Just One Catch

Given the admiration I expressed for Catch-22 earlier, I should point to this piece at The Paris Review on Heller’s magnum opus and his follow-up (Something Happened), written by Heller’s biographer (who has just published Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller).

“It was after the war, I think, that the struggle really began,” says Heller’s narrator in Something Happened, and during “peacetime” in the fifties and early sixties, Heller stepped into another genre, struggling with the faceless corporate world of the Organization Man, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the Mad Man (AMC’s successful television series draws heavily on Heller’s second novel).

“Along with success come … divorce … medication, depression, neurosis,” Heller quipped to a magazine interviewer in 1974, and he was not one to leave the “success” story alone, with its major subgenres, the medical and courtroom dramas. In the eighties, he was paralyzed, temporarily, by a bout with Guillain-Barre syndrome just as he was beginning to drag his wife and children through a nasty divorce ordeal. It wasn’t clear whether he would have his throat cut first (for a tracheotomy) or his soul bruised by self-inflicted wounds.

There’s also Heller’s Paris Review interview.

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