World War II bombardier John Yossarian wants to know if he can be
exempt from flying any more missions because he’s insane. Of course,
comes the reply, but in order to be declared insane you have
to consult a doctor, and only someone of compos mentis would consult a
doctor. Here’s another one: an aging novelist wants to end his career
with a novel as brilliant and innovative as his first. But the only way
he can be truly original is by pirating from the first book, which
makes him just another has-been stuck in a slump.
Sadly enough, that’s the predicament novelist Joseph Heller has
written himself into with his new novel, Closing Time, which publisher
Simon & Schuster is billing as the sequel to his groundbreaking
1961 work Catch-22. A sprawling domestic satire that tracks down Catch
protagonist John Yossarian fifty years later, Closing Time pales not
only in comparison to the rest of the Heller oeuvre, but to many of his
imitators’ works as well.
The Yossarian we meet in Closing Time
has decided, after a lifetime of lifeless copy writing and advertising
jobs, to throw ethics to the wind and help old World War II cohort Milo
Minderbinder sell his M & M E & A Sub-Supersonic Invisible and
Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber to the
government. Yossarian quells his ethical dilemmas by reasoning that
a) Milo won’t actually build the bomber once he’s got the money for it,
b) Yossarian will probably be dead before the first plane makes it off the assembly line, and
c)
Milo’s paying him good money. Yossarian only moonlights as a war
profiteer, however. He’s also in charge of planning the most expensive,
wasteful wedding ever to grace the Big Apple, and he’s decided to stage
it at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. With an exorbitant
million-dollar wedding cake and a cast of actors playing the various
prostitutes, thugs, and drug pushers that normally inhabit the
terminal, the wedding gives Heller ample opportunity to display his
trademark venom at the absurdities of twentieth-century life.
Unfortunately, Heller chose to mix the narratives of two additional
protagonists with the further adventures of John Yossarian.
These chapters devoted to fellow septuagenarians Sammy Singer
and Lew Rabinowitz move by at a snail’s pace, filled mostly with
tedious reminiscences about the heyday of Coney Island and whining Andy
Rooneyesque diatribes about the state of today’s youth. Heller’s main
problem in concocting a sequel to Catch-22, however, is that its
predecessor was too successful. Back in the early ’60s before civil
disobedience became fashionable, the idea of, say, Yossarian sitting
naked in a tree during a fellow pilot’s funeral was unbelievably
caustic and biting.
In the ’90s, that type of wit
has become the mainstream in humor. Today you can get something equally
raw from your garden-variety cable comedian, or even a mediocre episode
of "The Simpsons." There’s also a strange sense of ironic
self-awareness running through Closing Time that gives the book an aura
of recycled goods. Winking references are made to Catch-22s and a
writer named "Joey Heller"; Rabinowitz rubs elbows with the author’s
old buddy, Kurt Vonnegut, in the maple syrup factories of Dresden,
Germany; even Yossarian’s courtship of his nurse bears striking
resemblance to the real-life courtship of Heller and his nurse related
in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter. So what’s left? Plenty of
jokes directed at the video game junky Vice-President with the Secret
Service code name "Little Prick," who’s obviously supposed to be Dan
Quayle. (Haven’t we all heard enough of those jokes?) There’s also a
smattering of the old vaudevillian Heller dialogues, such as this one
in which Milo Minderbinder and pals go to bat for his stealth bomber
before a government commission: "And what does a flying wing look
like?" "Other flying wings," Wintergreen interposed adroitly, with Milo
struck dumb by a query he had not anticipated. "And what do other
flying wings look like?" "Our flying wing," answered Milo, his
composure restored. "Will it look," asked a major, "like the old
Stealth?" "No. Only in appearance."
Scenes like the
previous one show that Heller can still be lots of fun when he wants
to. But most of the rest of Closing Time is neither fun nor
particularly insightful, and the book’s apocalyptic ending — curiously
swiped from the Stanley Kubrick/Terry Southern film Dr. Strangelove —
is an exercise in depression without purpose.
Joseph Heller was right in the introductory note to his first novel: there’s only one catch, and that’s Catch-22.
