Word: slocum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Something Happened is the story of a multitude of happenings, somethings, someones, and someplaces, but mostly it is the story of Robert Slocum and his search through memory for an elusive something that happened sometime ago and made him the way he is. "Something did happen to me somewhere," says Slocum, "that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur." At the same time, the novel intermingles Slocum's memories with an ongoing chronicle of his family's disintegration, his success...
...Robert Slocum is a company man, Republican suburbanite working in New York City, who moved to Connecticut "to get away from Negroes." His aspirations are predictable: to get a promotion, make more money, get laid, and raise children to want these same things. Slocum--whose name suggests male menopause--has no sense of identity; he doesn't know precisely what he wants. Yet Rorschach tests show that his ability to see the whole picture will certainly lead to success. He is a man living on the brink of the abyss; he displays not only schizophrenic symptoms, but quadrophonic possibilities...
...inside, Slocum is a boiling cauldron of some moon-pulled witch's brew. He knows only dimly of that "something" which makes him fearful, disgusting, and self-loathing. Superficially, he maintains a calm indifference and manipulative diplomacy. He is so much like a chameleon that he acquires the characteristics of persons he's dealing with, including a stutter. For Heller, he is the conglomerate image of corporate man in America, at once the symbol of upward and downward mobility. "I ascend," he says, "like a Condor, while falling to pieces...
...Slocum's family, too, suffers from the same kind of egocentric personalities--nothing they do is valuable or redeeming, except perhaps Slocum's nine-year-old son--who, like his sixteen-year-old sister and mother, goes unnamed. Heller portrays their constant bickering, their petty desires, and all the time he is weaving a less penetrable allegory for the American way of life...
...style and structure of Something Happened elucidate this underlying design, which is at first not apparent. Heller departs radically from the style of Catch-22 here. The prose is extremely simple as Slocum introduces himself, due partially to the anti-hero's inhibition. And slowly, through parenthetical remarks and more elaborate, cinematic passages, one becomes aware of an overwrought personality, who has regressed or just never overcome an arrested development in the prepubescent stage...