THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410140789
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
CLOSING TIME
JOSEPH HELLER
Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $24.
Joseph Heller has written a whale of a book - beached, bloated, dead. What happened? Why would the author of Catch-22 try to reprise his success from 33 years ago with this decaying carcass of a novel? To borrow the title of Heller's second novel, something happened. Is there somewhere in Closing Time a savory piece of blubber still left to chew?
Heller gives us the story of Yossarian, the duty-avoiding bombardier from his earlier book, as a senior citizen. Yossarian is busy as usual trying to find something wrong, and the doctors remain unconvinced anything is amiss with his well-functioning 68-year-old body. Meanwhile, Milo Minderbinder, the conniving mess officer from Catch-22, still heads M&M Enterprises and is working to secure rights to manufacture a Stealth-like bomber with the nickname ``Shhhhh!''
Other Catch-22 characters appear in people's remembrances or in cameo. But the driving narrative thrust is a wedding to take place in Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan between M2, the son of Milo, and the niece of rich New York socialites. Like the Shhhhh!, not one plot element gets off the ground.
Without any coherent narrative, we turn to Heller's characteristic humor. The forms are there, but the laughs are not. Many readers will remember vividly their first encounters with Catch-22; only Catcher in the Rye rivals it for inducing outright belly laughs, but no book in my memory sustains the dark humor so brilliantly for so long as Heller's earlier novel. It is no doubt unfair to the author to bring back the success of the first, but he asks for it by writing a sequel. Sentences in Closing Time drag on well past their point, a process that could itself be funny, but is not. For example:
``Yossarian was lying on his back in his hospital bed when the chaplain had found him there the time before, and he waited with a look of outraged hostility as the door to his room inched open after he'd given no response to the timid tapping he'd heard and saw an equine, bland face with a knobby forehead and thinning strands of hay-colored hair discolored with dull silver come leaning in shyly to peer at him.''
The figure is the once-laughable Chaplain Tappman, who is made ``comic'' in this novel by being detained for producing heavy water in his urine. This kind of sad, tired joke pervades the book, along with fetish humor connected with big-breasted nurses. All right then . . . What did happen?
What happened, I surmise, was this: Somehow the author, 71, felt everything caving in - his career, his country, his culture, his ability to write long comic novels. In retelling Yossarian's utterly uninvolving life, he happened upon a couple of other characters, new in this book, who are either pieces of Heller himself or his good buddies from childhood in New York. Interestingly, a character named Sammy Singer recalls his pal from the old days, Joey Heller. The best parts of the book have no fictional interest at all, but instead re-create something like Heller's own growing up. In short, the only passages worth reading are closet autobiography - and Heller's command of detail is still so considerable that one wonders why he bothered with the mask of fiction.
Many of Sammy's reminiscences have an old-neighborhood sweetness that nearly made me weep for the story that lay behind them. Heller grafts his style onto Pynchonesque dislocations and ``Dr. Strangelove''-like doom, but he still speaks with a desperate authenticity, as in this passage:
``Joey Heller's father was dead and his older brother and sister worked too whenever they could, mainly part time in Woolworth's or in summer on the boardwalk at the frozen custard and hot dog stands.''
Heller gives Sammy a flat narration, almost as a way of protecting himself from being tied too meaningfully to these autobiographical bits. Yet the plot is so forgettable, it is as if Heller sabotaged his own novel, to make sure you could see that behind the career is a Jewish kid from Coney Island trying hard to make good. The author works at the end to blow up the whole thing in a plot taken from ``Strangelove,'' Stanley Kubrick's famous movie of the nuclear end. But in the gaseous hulk that remains is a small voice crying, ``I had a life and it was tough! I didn't just write one book!''
Bury this whale. Save the man inside, Joe-nah. Forget Yossarian. Tell us your story. Please. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University
in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Joseph Heller
by CNB