James Salimi read and liked David Beavers's review of Closing Time:

"Again, the rating system fails us. I decided to post a review for this after seeing I'd given it an arbitrary 3-stars, when in fact I recall being profoundly moved by this book. Isn't profound movement worth 5 stars? Whatever.

A lot of peo...more Again, the rating system fails us. I decided to post a review for this after seeing I'd given it an arbitrary 3-stars, when in fact I recall being profoundly moved by this book. Isn't profound movement worth 5 stars? Whatever.

A lot of people have read Catch-22, which is deserving of most all the praise it gets. This is, spiritually and literally, the sequel to that book, which is a little weird, not the least because it was published more than 3 decades after. Appropriate to this lapse in time, Closing Time is about Heller's generation grown old and tired, and with a cynicism that if not greater, is certainly more refined.

Heller is often & rightfully paired with Vonnegut as one of the masterful and distinctly American voices to emerge in the wake of World War II. A word on Vonnegut, because Heller & Vonnegut really are a Yin & Yang of the same subject, in many ways: as funny as Vonnegut's books are, it is often missed that there is a profound and real sadness to his work. Not a sadness with its edge dulled by humor & pathos (though of course those things are woven throughout Vonnegut's work), but just -- sadness. Not humor with sadness -- humor and then sadness. Like Heller's darkly comic moments, you laugh and then you remember why you're laughing, and you stop.

Vonnegut was always probably the more popular writer in no small part because of his talent for brevity, whereas his friend Heller was always more sprawling & digressive in his work. Closing Time is more victim to this than most of Heller's work, a sprawling and sometimes sloppy novel about old age, death, death, old age, the corruption of government and the absurd natures of those who run it, and death.

I'm writing this many years after reading Closing Time, so my memory of the details are foggy. Possibly my opinion of the book at the time was clouded by what it is like for the very young to read of the trials of the very old -- when you're hovering on either side of 20 you don't want to believe that the body breaks down and all your friends will die. Reading this was tantamount to science fiction -- and yet when I read Catch-22 it was my favorite book, and seeing an author revisit his masterwork, his first work, decades after its publication was a profound experience.

Closing Time is a stage for Heller's trenchant cynicism towards the government & the military -- on display in his excellent novel Picture This as much as in Catch-22 -- and paints with marvelous acerbity a portrait of the progression of clowns and lunatics who shape the fate of millions. I've always felt that the film "Doctor Strangelove" was a better adaptation of Catch-22 than the film version of Catch-22 was, and the dark humor of that film does permeate the background of Closing Time (one of the characters, a government contractor of sorts, is even named Harold Strangelove). Appropriately, the main characters of Closing Time (even the returned Milo Minderbinder, ever the entrepreneur) seem to have little real control over the machinery of government.

How America treats its elderly is an implicit subject of this book, in the same way as how the soldier is used by a military bureaucracy was a subject of Catch-22. So, it seems almost appropriate that this book should be considered slight or mediocre or an insufficient project by the genius who produced its beloved predecessor. The characters of Catch-22, human as they were, were larger than life, heroes from an American myth (which of course, as with Vonnegut's work, was no myth) who's darkly human experiences stood for something larger -- commentary on the changing face of a nation & the world as it entered the atomic age. To see those characters rendered old, dying, and above everything -- sad -- is humbling and, to be honest, unnerving.

And yet: In an edition of Catch-22 brought out simultaneously with this book, Heller wrote: "Sooner or later, I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away, too. But it won't be by my hand." That quote stayed with me. Part of Yossarian -- in many ways a modern day Quixote (only with Cynicism instead of Chivalry) -- no doubt died when Heller did, in 1999. But as the title indicates, Yossarian's "exit" from this life was less like death than the sad statement at a bar's closing -- 'you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.'


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James Salimi read and liked David Newman's review of Something Happened:

"Bob Slocum, the protagonist of Something Happened, is the prototypical successful modern man. Replete with all the trappings--ascending career, expansive home in the suburbs, attractive wife--he is the ideal we (the sons) were told we were supposed ...more Bob Slocum, the protagonist of Something Happened, is the prototypical successful modern man. Replete with all the trappings--ascending career, expansive home in the suburbs, attractive wife--he is the ideal we (the sons) were told we were supposed to aspire to. But to our dismay Bob Slocum is a man in the full throws of existential crisis. We find him in his late forties standing on the precipice, staring into the abyss. Here is a man adrift in a world devoid of rational purpose or design, confronting the absurdity and randomness of life. We are witnesses to the full horror of this painful realization. For close to 600 pages, Bob Slocum screams out to us a plea for understanding, a plea perhaps predicated on the idea that if he can reach us, take us inside his reality, then maybe his alienation and loneliness will be alleviated. Why else would he be telling us all this stuff? Page after page he drones on with an endless repetition of the mundane minutiae of his pathetic existence. This is not the result of sloppy writing or editing. No, this is a novel which is intentionally tedious. So why am I suggesting you read it? Because Joseph Heller is a master of conveying the essence of the gut-wrenching dread that modern man and woman experience as they search for meaning in an ever-expanding universe of emptiness. The author thankfully makes this task more palatable through the use of understated irony and clever, albeit self-conscious, word play. No, this is not Catch-22. This is not a fun novel and its rewards are to be found not in its humor (which is certainly there), but in our identification with and empathy for the main character. A character, who, even with all his foibles and blemishes, is ultimately extremely sympathetic. Although at times I had my doubts, I am glad I persisted with this under-appreciated masterpiece.(less) "