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Life Happens

by

Paul Clark

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When I was in high school and college, I religiously read the New York Times Book Review. As I drifted away from regular Sunday church going, I found a different sort of sacred text to replace the usual Sunday morning hymns and readings. I wanted to know what books were being talked about; I had vague notions that some day I would travel to New York, to live in the heart of the publishing world. The Review was my guide to the books that were important because they were praised or vilified each week by writers who were so confident in their opinions.

The Review displayed the pantheon of writers of the day (heck, what did I know; I was in high school), and I eagerly searched out, usually at the library, the books that were highly praised. Of course, the authors talked about in the Times tended to be those of the “literary fiction” variety—I would have to learn about the genres, science fiction, mainly—the old fashioned way: word of mouth from friends.

But the Review guided me to the writers I assumed I should be reading if I wanted to know anything about the publishing world. I read a lot of Vonnegut and Bellow, some Malamud. Not much Roth. And certainly not much by Joseph Heller because it took him a long time to publish his second novel—twelve years lay between Catch 22 and Something Happened.

Catch 22 certainly wasn’t as popular to talk about as, say, The Exorcist or The Godfather in the early 1970s. But having read it and being able to drop “Catch 22 situation” into conversation was a small sign of sophistication for a high schooler. I have a vague memory that the first time I read about Something Happened was via Kurt Vonnegut’s review in the Times. Based on the review, I went out and bought my first hard-covered adult novel; it was 1974 and I was a junior in high school.

I’d love to have a conversation with my junior self, to find out why he liked this book. My older (though not necessarily more mature) self assumes that the younger me was intrigued by all the sex, and possible insights into an adult world that was quite different from the adult world of my parents and their friends. But all I remembered from my earlier reading was that I enjoyed Something Happened, so much so that years later, when I managed a bookstore, I enthusiastically pushed it upon customers as Heller’s best book, better even than Catch 22. (I have discovered other like enthusiasts over the years.) When I picked it up this week for my first re-reading in thirty years, all I really remembered about the book was that the title is ironic, that NOTHING happens in the book, and nothing happens for almost 600 pages.

In a sense this is true. Something Happened is basically a monologue by Bob Slocum, a man in early middle age, with a middle management job at a nameless corporation, a wife, and three kids. The events of the novel, such as they are, are few. One can read the chapter titles and get a sense of the novel—“The office in which I work”; “My wife is unhappy”; “My daughter’s unhappy”; “My little boy is having difficulties.” In the office, Slocum is successful—he is likely to get a significant promotion, though he is just as likely to get fired. At home, his 15-year-old daughter expresses her unhappiness in many ways, usually in confrontations with Slocum in his study. There are pages of dialogue between daughter and father, as she tries to express her unhappiness and he tries to make things better for her, or not, depending on his mood.

Although he and his wife are generally content, that contentedness is itself unsettling. Slocum has numerous affairs, which his wife may or may not know about, and which give him little pleasure. Throughout the book, however, he reflects most on the affair he didn’t have, when he was seventeen and flirted for months with an older (21!) woman working in the same office. Throughout the book he turns over and over the events of that first job and that first non-affair.

His middle son he refers to almost always as “my little boy.” This son is not unhappy, but he has many fears, most of which have to do with gym class at school. Again, Slocum is ineffectual in making any difference in his son’s life.

The Slocums have a third son; retarded or imbecilic is how Slocum usually refers to him. A series of full-time nurses care for the boy because neither his father or mother nor his siblings want to have anything to do with him. The Slocums talks about putting the boy in an institution, but they never do.

My recounting probably conjures up an image of a grim read, but it’s not; well, not in its entirety. Heller pulls off a fascinating authorial feat, to stay inside the head of one character for a whole novel as he deliberately recounts, sometimes over and over, the most mundane details of his life. (A recent variation on this type of novel is Charles Chadwick’s It’s All Right, Now, which I highly recommend.) Slocum doesn’t change from beginning to end and there is little of what you could call a traditional narrative arc. There is a shattering event almost at the end, however, a plot development (in a book bereft of traditional plot developments) so stunning that when I finished reading, I re-read the first chapter—“I get the willies”—with a new sense of empathy for Bob Slocum.

I’d still like to have that conversation with my 17-year-old self about this book. I can’t remember if Slocum’s narrative described events that I looked forward to in my own life, or if I read it as a warning sign of adulthood. What I do know is that life—real life, not the fictional type—is made up of many repetitive and generally unmemorable events, spiked with a few moments of stunning happiness and sadness that mark us all.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he writes for pleasure. Over the last several months, he has re-read some of his favorite books and written a series of essays about why these books remain important to him, even decades after the first read them. Contact Paul.

 

 

 
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