Closing Time
In Joseph Heller's two best novels, Catch 22 and Something Happened, the narrative circles obsessively around a repressed memory that it is the stories' business finally to confront. We feel the tremors of its eventual eruption in each book even as the narrator frantically distracts us with slapstick improvisation. In his newest novel, Closing Time, Heller brings back the (anti-) hero of Catch 22, John Yossarian, and once again something horrific is building beneath his life and those of his generation and their century as they all draw to a close.
But this time it is not a brute fact lodged in memory, the something that draws its power simply from having happened. It is instead something that is going to happen-we're going to die-and it draws its power from-well-how we feel about that. The problem is that we may not all feel the same way about our approaching death, as we cannot fail to do about Howie Snowden bleeding to death on the floor of the bomber in Catch 22. We cannot re...
