Missive #657

Coming up with a judgment on Something Happened (you’ll wait a while for that something to happen — nothing does until the shattering clincher) should be the hottest game of Russian roulette in town this fall. There’s probably more riding on this book than any other in terms of author anticipation and publisher expectation. It runs close to 600 pages and is full of repetition which can be one of those suicidal assets (“call the repetition perseveration” — that’s Heller) in what amounts to a story without a story sans the pseudo of those now dated anti-novels. Heller’s novel, Heller’s tour de verbal force, Heller’s stomp then, is a representation of the underachieved contemporary man booby trapped all the way from his harassment at home to the office where he’s making his way up over someone else’s body.I read Catch 22 many years ago and plan on rereading it but thought I would read the authors second book first. I liked this book more than the Kirkus reviewer did from what he says. It is long but I did nor find it to be repetitious to the point that it was bothersome. Made me think back a lot about my life which was probably good. Read it, you might experience the same thing I did. Perhaps he’s closest to one of Roth’s middle-aged, self-made victims, full of lapsed hopes and more guilts than any man should have to assume. Ecce homo — Bob Slocum, always on the verge of something ominously imminent — prostate, suicide, failure, death — while only having experienced a string of little satisfactions, “jobs, love affairs and fornications.” Slocum figures negatively as husband of a wife who now drinks too much even if she has become more amatory in the process, father of a daughter who challenges, provokes and undermines him, also of a son who is diffident and withdrawn whom he loves best of all, and non-father of Derek whom they prefer not to think about at all. He’s retarded and “looks like lockjaw” when he talks. Hardly a new type, Bob Slocum, on the cramped plateau of middle-age, “tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed,” and rightly feeling that “there is no place for me to go.” He’s infinitely vulnerable. And undecided. Should they put Derek away? Should he get a divorce? “l have acrimony…I have more pain than acrimony.” Obviously there is none of the rogue absurdism or imaginative verve of Catch-22; only a circular sameness which one may justify (even if it is monotonous) with the Teacup observation of a much more serene man, Oliver Wendell Holmes: “What if one does say the same things — of course in a little different form each time — over and over. If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.” It is worth saying (or reiterating — however you want to look at it) to the degree that Slocum is symptomatic of this age — beleaguered all the way from his bad teeth to his rotten conscience. We know him only too well and it is the recognition factor which counts, along with the book’s bravura, expertise and cumulative hook… Whatever, wherever, Heller’s Kvetch-570 will be read and read and read. — Kirkus Review

The book is long and not the easiest to read. The quote I’m showing below is just an example of the text that I’m plodding through. I’m doing my best to ignore the ()s but some of the sentences are very complex with multiple independent and dependent clauses along with those enclosed with ().

“I don’t know.” He shrugged.
I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as though all the bones in his ankles were broken. I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him. I was sorry he was mine), then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him (because I had wanted to kill him. Imagine having a father that wanted to kill you. That’s the part they all leave out of the Oedipus story. Poor Oedipus has been much maligned. He didn’t want to kill his father. His father wanted to kill him). I don’t know what I felt when I found him standing there like that, immense gratitude that he was unharmed and intense, depressing disappointment over everything else, a terrible rush of ungovernable, dissonant emotions in which landmarks made no sense to me, either. (I don’t always know what I feel now.)
(I wish I were a chimpanzee.)

February continues to be winter here. The first six days have had freezing mornings with the past two above freezing with a forecast that will hold through next Friday when we might get some more rain. Then colder temperatures but not freezing in the morning is you want to believe the weather guessers.

I haven’t been doing much and the plan for the next few days is to keep on keeping on.
The only thing on the agenda is to go to H&R Block next Thursday and get confirmation that the calculation of my estimated tax payment is correct. I was also going to stop at WellsFargo and get the ‘brokerage authorized representative’ there to help me make a change in my brokerage account that I can not do online. I have received an email from the branch manager there that they can not do that and she gave me an email address to contact that could help with hearing impaired individuals. I sent an email to said address and received a robot reply that I need to call a telephone number. Classic Catch 22!