Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [52]
Each dent was a fact, a depressingly ordinary fact.
“My wife is a good person, really, or used to be,” says Slocum near the beginning, “and sometimes I’m sorry for her. She drinks during the day and flirts, or tries to, at parties we go to in the evening, although she doesn’t know how.”
“I have given my daughter a car of her own,” he says near the end. “Her spirits seem to be picking up.”
Slocum does his deadly best to persuade us, with his tap-tap-tapping of facts, that he is compelled to be as unhappy as he is, not because of enemies or flaws in his own character, but because of the facts.
What have these tedious facts done to him? They have required that he respond to them, since he is a man of good will. And responding and responding and responding to them has left him petrified with boredom and drained of any capacity for joyfulness, now that he is deep into middle age.
Only one fact among the millions is clearly horrible. Only one distinguishes Slocum’s bad luck from that of his neighbors. His youngest child is an incurable imbecile.
Slocum is heartless about the child. “I no longer think of Derek as one of my children,” he says. “Or even as mine. I try not to think of him at all. This is becoming easier, even at home when he is nearby with the rest of us, making noise with some red cradle toy or making unintelligible sounds as he endeavors to speak. By now I don’t even know his name. The children don’t care for him either.”
Mr. Heller might have here, or at least somewhere in his book, used conventional, Chekhovian techniques for making us love a sometimes wicked man. He might have said that Slocum was drunk or tired after a bad day at the office when he spoke so heartlessly, or that he whispered his heartlessness only to himself or to a stranger he would never see again. But Slocum is invariably sober and deliberate during his monologue, and does not seem to give a damn who hears what he says. Judging from his selection of unromantic episodes and attitudes it is his wish that we dislike him.
And we gratify that wish.
Is this book any good? Yes. It is splendidly put together and hypnotic to read. It is as clear and hard-edged as a cut diamond. Mr. Heller’s concentration and patience are so evident on every page that one can only say that Something Happened is at all points precisely what he hoped it would be.
The book may be marketed under false pretenses, which is all right with me. I have already seen British sales promotion materials which suggest that we have been ravenous for a new Heller book because we want to laugh some more. This is as good a way as any to get people to read one of the unhappiest books ever written.
Something Happened is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment. Depictions of utter hopelessness in literature have been acceptable up to now only in small doses, in short-story form, as in Franz Kafka’s ’The Metamorphosis,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or John D. MacDonald’s “The Hangover,” to name a treasured few. As far as I know, though, Joseph Heller is the first major American writer to deal with unrelieved misery at novel length. Even more rashly, he leaves his chief character, Slocum, essentially unchanged at the end.
A middle-aged woman who had just finished Something Happened in galleys said to me the other day that she thought it was a reply to all the recent books by women about the unrewardingness of housewives’ lives. And Slocum does seem to argue that he is entitled to at least as much unhappiness as any woman he knows. His wife, after all, has to adapt to only one sort of hell, the domestic torture chamber in Connecticut, in which he, too, must writhe at night and on weekends, when