I read through some of the previous Amazon reviews and am baffled by those who panned this book and said it was tedious. On the contrary, I found it a real page-turner. The writing is fresh and moves right along. Perhaps those reviewers who hated it were expecting another Catch 22, or in some way approached it with pre-set ideas as to what a novel should be and were therefore disappointed. The `repetitiveness' that some complained about was neither sloppy writing on Heller's part, nor careless work by his editor. It serves the purpose of getting inside the character's mind and portraying his life, and it held my attention throughout. Is every thought or feeling that each of us have day in and day out always startling and fresh, and do we never repeat ourselves? I think not. The portrait Heller creates is masterful.
Next to some of the post-modern, magic realism dreck that passes for fiction these days, Something Happened is incomparable. By all means, pick this book up; you won't be disappointed, unless you're expecting it to be something else.
In many ways, this novel is a more scholarly, literary, and philosophical precursor to Fight Club in that it chronicles a man who is, by any common standard, a very successful person in Corporate America. He has an excellent and well-paying job. He has a wife. He has children. He has a lovely house.
Yet he finds his life shallow and empty of purpose. He finds himself indulging in self-destructive behaviors. He finds himself completely unable to communicate with his family. He finds himself completely unable to connect in any genuine sense with any other person in his work or social life.
He examines every facet of his life from his job, to his marriage, to his children, and he finds that a strange sort of cowardice pervades his life. He realizes that "something happened" in his life to change everything he knew and every way he behaved and made him the ineffectual, pompous, and empty coward that he and all the people around him have become.
For those people in the business community who have pondered their own existence and the true results and purpose they will have on the world, this novel will read like a kick in the groin. Something Happened is a completely unsettling and unflinching look at the kind of life that is derivative of one spent in the service of a business. It will teach you why you fear everyone you work with and why they fear you. It will teach you why you so often feel so alone. And it will teach you why you learn to break free and why you may be so unable to do it.
