Something Happened (1974). Detailed description

Published 14 years after Catch-22, Something Happened is an entirely different world from his first novel. Whereas past trauma existed side by side with the present in the mind of John Yossarian, Something Happened introduces us to a world where hopes and dreams are lost in a forgotten past, elided in a distinctive moment that Bob Slocum, the novel’s protagonist, cannot remember.

The novel, narrated in the first person, forms a kind of all-encompassing confession, a monologue during which Bob Slocum confides all of his fears, insecurities, and problems, attempting to trace them back to his early adulthood and childhood. His stated motivation for doing this is to find the “something” that happened to him, the event or series of events that marked his loss of self. As he states:

There are long gaps in my past that remain obscure and give no clue. There are cryptic rumblings inside them but no flashes of recall. They are pitch black and remain that way, and all the things I was and all the changes and things that happened to me then will be lost to me forever unless I find them. No one else will. (Something Happened 134)

Thus, the project of the novel is for Slocum, a character so inauthentic that even his handwriting is borrowed from someone else, to unearth his identity out of the overabundant facts that make up his life.

Loosely following Heller’s own life, Slocum tells us in great detail of his time as a file clerk at an insurance company and his executive position at a corporation, where he “sells selling.” Slocum describes the absurdities of office politics and the demoralizing effects they have on his mind as he longs to give a three-minute presentation at the company conference in Puerto Rico. He details numerous infidelities he has committed with prostitutes, coworkers, and acquaintances. He also probes his unfulfilling relationship with his wife, as well as with his two older children, for clues about what has happened to his psyche. His youngest child, Derek, is mentally handicapped and taken care of almost exclusively by a nanny.

The Slocums debate whether or not they should stop housing him and send him to an institution. All of these facts are presented in an asso- ciational manner by the narrator, who intersperses descriptions of his current situation with reminiscences of childhood and an unconsummated love affair he had as a young file clerk with a girl named Virginia, who ultimately committed suicide. By the end of the novel, Slocum, seems to be suffering from a mental breakdown, causing the narrative to become more and more fragmented. Finally, we learn that Slocum accidentally suffocated his elder son while trying to comfort him after a car hit him.

As Catch-22 does, Something Happened focuses on the tortured psyche of a single protagonist. Unlike Catch-22, with its hard-hitting, dark humor and comic absurdities, Something Happened tackles the absurdity of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class suburban life to unveil the ultimate emptiness of modern society. Instead of discovering that the madness of his protagonist is actually a sane response to a mad world, Heller forces readers of Something Happened to recognize how deeply this world permeates the psyche of Slocum, causing the dissolution of his identity. In this sense, the novel presents Heller at his darkest, creating a psychological portrait of an unlikable character with whom it is difficult to empathize. But, lest the book be portrayed as nihilistic, it is important to look at Bob Slocum’s desires: the things he wants that the world will not grant. As he tells us near the end of the novel:

I wish I were part of a large family circle and enjoyed it. I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God. I liked shelled walnuts and raisins at home when I was a child and cracked the walnuts and mixed them all with the raisins in a dish before I began eating. My mother sent out for ice cream often in the spring and summer. In the fall we had good charlotte russes. I would spin tops. I remember the faces of the street cleaners. (Something Happened 496)

Here, and throughout his many ruminations, we feel the sort of longing that can be associated with homesickness and lack of a philosophy: the emphatic need to find and make meaning in a world in which love, trust, and community are horrifically absent. Even when thinking about extramarital affairs and the possibility of falling in love, what remains is Slocum’s desire to be elsewhere. As he said, “I wish there were someone I could hire by the hour to go through the whole wearying procedure for me from beginning to end, even to experiencing those ritualistic qualms of guilt, concern, and remorse without which a conscience can never feel antiseptically pure again” (Something Happened 519).

In short, Slocum cannot participate. Like a Camus character trapped in an existential quandary, a Kafka character who cannot be understood, or a Beckett or Dante character caught in a kind of purgatorial state, Slocum is a tortured man who cannot bridge the gulf between what he wishes to make out of life and what he is capable of doing. Here Heller targets those things that are near and dear to us all, tearing them asunder and placing them at an unreachable distance. But for those who read the novel and seek to draw meaning from it, the question remains: What is all the misery about, and how can all this misery end?

