Closing Time

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 has been my favourite book since I first read it at the age of 17, and I have yet to come across anything since that matches it in terms of its combination of genuinely epic scope combined with microscopic attention to detail, and passage after passage that resonate even after multiple readings and a million times removed from the situation in which Heller found his inspiration.

So how can you create a sequel to perfection? Well, Heller tried, although it took him over 30 years, and the result, like a lot of sequels, is a long way short of what came before. Not to say that Closing Time is a bad book; far from it.

Set in 1994, it catches up with three of the more interesting characters from Catch-22 to survive World War II - protagonist Yossarian, who has made his fortune, started a family and is now faced for the second time with a genuine prospect of death; Milo Minderbinder, who, having expanded his trade empire into a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate, is now trying to sell planes to the government; and the squadron chaplain, pursued by the FBI for his ability to produce tritium organically. Heller fills in the events in their lives since the war ended - and since the fate of all three was ambiguous at the end of Catch-22, it was actually quite nice to hear that things had been going relatively well. While it was slightly disappointing that Yossarian's solution to the titular catch had failed, it was necessary for the purposes of this book that he was still caught in it, and all three are provided with a certain amount of closure as to their problems in the first book.

That only accounts for half of the plot, however, the rest being given over to Sammy Singer, who appears in Catch-22 although I believe not by name, and his childhood friend Lew Rabinowitz, who served in the war as an infantryman. These parts I found harder to get through; their tales of working-class Jewish life in Coney Island almost impossible to identify with and the fact that Heller writes them in a much more conventional prose style to be very jarring with the rest of the book. There were some moments of poignancy but these were few and far between, and I had to wonder why Heller had decided to include this plot line at all.

But there was much to like elsewhere; more than enough, in fact, that I could enjoy the book as a whole. Heller's dialogue positively fizzes back and forth between characters, there are some genuinely laugh-out-loud lines, and he finds room to slip in quite a few catch-22 scenarios for the present day. None of this is anything like on the level of Catch-22 itself, but he had an impossible act to follow in that respect. And indeed the book stands on its own at times as well, as Heller slices through late 20th-century consumerist excess, the everlasting obtuseness of military bureaucracy (the scenes where Milo pitches his new stealth bomber to a bickering group of government advisers are by far the best in the novel), and the it-couldn't-happen-could-it ludicrousness of American politics, as the book's unnamed president inadvertently brings about nuclear Armageddon by mistake while playing a video game.

So all in all, it's not a bad follow up to the best book of all time - in lots of ways a spiritual successor, in other ways trying to do something a bit different and for the most part succeeding at both. It's almost as funny, almost as sad, and way more bizarre - and given the bar that had been set for it, that's no mean achievement.

4/5

This is a book about the end, and the book itself states that this is the soundtrack to it. I can kind of see it.