Closing Time [LARGE PRINT] (Paperback)

by Joseph Heller (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: offensive attack bomber, green rucksack, overlooked nothing, Coney Island, New York, Noodles Cook (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Worked on for many years and long anticipated (and perhaps dreaded) by admirers of the incomparable original, Heller's "sequel" shares with his great WWII saga a surreal sense of the absurd and of the fatuity of most human institutions. But it is hard to avoid a sense of keen disappointment, nonetheless. The satirizing of American contemporary life has been done so frequently-and often successfully-since the 1961 Catch-22, which helped make so much of that satirizing possible, that Heller is in effect competing with himself, and failing. Here again are John Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, Sammy Singer, Chaplain Albert Tappman, and the giant Lew. Newcomers include Washington finagler G. Noodles Cook and the mysterious and ubiquitous know-it-all Jerry Gaffney. The wartime buddies are old men now, worried about their health, their sex lives and their children, but they find 1990s civilian life as corruptly absurd as the old Air Force days. There are flashbacks to the war, some of which recall the power of Heller's original inspiration; there are nostalgic passages about Coney Island, long Jewish dialogues that could have been penned by a whacked-out Neil Simon, bravura passages (notably, a magnificent wedding reception held at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal) and hare-brained Pentagon meetings to discuss the new Shhhh super-quiet warplane. There are patches of vaudeville, dreamscapes, far too much sophomoric doodling, and longueurs when Heller seems simply to be filling pages. In the end, despite flashes of the old wit and fire, this is a tired, dispirited and dispiriting novel. 200,000 first printing; first serial to Playboy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Just like the original Catch-22, this sequel opens with Yossarian in a hospital bed, flirting with the nurses. Now in his seventies, Yossarian is depressed by his perfect health: things can only get worse. He lives alone in a Manhattan apartment not far from most of his old war buddies, including Milo Minderbinder, a defense contractor straight out of Dr. Strangelove. Yossarian and company mourn the decline of New York City and American culture in general and look back longingly to the golden age of prewar Coney Island. The symbolic center of the book is a surreal wedding extravaganza held at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hosted by Minderbinder, who recruits highly paid actors to portray derelicts and prostitutes. This work attempts the same sort of giddy black humor that made its predecessor a classic, but the underlying mood is somber, almost elegiac. A profoundly disturbing novel, if not quite up to the standard of Catch-22; recommended for all fiction collections.
Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 636 pages
• Publisher: Wheeler Publishing (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568952821
• ISBN-13: 978-1568952826
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,511,818 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Good Argument for the Abolition of All Sequels, October 12, 2000

By	Stone Junction "The Suburban Hobo" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Closing Time (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book on the effects of growing old in modern society, July 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 (Paperback)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars catch 23?, April 24, 1998

By	Mike Rice ([e-mail]) (Loughborough, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 (Paperback)

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.