The answer, of course, is that it is about nothing and it cannot be fixed. As with the ultimate horizon that defines human life—death—the meaninglessness of the world can never be faced straight on. And perhaps this is what makes Heller’s work so devastating, so painful to read. The narrator of Something Happened is Yossarian’s antithesis: Whereas Catch- 22’s protagonist is well aware of who he is and what he needs to escape from, Bob Slocum opts for being “garbage.” He is so entrenched in the bureaucracies and anxieties that surround him that Slocum’s spirit, like that of Snowden, the perpetual victim of Heller’s first novel, is no longer discernable, even to himself:

Who am I? I think I’m beginning to find out. I am a stick: I am a broken waterlogged branch floating with my own crowd in this one nation of ours, indivisible (unfortunately), under God, with liberty and justice for all who are speedy enough to seize them first and hog them away from the rest. . . . I float like algae in a colony of green scum. (SomethingHappened 305-306)

Early in the novel Slocum confesses: “Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur” (Something Happened 8). This dread of the unknown, this fear of change that permeates the entire novel, obviously prefigures Slocum’s accidental killing of his eldest son, who is never named in the novel. On a more symbolic level, however, Slocum is terrified of what he will find at the end of his long, sober, and painful self-examination. Perhaps at the core of Slocum’s being there is the corpse of a child—the remains of an authentic, whole person—crushed and suffocated by acquiescence and fear, contorted by the strictures of a society that values conformity above all else. The only son of Slocum’s who survives is destined to live a life completely derived from and dependent upon others who do not really love him.

For Discussion or Writing
1. In his October 6, 1974 review for the New York Times Book Review, Kurt Vonnegut said that “Something Happened is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment.” Of course, we might question Vonnegut’s stance because he is one of America’s best-known humorists, but for the purposes of this question, let us assume that Vonnegut means exactly what he says. With Vonnegut’s thought in mind, assess Heller’s vision as it is given through Bob Slocum. Is Heller a pessimist? If so, why? What makes this novel so dark when compared to Catch-22? With well-chosen quotes, argue why you believe the novel either is or is not pessimistic in its outlook.

2. While Kurt Vonnegut labels Something Happened a “pessimistic work,” critics have levied the same charge about Vonnegut’s masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five, and about Mark Twain’s posthumously published novel Mysterious Stranger. With these three works in mind, write a well-developed essay that examines the novels from a humanistic perspective, questioning the “pessimistic” claim and finding moments where future possibilities exist in this works. While these works no doubt work largely by negation, we can, through our own imaginations, supply what the works lack, which may be, in fact, where we can see these writers’ optimism: in the blanks we as reader’s must fill.

3. Read Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” observing what Camus says about Sisyphus’s fate and his heroic qualities. Then, write a well-developed essay that explores how Bob Slocum can be viewed as the absurd, existential hero. To round out your work, you may want to read Camus’s companion piece, The Stranger, which is narrated by a similarly dispassionate narrator who longs to enter life.

4. In his essay “Joseph Heller’s Milk Train: Nothing More to Express” (Washington Post Book World, 6 October 1974), Joseph Epstein argues that description in the novel takes the place of plot or character development and this description takes the form of a confession:

In the nearly 600-page monologue provided by Bob Slocum, there is no attempt to understand what is going on, but only to describe what it feels like to live under the malaise. Much as if he were talking to a tireless and well-paid psychoanalyst, Slocum rambles on confessionally, formlessly, repetitiously. Anxieties slide into fantasies, fantasies into terrors, terrors into nostalgia. It is almost as if we, the novel’s readers, are in the psychoanalyst’s chair, notebook on lap, a decanter of hot coffee on the desk, patiently awaiting the completion of the analysand’s tale, so that we might then return to the quiet of our study, reassemble the data, and offer an answer to what exactly has happened.

Similarly, both J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar are written as confessional and deal with pulling fragments of experience together. With these three works in mind, write a well-developed essay on the novel as a confessional form. What value does the confessional convey? And how does presenting the story in this way affect our experience as readers?

5. Toward the end of the novel, Slocum thinks about his position in society and about social status in general:

Most of the people around me seem to make more money than I do. Where I live now is perfectly adequate: and when I get my raise and move, it will again be among people who make more money than I do. This is known as upward mobility, a momentous force in contemporary American urban life, along with downward mobility, which is another momentous force in contemporary American life. They keep things stirring.

We rise and fall like Frisbees, if we get off the ground at all, or pop flies, except we rise slower, drop faster. I am on the way up, Kagle’s on the way down. He moves faster.

Only in America is it possible to do both at the same time.

Here Heller comments on the pursuit of the American dream, a subject explored by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and by EDWARD Albee in The American Dream. With these works in mind, write a well-developed essay on the American dream that these writers delineate. Are their works about disillusionment and failed potential in America cautionary; do they form a kind of social critique? If so, what value does this critique have for our lives? Be sure to quote the texts to support everything you say.