[books] Kurt Vonnegut Reviews Joseph Heller’s Something Happened … ‘The book may be marketed under false pretenses, which is all right with me. I have already seen (British) sales promotion materials which suggest that we have been ravenous for a new Heller book because we want to laugh some more. This is as good a way as any to get people to read one of the unhappiest books ever written. “Something Happened” is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment. Depictions of utter hopelessness in literature have been acceptable up to now only in small dose, in short-story form, as in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or John D. MacDonald’s “The Hangover,” to name a treasured few. As far as I know, though, Joseph Heller is the first major American writer to deal with unrelieved misery at novel length. Even more rashly, he leaves his major character, Slocum, essentially unchanged at the end.’
Kurt Vonnegut Reviews Joseph Heller’s Something Happened
This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Books.
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