Boring from Within

By Melvin Maddocks

SOMETHING HAPPENED

by JOSEPH HELLER 569 pages. Knopf. $10.

What can a writer do for an 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.

Slow Motion. To announce that Something Happened is a terrific letdown is only to make the obvious comment on publicized great expectations. But how exactly does it fail? To try to answer that question is to get into certain kinds of bankruptcy that have to do not only with American lives but also with the novels that struggle to record them.

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 in slow motion.

With 100 little winks, grimaces and ha-has, Slocum describes (and mercilessly redescribes) himself and his life in a flat pattern of total recall. He is a reasonably handsome man in his 40s --wavy hair that is thinning, a paunch that is growing. In the office he is "cordial and considerate to just about everybody." He has "this wretched habit" of acquiring the characteristics of the last person he has been talking to--a stutter, a tic, even a limp.

In his private life, if it can be called that, Slocum is a petty tyrant presiding over the standard domain: first a New York apartment, then a Connecticut house; a plumpish but svelte wife who drinks; a contentious 15-year-old daughter; a couple of younger sons, one braindamaged; and a constantly changing succession of maids. On the whole, he feels more at home in the office: "I don't think I've ever had a good tune on a vacation. (I'm not sure I've ever had a good time anywhere.)"

Sex, like gray suits and regimental ties, is approved by the company. In his wallet Slocum carries a coded list of the names of 23 girls--the interchangeable inhabitants of his third world. Joylessly he fornicates. He finds "close relationships suffocating." He warns: "A friend in need is no friend of mine."

"Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage," Slocum concludes from the depths of his boredom and anxiety. Endlessly he rummages through his childhood sexual initiations for clues. But it is not what has happened, but what has not happened to Slocum that constitutes his main problem--and Heller's. Can anything be more difficult than constructing a novel about a weightless figure with no pull of gravity morally or emotionally--a cipher whose chief sensation is of "standing still"? For brief, affecting moments Slocum feels love for his bright, affectionate nine-year-old son. But Heller clumsily resolves the relationship by making Slocum responsible for the boy's death. Improbably, he smothers him with a hug. Rather than being shocked, or moved, the reader is embarrassed by this climax, so abrupt, so calculated, in its symbolism. The son's death simply seems scripted in desperation to wrench the novel out of its passive mood, to interrupt at any cost the compulsive drone of self-pity--to break at last Slocum's death grip not only on his son, but also on the reader and on Heller himself.

"There are really so few things that can happen to people in this lifetime of ours, so few alternatives, so little any of us can become." Does Slocum's confession of impotence speak, too, for Heller's predicament as a writer with a dead-end novel on his hands?

A little naively, perhaps, readers still look to novels to provide models, or at least styles, for their own lives. From Catch-22 they received the antic message: In a mad world, the sane man runs for his life.

What does Something Happened have to say? A tired retread of the anti-hero--a dated update of The Organization Man as crossed with Kafka --Slocum kicks his doubtless hand-cut English shoes against his casket and pronounces the epitaph on himself and his novel: "I wish I knew what to wish."

The world imagines the author of Catch-22 as a breezy chap, rolling in dollars and rubbing up against the beautiful people. Or possibly as a manic innocent like Yossarian. Joseph Heller did in fact try celebrity for a while, years ago. It soon grew both tiring and tiresome. On the other hand, he is no Yossarian. Says Heller: "We are home seven nights a week sometimes, twelve months of the year. People don't invite us places." Heller grew up in Brooklyn but home now is variously a big Manhattan apartment and a small summer house in Amagansett, L.I., both acquired with some of an estimated $500,000 that Catch-22 brought in. Royalties also allowed Heller and Shirley, his handsome redheaded wife of 29 years, to educate then-two children, Erica, 22, and Teddy, 18, at private schools. But the money's most crucial use was in letting Heller write Something Happened at his own pace.

"I am 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 and promotion at Time Inc., Look and McCall's. "I guess I am a little like Slocum," he finally admits. "I suffer from a fundamental lack of confidence. I don't like speed or excitement. I won't go 65 miles an hour because I worry about a tire going flat. When I go swimming, the surf is a little too rough for me." And, he says, "I'm not comfortable with plots that move too rapidly."

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 it."

Moral Blindness. Not even Joseph Heller could spend 13 years brooding over Something Happened. Between bouts of literary fretting, he has taught fiction writing at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania (Heller himself did graduate work in English at Columbia and Oxford). He has written a few TV scripts and screenplays (Sex and the Single Girl). He also wrote a play, We Bombed in New Haven, a dramatic indictment of the moral blindness of the Viet Nam War that demonstrated the author's difficulties with plot.

Kind advance reviews have compared Something Happened to a "Greek tragedy without catharsis." Heller is naturally pleased, since he acknowledges a literary debt to such sources as The Children 's Reader, the annual reports of corporations, and R.D. Laing. What will he do next? He does not know, though he would like to do it in three years, if possible. Then the Slocum-Heller angst sets in. "I am afraid I may never get another idea that will turn into a novel."

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