Heller's Hell: Heller's Later Fiction, Jewishness, and the Liberal Imaginationстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Joseph Heller's career as a writer of fiction has been rather peculiar. The work which brought him note is, of course, the now legendary Catch-22, published in 1961. Then there was novelistic silence for thirteen years until the publication of Something Happened, followed five years later by Good as Gold. These three novels certainly established Heller's reputation as a significant figure among writers of the fiction of the United States. The publication in 1984 of God Knows was awaited with interest, and led to much discussion. The critical placing of Heller was in one sense easy. Given the spate of Jewish-American writers who came to prominence in the fifties and sixties-Bellow, Mailer, Malamud and Roth stand as examples, though they by no means exhaust the category-it was obvious that one placing of Heller would be as a Jewish writer. There was only one problem-in his first two novels he had not written about Jews. It became a commonplace of the reviewers, especially after the publication of Something Happened, to say that the characters of the novels really were Jews, and that the writer, probably for purposes of universalizing his work, had simply chosen to give them some other ethnic identity, or no discernible one at all. Another category into which Heller fit was that of humorist. Catch-22 was certainly a darkly humorous novel. James E. Miller, Jr. groups Heller with Ken Kesey as among promising American writers who will have permanent impact on American fiction (24) and Kesey, of course, is an outstanding humorist. If Catch-22 was dark humor, Something Happened was perhaps even more so. Dependent on the happening, that is, the death of Bob Slocum's son, this novel, though humorous in its own way, has less of the absurdity that helped to make Catch-22 such a popular book, though it has its share. No work of contemporary fiction is so keyed to fear as Joseph Heller's second novel... writes Richard Hauer Costa (159) in an impressive essay about Something Happened that compares that novel with Dostoevski's Notes from the Underground. The purpose of his paper, writes Costa, is to compare the similar devices used by
Год издания: 1988
Авторы: Frederick C. Stern
Издательство: Oxford University Press
Источник: MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Ключевые слова: Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern European Communism and Reforms, American Jewish Fiction Analysis
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 15
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 15–15