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Something happened is not a book that’ll leave you feeling good, or ok, or average, or below average. Something happened is a book that will leave you feeling that everyone in the world is a bad person. Its the type of book that will leave you feeling like people are worse than they appear to be when you first meet them, and it will make you feel bad about every interaction for the next month or so. Nonetheless, read it.
Written by Joseph Heller, mainly known for writing Catch Twenty-two, this book was his follow up to that novel.
The books a satire of corporate America in the mid sixties and it also happens to be the most depressing piece of fiction I’ve ever read.
Something happens is an odd title, because for most of the book, positively nothing happens.
Robert Slocum, the books narrator, sits in his office or in his house and tells the reader about his life.
He has a wife who he cheats on often, a daughter he picks on because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, a son he loves, and a retarded son who he wishes would die.
Slocum isn’t a happy person. He finds the half empty side to every single activity in his life.
He’s the type of person whose glad he snores so that his wife can’t sleep, who won’t wake that same wife while she has nightmares, and he is glad when she tells him the nightmares are worse than usual. He is upset that his female sexual partners derive pleasure from intercourse because he wants all of the pleasure to be his.
He hates people who have physical malformities, he’s a little racist, and yet after all this, he’s still sympathetic.
I spent half the book hating him, half of it feeling sympathy for him and most of it laughing.
Because the book, while depressing, is also a sterling example of black humor. Slocum is depressed but extremely funny, and his mordent whistling passed the graveyard voice had me laughing out loud.
Everyone describes this book as a satire but I’d argue that its not really a satire. Satire, to me, means that you don’t care about the characters, they exist to prove a point just as characters in ancient morality plays did. But in Something Happened, I cared a lot about everyone except for the retarded son.
Slocum is an ass hole, but he knows it and wishes he were a better person, is in fact slightly better than he gives himself credit for being. I spent most of the book feeling bad for almost everyone Slocum knows because he berates everyone who isn’t berating him, demeans everyone who isn’t demeaning him, and has harsh words to say about absolutely every other character in the novel.
This book is so dark that when I first tried to read it, when I was a senior in high school, I had to put it down because it was making me too depressed to function. I’m really not kidding. Poverty is boring these days, we’ve heard about slums, foreign and domestic, so often that they’ve become hardly worth an eye blink, but Heller, through his narrator its painted a bleak picture of suburbia, corporate culture, and America itself.
Something happened is almost plotless. The narrator deals with his son’s inability to do well in gym class, his wife’s suspicions he’s cheating on her, (which are justified a thousand times,) and mulls over whether or not to take a promotion by replacing a colleague who he hates and feels sorry for. excepting one development which happens towards the end of the novel, that’s its entire plot.
But Heller is one of the few authors I’ve found who can make such a meager soup into something fine, as he delicately interweaves scenes that make you want to cry with scenes that have you snorting. Then he blends the two together. The perfect balance between sadness and humor is one of the two reasons this book is worth reading.
The other is the way Heller can make this douche seem to not be a douche. You root for his marriage, which is bad, you empathize with him, although he’s a huge ass, you even start to feel for his children. This is because the book is taking place mainly in the narrators head and very few bad people think of themselves in that way, and Slocum is no exception.
The most heartrending section of the book is when Slocum recounts, through a series of anichronicly arranged flashbacks, a sort of trist he had when he was working his first job. He thought he was in love with a girl, but was too immature to per sue the relationship properly, so he never dated the girl. He was in love with her and it is hinted that she was in love with him but because of his nervousness and his inability to recognize the daily hints this girl constantly threw around that she wanted him to take her to a hotel for a night, they never ended up together.
He keeps coming back to this event in his life over and over again because the missed opportunity haunts him, looking at it from different angles and thinking about random what ifs.
Slocum mentions early on that he has a knack for telling whose going to have a nervous breakdown at the company, a typist in the office is slowly going crazy.
Other characters in the book, such as Slocums first girlfriend, were crazy, and mental health is one of the books main themes. This has a particularly sinister and ironic undertone, at least for me, which I won’t go into here as it might spoil things
Something happened is a character study. Its about Bob Slocum , but that isn’t the best thing about it. Something happened is a novel where the author has locked you into someone’s brain and won’t let you look away from any thoughts experienced, whether they be noble or awful, and there in lies its brilliance.
Five out of five stars.