his working life, we never learn what product or service the company exists to sell, only the malevolence of its hierarchical and bureaucratized relationships Slocum's pomtillist self-portrait becomes a dank web of distrust and dishonesty, lust and infantile rage, envy and hatred, punctuated with hollow cnes of despair "Is this the most I can get from the few years left in this one life of mine...

...Everywhere he turns, burrowing into the past and enduring the present, Slocum is confronted with breakdown, madness suicide, betrayal, and sloth Within and without, his world is an unre-generate swamp of rack and mm Pathologically dissociated from himself, Slocum is a chameleon, taking on the gestures and vocabularies of whichever colleague he is with, even his handwriting is a forgery, borrowed from a boyhood fnend Away from the company, in his suburban Connecticut home, things are no better His wife is a lush, and his teen-age daughter is rude and miserable, his nine-year-old son is afraid of his gym teacher, and his youngest child is a hopelessly brain-damaged idiot One minute Slocum wallows in self-loathing guilt—he cheats on his wife in countless beds, doesn't love his children, neglects his dying mother—but the next he decides the woild is at fault, not himself In a rare burst of objectivity, he admits "When I grow up I want to be a little boy " When something finally does happen, it is so motiveless, so arbitrary, so perversely vague as to seem only another of Slocum's furtive dreams of murder, and it may well be only that Even Heller seems to have dozed over his text at times—we are frequently informed that Mrs Slocum is a churchgoing Congregationalist, but on page 472 she suddenly becomes Jewish By then, however, I was beyond caring If Slocum is meant to be a distillation of present-day America's pervasive sickness, Heller does not render this contaminating despair with sufficient urgency, and Slocum never extends beyond the bog of his sordid, dull particularity He is not Everyman but no-man, and he can move us neither to pity nor to rage There is scarcely a link, an echo, a family resemblance of style or tone to be found in Joseph Heller's two novels What happened to the manic wit, the running gags, the loony inventiveness and corrosive horror of Catch-22"* Where did Heller mislay his descriptive agility, the violently grotesque gift for caricatures like Milo Minderbinder and General Dreedle...

...Heller's predicament was exacerbated by the fact that Catch-22 was more than a wildly successful work It was also heralded as the classic fictional statement of that passionately antiwar decade and its nay-saying, antinomian, black-comic Zeitgeist Though Heller was writing about World War II, his contemptuous denunciation of all war perfectly suited the American mood of mockery and disgust in the time of Vietnam Yossanan, Heller's exuberantly self-devoted hero, unequivocally rejecting the idiotic and lethal notion that any country, any cause, any ideal is worth risking one's life for, became a heady symbol By asking a simple question?Why are they shooting at me...