Jared's review
status:
Read in August, 2004
Something happened…and I still can’t figure out what it is. With Heller’s careful and passionate dialogues along with profound character development, he successfully produced his second book about nothing. There are few authors that can write an entire novel without a plot and still make it encapsulating and powerful. I take my hat off to Mr. Heller, especially when he identifies many of our empty words and selfish tendencies in our interpersonal relationships. It will scare you to read the absurdities of the nameless protagonist—he will remind you of you. But it is that cynical example that helps identify the changes we can all make in our relationships: at home and at work.
No doubt that this book was all but burned when it was first published—labeled as pornography (and I have to admit that some of the more descriptive passages had me wondering…). It is not reading for everyone, especially those sensitive to immodesty. Something Happened is a 530 page book th...more
Something happened…and I still can’t figure out what it is. With Heller’s careful and passionate dialogues along with profound character development, he successfully produced his second book about nothing. There are few authors that can write an entire novel without a plot and still make it encapsulating and powerful. I take my hat off to Mr. Heller, especially when he identifies many of our empty words and selfish tendencies in our interpersonal relationships. It will scare you to read the absurdities of the nameless protagonist—he will remind you of you. But it is that cynical example that helps identify the changes we can all make in our relationships: at home and at work.
No doubt that this book was all but burned when it was first published—labeled as pornography (and I have to admit that some of the more descriptive passages had me wondering…). It is not reading for everyone, especially those sensitive to immodesty. Something Happened is a 530 page book that could be condensed to 200 pages while maintaining its correctness and brilliance. Heller must have either been compensated by the page or locked himself in his attic for way too long. (Dickens’ time is over Joseph!) But for a novel published in the 70s, it struck a chord about moral reform that few other books did at the time. Heller’s ability to describe a tortured emotional soul is way too good; it makes me wonder about his personal life. But his strategy of creating an anti-hero is his gift, rarely accomplished in literature since Russia’s Dostoevsky.
“Something Happened is about ambition, greed, love, lust, hate and fear, marriage and adultery. It is about the struggle among men, the war between the sexes, the conflict of parents and children. It is about the life we all lead today—and you will never be able to look at that life in the same way again.” This might be too grandiose of a statement (it is on the back of the book) but it’s in the right direction.
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Something Happened 
