Customer Reviews

Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I read Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 on a rainy day, with nothing to do but gaze at the novels my father had collected over the years. Plunging in to avert crushing boredom, I discovered what all readers before me have, the absolute brilliance of it. CATCH-22 is one of the finest war novels I have read, surpassing even M*A*S*H* and THE SHORT-TIMERS in its audacious mix of humour, horror, and insanity. I also was overwhelmed by the fact that this was Heller's first novel. When I completed it, I rushed to a second-hand bookstore to buy CLOSING TIME. I had become such an instant fan of Heller's work, that it never crossed my mind that some things are better left alone.

Why, oh why, did Heller pen CLOSING TIME? CATCH-22 did not need a continuation. It was lightning in a bottle, a once-in-a-lifetime event that could never be repeated. But Heller, late in his career, decided, for better or for worse, that Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder had lives worth examining yet again.

The plot begins with Yossarian (whom I desperately wanted to meet after finishing CATCH-22) in a hospital, now older, still bitter, but unfortunately, not funny. As the labyrinth storyline progresses, Yossarian bumps up against a plethora of eccentric characters, both old friends and new enemies. There's the Chaplain (who can produce heavy water from his bowels), a president addicted to videogames, a bizarre wedding coordinator with dreams of the ideal society wedding within a decrepit bus station, and Milo, the schemer extrordinaire, now trying to sell invisible bombers to clueless generals. All this, plus a subplot in an underground playworld that may or may not be Hell.

Why doesn't this work? Part of the problem, I believe, is that CATCH-22 had a genuinely insane setting in which to place its insane characters. The comparison of war with mental imbalance may not be new, but CATCH-22 made it fresh and invigorating. CLOSING TIME finds Heller without such a setting, frantically trying to create insanity where there was none before. It's not enough to simply show nutty people; they need a context in which they can flourish. CLOSING TIME doesn't provide them with one.

Is it fair to keep comparing CLOSING TIME to CATCH-22? Probably not, but Heller invites the comparison. Reading CLOSING TIME is akin to attending your high school reunion. You meet all the people you once knew and loved, but despite your being glad to see them, you leave in a sonewhat depressed state. You've grown up, but they haven't. They were fun in school, but in the real world, you can't wait for them to leave you alone.

Judging from the reviews on this page, it seems to me like most (but not all) of the negative reviews are from people who were merely expecting more Catch-22. Some comment that Closing Time has nothing to do with Catch-22, some that it is merely a poor rehashing of the material from Heller's earlier work, thus implying that the content is effectively similar, albeit inferior. I suppose I'm lucky not to be a Novel Nerd, because it seemed to me that Closing Time does an excellant job of what Heller set out to do: show us the effects of time, age, and society on young people with strong ideals and direction. The meandering reminicences of Yossarian and the others are not shoddily constructed prose, they are the sounds of old men trying to put their past into the context of what their present has become, and vice-versa.

If I could offer any constructive negative critism of this book, it would be that the surreal juxtaposition of concrete life, the military, and Hell seemed somewhat ill-defined, and as a result Heller's conclusion to the novel lacks some of the conviction that it could have had.

I am a big Heller fan who has read most of his work and enjoyed almost every minute of it, but Closing Time was just a painful read.

The book is basically nothing more than a sub-par Catch-22. Heller attempts to catch some of the old magic, but Yossarian as a disappointed geriatric made me want to cry. I would much rather have kept Yossarian sitting naked in a tree inside of my imagination rather than ever see him as a feeble old man. I compare seeing him as a vulnerable old man to the feeling I had when, as a kid, I figured out my dad couldn't beat up everyone else's dad. I didn't want to see my dad as a mortal man nor did I want to see my favorite literary character as a mortal either.

Other than the disappointment of seeing my favorite characters as old timers, the book tries to read like its predecessor but falls very short. The humor is the same but the jokes have become as old and tired as the characters. Catch-22 had me rolling on the floor one minute and then crying a few minutes later, but this book had a few smirks and no tear jerkers. The conversation about where the water went (if you read the book you know what I am talking about) was a brief, shining moment among many lusterless ones.

I would advise anybody who is as big a fan of Catch-22 as I am not to even read this book, even if you get a free copy. I wish I hadn't. The image you want in your mind is Orr paddling away to freedom and Yossarian flying off into the sunset on his trail, but if you read this book that image will be gone forever.

Review from a huge fan of Catch-22 telling other fans do not read this book for your own good.

