Long lunch hours, or while pretending to work late at the office. He commits unsatisfying adulteries now and then at sales conferences in resort areas, during He is itchy for raises and promotions, even though he despises his company and the jobs he does. He mourns the missed opportunities of his youth. Slocum works in Manhattan in the communications racket. There is a nattily-dressed, sourly witty middle-management executive named Robert Slocum, he tells us, who lives in a nice house in Connecticut with a wife, a daughter and two sons. Now he offers us the thousand-and-first version of 'The Hucksters' or 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.' Published and pulped, he gave us yet another one, which was gradually acknowledged as a sanely crazy masterpiece. After a thousand World War II airplane novels had been He also insists on dealing with only the most hackneyed themes. Heller is a first-rate humorist who cripples his own jokes intentionally-with the unhappiness of the characters who perceive them. Taken together, they tell a tale of pain and disappointments experienced by mediocre men of good will. Generation, and on and on-that for them everything has been downhill since World War II, as absurd and bloody as it often was.īoth books are full of excellent jokes, but neither one is funny.

Heller's generation, Herman Wouk's generation, Norman Mailer's generation, Irwin Shaw's generation, Vance Bourjaily's generation, James Jones's Middle-class generation of American males, my generation, Mr. Heller's two novels, when considered in sequence, might be taken as a similar statement about an entire white, Mark Twain is said to have felt that his existence was all pretty much downhill from his adventures as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. It has shrunk to the size of a grave, almost. Life is a whole lot smaller and cheaper in this second book. If somebody wants to make a movie out of his second novel, 'Something Happened,' he can get most of his props at Bloomingdale's-a few beds, a few desks, some tables and chairs. He company that made a movie out of Joseph Heller's first novel, 'Catch-22,' had to assemble what became the 11th or 12th largestīomber force on the planet at the time. OctoThe New York Times book Review By KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

Joseph heller books