Closing time: a novel

Joseph Heller

Simon & Schuster, 1994 - Fiction - 464 pages

In a novel as darkly comic and audaciously ambitious as was Catch-22, Joseph Heller has dared to write the sequel to his American classic, using many of Catch-22's characters, now older if not wiser, to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II. In 1961, Joseph Heller's remarkable first novel made its way immediately into the American psyche and came to symbolize the absurdity of war and of life. Catch-22 was recognized overnight as a classic and has sold nearly ten million copies in the United States alone. It remains perhaps the funniest - and the most serious - novel ever written about war, "an apocalyptic masterpiece, " in the words of one reviewer. Now, thirty-three years later, Joseph Heller has written the sequel. You don't have to have read Catch-22 (But then, who on earth hasn't?) to enjoy Closing Time, which is a fully independent companion work, a comic masterpiece in its own right, in which Heller spears the inflated balloons of our national consciousness - the absurdity of our politics, the decline of society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture - with the same ferocious humor that he used against the conventional view of warfare. His characters are those of Catch-22, coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian, and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, this time in uneasy peace and old age, fighting, not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

What people are saying

Review: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 (Catch-22 #2)

User Review  - JP - Goodreads

The sequel to Catch-22 shows the same cast of characters 40 years later. John Yossarian, Lew Rabinowitz, Milo Minderbender, Sam Singer, and the chaplain weave their way through an equally ridiculous ...

Review: Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22 (Catch-22 #2)

User Review  - Keir Thomas - Goodreads

Catch-22 was a confused mess in a good way. This was a mess in a bad way. Lacking the wit, story and poignancy of his earlier work, this was a tough read. The second star came only from Sammie, Lew ...

Contents

• Section 1: 11
• Section 2: 18
• Section 3: 19

About the author

American novelist and dramatist Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on May 1, 1923. Heller started off his writing career by publishing a series of short stories, but he is most famous for his satirical novel Catch-22. Set in the closing months of World War II, Catch-22 tells the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who discovers the horrors of war and its aftereffects. This novel brought the phrase "catch-22," defined in Webster's Dictionary as "a situation presenting two equally undesirable alternatives," into everyday use. Heller wrote Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, in 1994. Other novels include As Good As Gold and God Knows. He also wrote No Laughing Matter, an account of his struggles with Guillain-Barr Syndrome, a neurological disorder, in 1986. Thirty-five years after writing his first book, Heller wrote his autobiography, entitled Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here. In his memoirs, Heller reminisces about what it was like growing up in Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s. On December 13, 1999, Heller died of a heart attack in his home on Long Island. His last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, was published shortly after his death.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Closing time: a novel
• Author: Joseph Heller
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1994
• ISBN: 0671746049, 9780671746049
• Length: 464 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Psychological; Fiction / War & Military; Middle aged men; Middle-aged men; Middle-aged men/ Fiction; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945/ Veterans/ Fiction