The Shadow of Chez

“I’ve got two books under my belt now. I would be content to consider that a lifetime’s work, and I could just putter around and find other things to do.”
– Joseph Heller

Catch-22 is in my top five list of all-time favourite books. I first read it in high school. My English teacher, Mr Thompson, recommended it to me. He felt the style and theme closely matched my personality, and thought I would like it. He was right. I loved it. In my senior year I wrote “Yossarian Lives” as my grad blurb in the yearbook.

Since then I have read Catch-22 five times. Generally, once every couple years. Oddly I haven’t read much else by Joseph Heller. I have read his short stories, in Catch as Catch Can, which are fantastic, but none of his other novels. I figured Something Happened would be a good second novel in my 25 in 2010 challenge.

I picked Something Happened because it was the first novel Heller wrote after Catch-22. I was hoping it would have the same energy, wit and poignancy.

I didn’t  know either that Heller’s writing process is somewhat whimsical, or that Something Happened was published 13 years after Catch-22. In a 1974 interview, during the release, Heller told The Paris Review that he doesn’t begin a novel until he has the first and last lines in his head.

The opening line for Something Happened came to him while on the deck of a house in Fire Island, New York. “In the office in which I work there are four people of whom I am afraid. Each of these four people is afraid of five people.” In fact, a great deal of the book, the major scenes, and the last line all came to him within an hour. Heller would not begin working on the novel for another two years.

It took Heller ten more years to complete it. Not that his sole focus was the book. During that time he wrote a play, We Bombed in New Haven, transcribed a screenplay, and did other such work. When Something Happened was finally published it received warm reviews. Kurt Vonnegut Jr lauded it as Heller’s best work.

Seeing that Heller had only written two novels, collectively taking twenty years to produce, it’s easy to understand why Heller made the comment at the top of this review. Novel writing is obviously does not come quickly, or easily, to Heller.

Something Happened is the story of a middle-class businessman who is trying to figure out what went wrong. He is afraid of change, closed doors, and the unknown. He is misogynistic, highly adulterous, and dependent on his wife (despite wanting a divorce). His doesn’t get on with his daughter. Him and his son are growing apart. Plus he has another “retarded” son that he tries to ignore.

Rather than being a story, Something Happened is more “a portrait of a dysfunctional middle-class family”. Information is passed through the main character, Bob Slocum, as a sort a stream of consciousness in his diary. Nothing really progresses, and the main topics are sex, his affairs, his promotion, and the people at work.

The book is over 500 pages long. Bob Slocum’s thoughts are circular, self-centered, and full of digressions. As well, he likes to add incidental information mid-sentence, with bracketed statements or stories. These, while they do give insight into his thoughts and fears (as well as revealing scattered thought patterns), they do slow down the story considerably. Towards the end of the story, I found myself skimming these passages.

His relationship with his son is my favourite in the whole book. The son exemplifies Bob’s childish fears, and further exposes Bob’s inability to empathise. The funniest part of the story are the interactions between these two. Bob is endlessly trying to understand his son’s actions. If his son is given a dollar he will give it to a stranger. “What if you need a dollar and don’t have one because you give it away. What will you do then?” Bob will ask.

“I’ll just ask you for another, and you’ll give it to me.”

“What if I don’t”

“But you will”

“Maybe I won’t”

“But you will”

“Then next time I won’t”

“You will”

“Ya, I will”

Bob’s deep caring and inability to refuse his son is counterbalanced by his low-level hostility to his daughter, and his almost complete disregard for his “retarded” son. He tries to reconcile with the former, while the latter is treated as the family’s “dirty little secret’”. He is a constant reminder of the family’s dysfunction and dissatisfaction. In him they see their faults. And so clouded is their ability to deal with their own problems, they think sending him away is the answer.

Something finally does happen at the end of the novel. It isn’t what the reader will expect, or want for that matter. This is not a story you read for the pleasure of the journey. The whole point lays in the final 40 pages. If I could go re-edit it, I would slim down the verbosity, while trying to maintain the humanity of the character.

To whom will this novel appeal? I think anyone who likes stories about families that will make their own appear normal. I felt better about my own upbringing while reading this. We may have our quirks, but at least I’m not searching for that moment when something happened, when it all went wrong.

This is a rough transition, but I will end this piece here, with an anecdote from Heller’s Paris Review interview. In this interview I liked how he made a point of saying that no matter our accomplishments, we all need to be humbled once in a while.

“In 1948, when my first story came out in The Atlantic and nearly won the ‘Atlantic First’, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. About that same time, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead was published, and he was on the cover of Saturday Review. We were about the same age – twenty-six or twenty-seven – and it put me in my place.”

(If you would like to read more about Heller’s writing process, or would just like to read the full Paris Review interview, click here.)

The next book: Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift