Word: hellers
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...JOSEPH HELLER 569 pages. Knopf...
...encore who has already been compared-by a critic as restrained as Robert Brustein -to. the Marx Brothers, Kingsley Amis, S.J. Perelman and Al Capp? For 13 years, ever since Catch-22 became an unparalleled publishing phenomenon and a cult book all over the world, that has been Joseph Heller's problem. His new novel, only his second, was given its present title as early as 1963. As a fabled work-in-progress, it had become a legend long before publication; with each passing year its promise (and therefore its risk) seemed to grow...
Something Happened, for instance, cannot really be read apart from Catch-22. It represents the second installment, so to speak, of Heller's War and Peace. Over ten years ago Heller explained: "The hero is the antithesis of Yossarian-20 years later." Of his Syrian-American bombardier in Catch-22 he had written: "It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it-lived forever, perhaps." Of his WASP business executive, Bob Slocum, in Something Happened, Heller might have written: It was a vile and muddy peace, and Slocum was dying of it-dying...
...slow," Heller says seriously. "Even in a letter, if I want someone to think I'm literate, it will take me two or three days to write as many drafts." In the past 13 years-a quarter of his lifetime to date-he has shaped his whole working existence to that slowness. Heller insists that Something Happened is not autobiographical. Yet he has made clear that one of the problems was to keep the kids' dialogue from sounding like his own children, and he points out that some characters are drawn from colleagues during his years in advertising...
...Heller writes in longhand on yellow pads and 3-by-5 cards, which he carries with him constantly. He does not meet friends for lunch any more ("I enjoyed that too much, and all I wanted to do was sleep the rest of the afternoon"), now jogs three miles a day in a gym. "It's good mentally," he says, "but so boring that I can barely get through...