| “THE MOST CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED great novel of the...

15th May 2015

“THE MOST CRIMINALLY OVERLOOKED great novel of the past half century is a book called Something Happened, which this year celebrates the 40th anniversary of its publication. Joseph Heller spent more than a decade writing the novel and was so convinced of its genius that he stashed manuscripts all over Manhattan, ensuring that Something Happened would survive in the event his apartment burned down. When he finally brought the completed draft to his agent, he forced his daughter to accompany him on the trip — so she could deliver the pages in case he suffered a coronary or got hit by a bus. In 1974, 13 years after Catch-22 began its gradual ascent into the rarefied realm of idiom, Something Happened was released to a collective cultural shrug, delivering the book its first firm nudge down the slippery slope that bottoms at obscurity. Today, the novel is perhaps best remembered for Kurt Vonnegut’s artfully impartial appraisal in The New York Times Book Review, which described it as “one of the unhappiest books ever written.” Vonnegut wasn’t entirely wrong.

Something Happened is, by design, a punishingly bleak novel. It’s dense and overlong, sometimes sadistically so, and it offers a minimum in the way of resolution or plot. If the novel’s worldview were a color, the human eye would likely fail to perceive its darkness. What is surprising, though, is how by virtue of that same bleakness, Something Happened becomes one of the most pleasurable, engrossing, and in retrospect moving American novels ever written. If you’ve read Something Happened, and you get why others haven’t, then you make it your little mission to convince people that they should.

Understanding why Something Happened failed to achieve the distinguished status of its predecessor is a matter of historical and personal context. Few remember that Catch-22 was greeted with neither universal critical acclaim nor commercial success when it was released in 1961. Presumably, most Americans did not see World War II, i.e., the Good War, as a vehicle for farce, and at the time our escalation of troops in Vietnam was just beginning. When the antiwar movement coalesced a few years later, it discovered, in Catch-22, a madcap distillation of every argument against American Imperialism and indeed against war itself. Heller, already in his 40s, went from relative obscurity to cultural icon during those years. It took him 13 years to publish again, and the pressure of great expectations is apparent on every page of Something Happened. If Catch-22 appeared a few years before Americans were ready to read it, Something Happened jumped the gun by decades, and the novel was already forgotten when its comically bleak take on upper-middle-class life became a staple of fiction.”

What Happened: A Look at Joseph Heller’s Forgotten Novel