I loved Catch-22, but I should have known better than to hold high expectations for Closing Time when i found it on sale for a few dollars. I plowed my way through most of this just to see how it ended, reading it was a painful experience, however, so I just ended up flipping to the last 2 pages. Heller seems to be trying too hard to mimic the style of Catch-22 and the result was as if he had strewn the work with exclamation marks, bold font, and bawdy pictures. There was nothing refreshing, entertaining, or rewarding in this book. Just utter redundancy and rehashing. For the sake of full disclosure, I love Kurt Vonnegut's stuff as well and it took me 6 or 7 novels but I did notice a bit of the same effect. Please, stay away from this, read or reread Catch-22 and don't let your opinion of Heller suffer the way mine has.

It could be argued that in embarking on writing a sequel to "Catch 22" was indeed the ultimate Catch 22 itself. Unless "Closing Time" proved to be an absolute classic, a wonderful funny-sad commentry on contemporary life, then it would pale in comparison with it's predesessor. Make it too similar, of course, and the author is open to charges that he is merely retreading old ground. Heller waited 25 years to write this sequel, and sets some of the characters introduced in "Catch 22" in modern life. More than forty years after the War, Yossarian remains as abrasive and dissatisfied as ever in his old age. Milo remains the entrepreneur of his earlier life. Both these characters have made successes of themselves in the business world. "Closing Time" attachs the absurdities of the contemporary business world in the same way as "Catch 22" attachs the absurdities and attrocities of war. Milo's new idea is to sell a stealth bomber type aircraft to the American military, and he employs Yossarian and his son, Michael, to help him sell the plane to the military. Yossarian has the ear of the "little p***k", the American President, who is obsessed with video games. Yossarian also has the plan of holding a massively expensive and gaudy wedding ceremony in a bus shelter. When exploring this possibility he finds a network of tunnels beneath the ground, where officials are safe from nuclear war, and dead people live with their wealth.The characters of Yossarian and Milo remain as good points in this book. Yossarian has the feel of a "dirty old man" in some of his sexual flirtings, and has certainly grown old disgracefully. He does however show a devotion to his son Michael. Yossarian still shows that biting wit at times, especially when dealing with the private detective that has bugged his telephone, and in conversations with his son Michael over what he is going to do with his life. Milo's dodgy dealings remain as fun as ever, attempting to sell a plane he has no intention of building. Mingling with these are passages from other old characters Sammy and Lew, which bring a note of seriousness in comparison with the decadent lifestyle led by the other two. It remains strange to see Yossarian in such circumstances as in this book. "Catch 22" is a difficult if impossible book to follow up, and the only way to really read this is to totally detach that book. If you do not expect another "Catch 22" you will still enjoy the updated exploits of Yossarian and friends.

Please tell me that this book wasn't seriously called "The Sequel to Catch-22." It was? WHY?

Something should have clued me into the fact that this wasn't quite up to the standards, elusive as they were, of the original dark comedy masterpiece. Maybe I should have recognized the marketing strategies: make the cover look like Catch-22, and people will think the content is like Catch-22; and put Joe Heller's piture on the back cover, people might recognize him.

Perhaps it's age, perhaps it's the passage of time, perhaps it's just the 90's -- but Closing Time just didn't have that magical spark: Yossarian and several other characters from Catch-22, as well as several new additions, have survived WWII, the hippie 60's, the disco 70's, and the punk/yuppie 80's (none of these decades were mentioned in much detail, if at all) to become the aging, soon-to-be-retirees of the 90's. No, let me rephrase: they didn't just survive, they prospered. Yossarian is rich for what appears to be no good reason, and Milo and his son own half the world. Conceivable? Maybe. And maybe that's the problem: it's *just* believable, and not quite absurd enough to be life.

Now, I know this is supposed to be yet another reflection on today's society and values, but somehow, it just isn't quite as compelling as when Yossarian and his buddies were at war with war.

The fact that it's also poorly written doesn't help any, either: characters that might have been forgotten since the last time you read Catch-22 are mentioned with a few helper hints, i.e.: Kid Sampson, the poor guy who was sliced in half... That's all good and fine, but mention the same thing using the exact same wording three times over the course of two chapters, and one is reminded of senile seniors reminding themselves of events and people that only they themselves have forgotten -- and Yossarian is nowhere near that old or that senile. And we readers are nowhere near that forgetful.

