![]() Heller had started his sequel by then, but no publisher would pick it up. ![]() The deal resulted in “Picture This” (1988), a critical and commercial disappointment, then, the next year, in cancellation. It would be book two in a two-book, $4-million deal with G.P. Over the years, asked why he never wrote another book as big as “Catch-22,” Heller has riposted, “Who else has?” That bravado had to wither a bit in the late 1980s, when he agreed to write a “Catch-22” sequel. It is the sequel to Heller’s entire career. “Closing Time” recalls the suffocating offices of “Something Happened,” the Jewish identity crises that permeate Heller’s “Good as Gold” and “God Knows,” the musings on art and economics in his “Picture This,” and even “No Laughing Matter,” his nonfiction chronicle of recovery from Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease. It descends from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to the sub-basements of the White House and the circles of hell. Strangelove” and Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus.” The story juggles elegy and comedy, cancer and comic apocalypse. ![]() ![]() ![]() Beyond “Catch-22” and its aging cast, “Closing Time” refers to a postwar, anti-war pantheon including Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |