Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | Stick with the Sammy and Lew interludes

Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | Let bygones be bygones (2.5 stars)

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Closing Time: The ...

	Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 Joseph Heller Simon & Schuster, 1995 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22.

In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22.

Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

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Stick with the Sammy and Lew interludes

This unfortunate and unnecessary sequel to the immortal "Catch-22" actually includes some very good material. These are the interludes about Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, good friends and contemporaries of Yossarian, who look back with nostalgia on their Brooklyn childhoods and with bemused horror on their WWII experiences in riveting first-person narratives. I would have been happy to read a book centered on these two, and perhaps at one time author Joseph Heller intended to write just that, since these sections have very little to do with the main portion of the novel--stylistically, thematically, or narratively.

The novel is mostly concerned with the surreal circumstances surrounding Yossarian's final days. It just didn't hold together for me. It read as a hodgepodge of nutty characters and absurd circumstances that didn't pull together to make a point other than that the military is bad and that the children of the "greatest generation" are pallid imitations of their elders. Heller wants to skewer the military-industrial complex, but he does so by presenting such outrageous, ridiculous circumstances that it is difficult to believe he had any deep understanding of it or much desire to acquire such an understanding.

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Let bygones be bygones (2.5 stars)

Heller's masterpiece "Catch-22" ends in a stupendous crescendo with Yossarian running furiously toward freedom and the unknown, destined to become a legend.

He should have stayed there.

In "Closing Time" we flash forward to a time where Heller offers a version of Yossarian as a grouchy old liberal who improbably became a supremely wealthy corporate executive. Of course he's still sex-obsessed, and coming from an septuagenarian character, it's more lecherous than funny. Even the back-and-forth banter for which "Catch-22" was famous is recycled here, but this time to tiresome effect. It's as if Yossarian is talking to himself. Or rather, Heller is talking to himself, because after about 1 page of dialogue, I found myself skipping forward to get back to the plot.

The Yossarian of "Closing Time" is no longer engaged in a life-and-death struggle. It's just a slow march toward the end of a life that, in the context of post-WWII, makes little logical sense. Instead of railing against the stupidity of war and its masters, Yossarian is left with nursing (and complaining endlessly about) the socio-economic wounds of the Reagan era. That Heller turned Yossarian into a cliched sounding board does the rest of the novel a disservice.

Because the second part, involving new characters Sammy singer (who actually had a cameo in "Catch-22" and Lew Rabinowitz has more of a genuine, beautiful feel. Here Heller waxes lyrical on their personal lives, clearly one can sense the echoes in his own life. These parts of the book were enjoyable to read and I wished that Heller's loving homage to his generation and his Coney Island haunts was the real core of the book.

Just like the world described to us in "Catch-22", Yossarian doesn't belong in the one in "Closing Time", either. It would have been better if 50+ years ago Heller simply let him vanish off the coast of Pianosa and into myth...

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Disappointing...

Since I was so captivated and amazed by Catch-22, I decided to get Closing Time in order to see what else Heller would do with the characters.

On the whole, this book was a huge disappointment. It had hardly any of the edgy, cynical and insightful comedy that was so prevalent in Catch-22. About the only theme of which to speak is the one concerning how all of this generation of vets grew up to be successful, cynical family men. Rather than being disillusioned about the military, they became disillusioned with politics and society. After thinking about it for a few moments, that does seem like a natural progression for the characters, especially Yossarian, but Heller does not do as good a job capturing this feeling as he did with the disillusionment that characterizes this book's predecessor.

At the beginning of the story there were a few exchanges of dialog that made me chuckle, but as I progressed throughout the book I saw nothing new and grew increasingly bored with the story. As another reviewer noted, the strange purgatory/hell location with famous dead rich people and a Coney Island amusement park that sinks into the earth was a bit confusing. It came together a little at the end, but I was still disappointed.

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