Perhaps it's just that I'm living in the same era that Heller is describing in Closing Time -- I have no comfortable distance from which to judge things. But as a whole, this book came off as an odd jumble of nostalgic remeniscences about boyhood and teenage days, bitter gripes and grumblings about the state of the world today (particularly New York City and the US Presidency -- more pointedly, the Vice Presidency), refractions and reflections of death (so much that the poignancy is lost), and ineffectual attempts at humor, usually at the expense of some female character or other.

Catch-22 needed no sequel, and I hope I can go back and read it again someday without feeling somehow tainted. Perhaps if Orr hadn't disappeared...

This unfortunate and unnecessary sequel to the immortal "Catch-22" actually includes some very good material. These are the interludes about Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, good friends and contemporaries of Yossarian, who look back with nostalgia on their Brooklyn childhoods and with bemused horror on their WWII experiences in riveting first-person narratives. I would have been happy to read a book centered on these two, and perhaps at one time author Joseph Heller intended to write just that, since these sections have very little to do with the main portion of the novel--stylistically, thematically, or narratively.

The novel is mostly concerned with the surreal circumstances surrounding Yossarian's final days. It just didn't hold together for me. It read as a hodgepodge of nutty characters and absurd circumstances that didn't pull together to make a point other than that the military is bad and that the children of the "greatest generation" are pallid imitations of their elders. Heller wants to skewer the military-industrial complex, but he does so by presenting such outrageous, ridiculous circumstances that it is difficult to believe he had any deep understanding of it or much desire to acquire such an understanding.

Joseph Heller's career path described a long slow decline. This book will be very depressing to anyone-- and I imagine this is every single one of its readers-- who reveled in the glorious transcendent wisdom/humor of "Catch-22." That's the only reason to read it and precisely why it will disappoint. "Another book about Yossarian? You know, I always did wonder whatever happened to him..." Man, what a bummer. Turns out he's more or less the same, just older and even more disillusioned and bitter. And the world hasn't changed much (and certainly not for the better.) As a young man, part of Yossarian's appeal was his lust and smugness-- he was smarter and cooler than everyone in the room and that's what made his situation, trapped as he was by the infernal Catch-22, so intriguing... how was he going to escape his purgatory? As an old man, he's (perhaps realistically, but that doesn't mean it's entertaining) become nothing so much as a pathetic nihilist.

You know how at the end of the long run of "MASH" on tv, Hawkeye had over time been so beaten-up he had become a pitiful shell of his former self and it just wasn't funny anymore? Did you find it painful to watch? "Closing Time" is the same way. My guess is most will prefer to remember Yossarian as he was in the first book, or as Alan Arkin's excellent portrayal of him in the movie.

(By the way-- if you transcribe this review and substitute Larry McMurtry, "Duane's Depressed" and "Last Picture Show / Texasville," you'll save yourself some time and a couple of bucks at the remainder rack there as well...)

Maybe it's because I loved 'Catch-22' so much, but this novel was nothing but a disappointment. This book would be poor as a stand alone work; as a sequel to the ground-breaking original, it's dreadful. We're presented with an older Yossarian, Chaplain and Milo, with no mention of what happened at the end of Catch-22. Readers are not told how Yossarian escaped from Italy, or his further adventures. The book varies between a dull pondering of the significance of war and an ill-advised turn to science fiction/fantasy. The plot revolves around a new US president who is a clear parody of former VP Dan Quayle. Since Quayle was a political non-entity by the time the book came out, 'Closing Time' became instantly dated. I would not recommend this for fans of 'Catch-22', or to anyone for that matter.

Since I was so captivated and amazed by Catch-22, I decided to get Closing Time in order to see what else Heller would do with the characters.

On the whole, this book was a huge disappointment. It had hardly any of the edgy, cynical and insightful comedy that was so prevalent in Catch-22. About the only theme of which to speak is the one concerning how all of this generation of vets grew up to be successful, cynical family men. Rather than being disillusioned about the military, they became disillusioned with politics and society. After thinking about it for a few moments, that does seem like a natural progression for the characters, especially Yossarian, but Heller does not do as good a job capturing this feeling as he did with the disillusionment that characterizes this book's predecessor.

At the beginning of the story there were a few exchanges of dialog that made me chuckle, but as I progressed throughout the book I saw nothing new and grew increasingly bored with the story. As another reviewer noted, the strange purgatory/hell location with famous dead rich people and a Coney Island amusement park that sinks into the earth was a bit confusing. It came together a little at the end, but I was still disappointed.