Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine Representation of Heller's Psychology and Style, June 13, 2001
If you are like me, you are tempted by autobiographies of writers whose work you love. You hope to get that extra bit of insight that will expand your appreciation of their writing. Usually, these hints come from long passages about writing and inspiration concerning those works. In Now and Then, Mr. Heller is more laconic about that sort of information than many writers are. On the other hand, he is very generous in explaining his personal psychology, demons, work habits, and writing blocks. You will come to appreciate that Mr. Heller is a man beset by some important demons who overcomes them with wry wit that delights almost everyone. The book's weakness is that you will perhaps get more knowledge about Coney Island in the 1930s than you had counted on. If you are from Coney Island, on the other hand, you will revel in all of the myriad details and will want to give this book more than five stars. Mr. Heller takes great pleasure in his success, his career, his recognition, and his accomplishments. He takes equal delight in his ability to use language with precision and erudition. The autobiography allows him plenty of opportunities to focus on all of these pleasing elements. To make this self-indulgence more palatable to the reader, he pokes a bit of fun at himself with gentle irony. But all of this seeming self-indulgence is really procrastination to delay dealing with the painful parts of his life story. His father's death while he was young, and later exposure to the horrors of war in World War II left a deep stamp on his emotional make-up. The book describes an important catharsis as Mr. Heller identifies what he learned from psychoanalysis and the pscyhological testing that his employers applied. His self-descriptions perfectly mirror his characterization of what happened in a typical psychoanalysis session. He would tell witty stories, jokes, and did everything possible to please the analyst . . . so he would not have to focus on the problems that faced him that day. And so the book does the same. I came away with a new appreciation for Mr. Heller after coming to see how much of his great writing and humor serve as his defense against deep emotional wounds. I hope that we can all learn how to cope as well. After you finish this book, think about where you procrastinate. What is it that you are trying to avoid facing about yourself? Tell the truth . . . and make it interesting if you want to help others! You may also help youself.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great memoir, even if it isn't that linear, August 12, 2002
I bought this book solely on my admiration of Heller's great book Catch-22, and I wanted to find out more background on the guy who wrote this strange and cynical bit of humor. But once I started reading, I got pulled into another realm, the world of Coney Island during the depression, where a fatherless Jewish family struggled to make ends meet while living in the shadows of this wonderland boardwalk and amusement park area. I live near Coney Island, and always wonder about its past, the demographic that lived there and made it mighty, and then watched it coast back down to what it is today. Heller's book is such a wonderful and detailed display of this childhood, that after fifty pages, I didn't even care about what happened to him in the war. This is covered a bit, and he does lay down some interesting facts about how some people and events in Catch-22 really happened. But he doesn't spend that much time on the war, and instead drifts into how his writing career got started, how he worked the chump jobs and waited for the magazines to pay him $10 a story, until he really made it. The book is a bit anticlimactic in the end, especially when you realize Heller is gone now and this is the end of the road. But despite his habit of jumping forward and backward in time (A lot like Catch') I'd call this book a success, although maybe in an area that wasn't as advertized by the jacket or publicity.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Memoir With A Catch, December 11, 2000
By A Customer
Marguerite Oswald, the loquacious and vaguely lunatic mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, once announced her intention to write a memoir with the title "This and That," a title suggestive of the scattered contents of her always-busy mind. Now, Joseph Heller is no Mother Oswald -- thank heaven for that -- but reading his memoir, "Now and Then," I couldn't help thinking that he should have filched Oswald's unused title for his own. For Heller, the author of the bitterly funny "Catch-22" and several other less winsome novels, has filled the pages of this somewhat disorderly memoir with a collection of remembrances that have no more logic to them than a dream. Still, Heller is Heller, and even the most jumbled segments of this generally affable memoir have their share of insightful observations and amusing asides. Heller's memories of his Coney Island childhood are laced with sardonic humor and bathed in a warm glow of nostalgia. He tells of his first (and last) ride on the Cyclone at Luna Park (as a returning Air Force airman with 60 missions under his belt); of street games of "punchball" (a sort of stickball without the stick); of swims out to the bell buoy at Coney Island Beach -- which he only now recognizes were exceedingly dangerous ventures. Most of this memoir deals with Heller's childhood, his stint in the Air Force and his years as a young adult. Aside from relating his early struggles to get into print (one of which involved a story called "Did You Ever Fall In Love With a Midget Weighing Thirty-eight Pounds?"), Heller provides few insights into his career as a writer. But the crumbs he gives are intriguing enough. He notes that over the years his memories of wartime incidents have gotten so intermingled with his fictional versions of them he can't always tell them apart. But there are some things he'll never forget. Like most writers, Heller is unable to forgive a bad review, including one rather unkindly review of "Catch-22" from the New Yorker, which declared that the novel didn't "even seem to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper." Heller restrains himself from gloating over the book's triumph over its early critics, but, as he notes with blunt honesty, "What restrains me is the knowledge that the lashings still smart, even after so many years, and if I ever pretend to be a good sport about them, I am only pretending." An eclectically myriad view of and by the author of Catch-22.
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