FREE CLOSING TIME: A NOVEL PDF Joseph Heller | 464 pages | 25 Sep 1995 | SIMON & SCHUSTER | 9780684804507 | English | New York, United States The New York Times: Book Review Search Article If your first novel happens to have been "Catch" -- 10 million copies sold and a phrase added to the language -- just about any follow-up will be judged a letdown. Joseph Heller's fate was to have his four successor novels in variably compared, usually unfavorably, to their mighty predecessor. Now, 33 years after his literary debut, Mr. Heller has given us not just a successor, but the sequel to "Catch Yet, surprisingly enough, he has more than got away with it. Although "Closing Time" won't astonish readers with its inventive brilliance and surprise after all, they've read "Catch"it contains a richness of narrative tone and of human Closing Time: A Novel lacking in the earlier book. Best to admit, however, that I am far from the ideal reader of "Catch"; I didn't and still don't find its black humor as the phrase used to be all that humorous, compared, say, to that of Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth or Lenny Bruce. Its length and relative shapelessness are also problems. Norman Mailer wrote that you could cut "Catch" anywhere, like yard goods, and that if you removed pages from its middle not even Mr. Heller himself would know Closing Time: A Novel were gone. Several academic essays have since been written, proving the novel is full of "structure," but that's what English professors like to do. The book becomes powerful and disturbing when it focuses on the terrible scene in the aircraft where Yossarian tries to save the fatally wounded radio gunner Snowden, bandaging the wrong wound as Closing Time: A Novel dies. The opening sentence of "Closing Time" is direct and unflashy, expressing nothing more than a truth: "When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world. SAMMY, whose narrative begins and ends "Closing Time," is one of the dying generation that remembers the war: "We wear glasses and are growing Closing Time: A Novel of hearing, we sometimes talk too much, repeat ourselves, things grow on us, even the most minor bruises take longer to heal and leave telltale traces. Sammy, who has things in common with his creator like Mr. Heller, he taught English after the war in a Pennsylvania college and later worked for Time magazineis a widower whose Closing Time: A Novel died of ovarian cancer 30 days after it was diagnosed, and whose best friend -- another Coney Islander named Lew Rabinowitz -- is dying of Hodgkin's disease. Lew fought in the infantry during the war, thus was absent from "Catch Heller's narrative strategy, an interesting and lively one, is to pack the first-person accounts of Sammy and Lew -- and, after Lew dies, of his wife, Claire -- with sane reminiscences Closing Time: A Novel things back then, as Closing Time: A Novel as with reflections on the state of things now. Coney Island, where Mr. Heller grew up and which previously appeared in his fiction only in "Good as Gold," provides a rich vein to mine. Sammy remembers what you could get with the deposits on bottles of soda: "For Closing Time: A Novel cents you could buy a nice-sized block of Nestle's or Hershey's chocolate, a couple of pretzels or frozen twists, or, in the fall, a good piece of the halvah we all went crazy about for a while. For a nickel you could get a Milky Way or Coca-Cola, a Melorol or Eskimo Pie, a hot dog in Rosenberg's delicatessen store on Mermaid Avenue or at Nathan's about a mile down in the amusement area, or a ride on the carousel" -- that carousel whose "indistinct, ghostlike music" Sammy can hear from the Singer apartment along with "the Closing Time: A Novel of waves and the gong from the bell buoy. In this little world of Coney Island everyone worked, and America's promises to them were large: "We had a Ford in our future, the manufacturer told us, and there was no-knock gasoline at Gulf or at the sign of the flying red horse at the filling stations for the automobiles with knee-action wheels we could not yet afford Closing Time: A Novel buy. Lucky Strike meant fine tobacco in those days of the knee-action wheels, and people called for Philip Morris and would walk a mile for a Camel and for the other cigarettes and cigars that gave my father the lung cancer that spread to his liver and his brain and then very quickly killed him. This world even contained a character named Joey Heller, who at age 16 got Closing Time: A Novel working papers and delivered telegrams for Western Union in the city for five dollars a week. Such events as Sam and his friends enlisting at the Army Induction Center in Grand Central Station, or Lew Rabinowitz's account of working in his father's junk shop, give their narratives realistic solidity, but a solidity infused with the poetic quality of times remembered. Then there is the other more-than-half of "Closing Time," the zany part told in the third person with Yossarian as in "Catch," virtually the only sane person on the scene at its center. Now 68, twice divorced, his children married or separated except for his youngest, Michael, whose dependency on his father is worrisomesexually enamored of a nurse he meets in the hospital to which he's gone in hopes they'll find something wrong with him, Yossarian very definitely lives. The wildly complicated plot in which he figures, and which culminates in apocalypse, throws up slews of characters, some of them old friends like the black marketeer Milo Minderbinder, now a billionaire, wheeling and dealing from offices in Rockefeller Center, his current project being the selling of a "defensive second-strike offensive attack bomber" to the generals. On Yossarian's suggestion, Milo's son and the daughter of another billionaire are to be married in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the usual crowd of transients, drug dealers and homeless people there replaced for the evening by actors, judged "more Closing Time: A Novel and tolerable. Meanwhile the chaplain from "Catch" weaves in and out of the plot. His urinary tract now produces "heavy water," which, since it is radioactive, has caused him to be arrested by the Government. AT one point Yossarian says, "I will resist the wisecrack," but he seldom does, nor does Mr. Some of the jokes are very Closing Time: A Novel indeed: the chaplain's doctor has told him he's a candidate for "late-life depression" since at his age he's "already too old to expect any better kind. Wintergreen chips in with "Light is just about the fastest thing there is. Johnson said that Shakespeare's inability to resist a pun was the fatal Cleopatra for Closing Time: A Novel he lost the world and was content to lose it. Heller would do the same to make a joke, anywhere, anytime. He lacks, or disclaims, the coolness of a Thomas Pynchon; his satire and parody are loud, up-front, and its targets are familiar ones: the military-industrial complex, of course, but Closing Time: A Novel just about everyone in the city of New York, especially the inhabitants of the Port Authority terminal. The novel's thematic and symbolic texture is just as heavily laid on; a chapter titled "Dante" comes as no surprise, since Yossarian has been taken many levels below the surface hell of the terminal into realms where, along with other marvels, George C. Tilyou and his once-famous Closing Time: A Novel Island Steeplechase Park are ensconced. In a powerfully phantasmagoric scene, Yossarian steps through the looking glass at the underground "amusement" park, looks at an image of himself Closing Time: A Novel a young man, and, after viewing assorted worthies from William Saroyan to Gustav Aschenbach Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" keeps surfacing to his dead parents, aunts and uncles, he knows he's going to die:. The great entertainment stars of his time were no longer stars, and the celebrated novelists and poets in his day were of piddling significance in the new generation. The gods were growing old again, and it was time for another shake-up. THE deeper note struck here dovetails satisfyingly with the "closing time" perceptions of Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz. Not only are we looking in on a twilight of the gods, but it's not at all clear that the redemption-through-love motif -- which ends Wagner's "Gotterdammerung" as well as the wedding of the two billionaires at the Port Authority -- is anything more than a beautiful theme Closing Time: A Novel in the dark. What is clear is that Mr. Heller has invested a lot of himself in a few of his characters, enough to give them the third dimension usually absent from his fiction. One has the sense that, like Yossarian, he is determined to live forever in his writing, or at least to die trying. So rather than thinking of "Closing Time" as the sequel to "Catch," I'd call it instead an independent creation in whose best parts the seriousness and the joking are inseparable, as they should be in art. At a roll-top desk many levels below, Mr.