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The book is “an angry tale,” says Heller’s own daughter Erica in reference to Something Happened, “of one man’s scorching disgust with each member of his family, none of whom was named in the book.” Slocum’s daughter, of all the book’s characters, gets the cutting edge of the father’s overcritical leanings generally, as well as being the target of his bile in a chapter titled “My Daughter’s Unhappy”. The plot, in all it’s catch-22ness, thickens…

Towards the end Slocum starts worrying about the state of his own sanity as he finds himself hallucinating or remembering events incorrectly, suggesting that some or all of the story might be the product of his imagination… Heller’s second and far less popular novel Something Happened follows the life of narrator, Bob Slocum, a businessman who engages in a stream of consciousness about his job, his family, his childhood, his sexual escapades, and his own psyche. But in both books I am concerned with the closeness of the rational to the irrational mind, the location of reality. I put everything I knew about the external world into Catch-22 and everything I knew about the internal world into Something Happened. Well, he did separate from Shirley Held, mother of his two children, in 1981 after 36 years of turbulent marriage. When he agrees, she sneers, “Why? So you can tear it up?” He says of course he won’t and tears it up the minute she’s gone-then regrets it bitterly. He sleeps with her, she refuses money and suggests that he keep her address on a slip of paper. His (Yossarian's) encounter with Luciana, the Roman whore, corresponds exactly with an experience I had. Oh, and there is the Italian sex-worker Luciana: Well, in a later interview Heller explained that none of the characters in Catch-22 were based on real people except for a pilot “Hungry Joe”. Air Forces bombardier, Heller enjoyed massive literary and financial success with the publication of his first novel, one that took nearly 7 years to complete. “In balance," Merrill asks, probing further, "which is more beneficial to one’s spiritual health?”Īuthor of the famous novel set in WWII which follows antihero John Yossarian, a U.S.

The response opens an interesting window into the potential catch-22 that is success from the mind of the man who penned Catch-22. “Do you think success is more damaging to a writer than failure?”Īfter a tangent about how, as a writer, if he had not been kept busy teaching - needing “a responsibility to keep him from making a fool of himself” - he would likely have been self-destructing somewhere, Heller made the above obeservation on success and failure. In conversation with Sam Merrill of Playboy (1975), novelist Joseph Heller was asked a simple question: Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide.