CLOSING TIME THE SEQUEL TO CATCH -22

The sequel to Catch-22, the classic that came to symbolize the absurdity of war, takes on politics, the greed of business, and the decline of society and brings back most of the original major characters as they battle The End. 150,000 first printing. Tour.

Worked on for many years and long anticipated (and perhaps dreaded) by admirers of the incomparable original, Heller's "sequel" shares with his great WWII saga a surreal sense of the absurd and of the fatuity of most human institutions. But it is hard to avoid a sense of keen disappointment, nonetheless. The satirizing of American contemporary life has been done so frequently-and often successfully-since the 1961 Catch-22, which helped make so much of that satirizing possible, that Heller is in effect competing with himself, and failing. Here again are John Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, Sammy Singer, Chaplain Albert Tappman, and the giant Lew. Newcomers include Washington finagler G. Noodles Cook and the mysterious and ubiquitous know-it-all Jerry Gaffney. The wartime buddies are old men now, worried about their health, their sex lives and their children, but they find 1990s civilian life as corruptly absurd as the old Air Force days. There are flashbacks to the war, some of which recall the power of Heller's original inspiration; there are nostalgic passages about Coney Island, long Jewish dialogues that could have been penned by a whacked-out Neil Simon, bravura passages (notably, a magnificent wedding reception held at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal) and hare-brained Pentagon meetings to discuss the new Shhhh super-quiet warplane. There are patches of vaudeville, dreamscapes, far too much sophomoric doodling, and longueurs when Heller seems simply to be filling pages. In the end, despite flashes of the old wit and fire, this is a tired, dispirited and dispiriting novel. 200,000 first printing; first serial to Playboy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The long-unawaited sequel to an American classic. In 1961 Heller published Catch-22, a viciously antiwar novel about a group of young American bombers in WW II. It was a tight, brutal assault on the military mindset, bureaucratic logic, and the ruthlessness of capitalism. In an act of absurdity worthy of Catch- 22, Heller has written a sequel to a novel that needed no sequel. Yossarian is once again in the hospital. This time, he's 68 and in Manhattan. He is still after the nurses, and Chaplain Tappman again pays him a surprise visit. Yossarian is now a consultant for Milo Minderbinder and his defense contracting company. The chaplain disappears after the government (and Milo) learn that his body is inexplicably producing heavy water. The nation is led by a trigger- happy Dan Quaylelike president, and there is a secret network of government tunnels under the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Yossarian stumbles down below, where he finds a massive doomsday cellar connected (literally) to hell. In hell he finds a pantheon of dead writers and a reconstructed turn-of-the-century Coney Island. However, this semi-interesting plot is not the main story. Instead, Heller spends most of the time kvetching about getting old and dying. Hardly any of the old, interesting characters make appearances (Orr gets a paragraph), and those who do, like Lew and Sammy, have nothing to do with the plot and no interaction with Yossarian. The only connection to the original is that in a few places Heller sets up similar situations and dialogue to show that capitalism and the military mindset are still the same. But by naming a character Dr. Strangelove, Heller is beating a very tired horse. A line aimed at Yossarian applies to Heller as well: ``You sound so bitter these days. You used to be funnier.'' Be content with the original and pretend the sequel never happened. (First printing of 200,000; first serial to Playboy; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A sequel to Catch-22? Not possible, not desirable, and bound to fail. That said, Closing Time remains a brilliant book--broadly, about the end of culture, the end of the U.S. as a wonderful place for ordinary working stiffs, and death itself. Like the original novel, it opens with Yossarian in a hospital; there's nothing wrong with him except that he's old and no longer enjoys life. Someone is tapping his phone, and somehow that's connected with Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Tappman. Milo, a defense contractor, is trying to sell the Pentagon a silent bomber that will do anything they want it to--of course it will, since the bomber will never be made or even drawn. Meanwhile, the chaplain becomes a military secret because he has begun to pass heavy water, and if the process can be patented it's worth millions. The president, very nice and incredibly stupid, also appears; he loves video games and inadvertently plunges the world into nuclear war. This plot line is loosely tied to a vast underground industrial complex that resulted when George C. Tilyou, a "Coney Island entrepreneur," became the first person in history to take his wealth with him, somehow sinking it, piece by piece, beneath the city. Maybe his empire has become part of secret, military goings-on, and maybe it's hell, and maybe they are the same. Can you oppose the very end of the earth? Heller's characters, at the end themselves, sort of do, but one really should read this novel as an expression toward the end of a grand career, a summing up. Heller is savage as ever, and--particularly in his brutal portrait of the decline of New York City--mournful. John Mort

Just like the original Catch-22, this sequel opens with Yossarian in a hospital bed, flirting with the nurses. Now in his seventies, Yossarian is depressed by his perfect health: things can only get worse. He lives alone in a Manhattan apartment not far from most of his old war buddies, including Milo Minderbinder, a defense contractor straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Yossarian and company mourn the decline of New York City and American culture in general and look back longingly to the golden age of prewar Coney Island. The symbolic center of the book is a surreal wedding extravaganza held at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hosted by Minderbinder, who recruits highly paid actors to portray derelicts and prostitutes. This work attempts the same sort of giddy black humor that made its predecessor a classic, but the underlying mood is somber, almost elegiac. A profoundly disturbing novel, if not quite up to the standard of Catch-22; recommended for all fiction collections.
Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.