Something Happened

Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
-Kurt Vonnegut

You go by the rule of three or sometimes two depending upon who the people are doing the recommending or mentioning. If three people in a short period of time recommend or even just mention a book, then you read it. In the case of Something Happened, I had seen this Vonnegut poem a few times, then it was cited 5 separate times in Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissim.

And the third mention was part of a bigger conversation between Walter Kirn and Bret Easton Ellis on the B.E.E. podcast about the state of the novel. People don't write important novels anymore, and novels aren't read and talked about like they used to be. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's second novel, published 13 years after Catch 22 in 1974 and they are talking about how big a deal this book was as a follow up to Catch 22, Bret's parents had a copy. People just read a book like this, like I feel about the Undoing on HBO, just because it is on TV. The bigger context is the book is nearly 600 pages and barely anything happens until the end at which point something shocking does happen.

The book requires you to fight through 600 pages to get there and at first found myself losing interest, a struggle to read more than ten pages at a time. Eventually, I got into a grove or maybe was just able to read faster because of the repetitive nature. But like the discussion I had listened to I found it hard to imagine today people reading this book. Bob Slocum works for an insurance company and is living the American Dream in a cushy high paying middle management job with a wife and three kids in suburban Connecticut, and all the mistresses he wants. It is written in a stream of consciousness format with several long chapters that focus on Bob's relationship with his wife, then son, then daughter, but not much plot to connect any of the anecdotes together, and then you start to question whether it is all in Bob's imagination- not so unlike American Psycho. Ellis never mentions this connection but now that I think of it, it is right there.

Our Assessment: B