CLOSING TIME

By Joseph Heller
Simon & Schuster (1994)
$24.00 464 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

Of all of the weapons in humanity's vast arsenal, perhaps the most formidable is the ability to laugh at.

The king, the high priest, the general, the President...all may get away with many an atrocity or abuse and still hold power, so long as they do not do something ridiculous. But when the people no longer look at them in awe or reverence or fear...when their image is shaped solely by the bawdy joke or ribald poem...that often marks the beginning of the end of their power.

Inevitably, the ability to invoke laughter against a selected target is not an easy weapon to wield. Satire has been described as among the most difficult of all writing. We can point to numerous examples of great fiction over the past 200 or 300 years, but how many great satires? Johnathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," certainly, and Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" and "Through The Looking Glass." And, of course, Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," a defining book of the World War II generation and one of the best American novels of all time.

But as for "Closing Time," Joseph Heller's sequel to "Catch-22"... Well, in all fairness, this book ought to be judged on two separate bases: first) standing on its own as a lampoon of America in the 90's, and second) as a follow-up to an American classic. Unfortunately, in all fairness, "Closing Time" comes up short either way you look at it. But that has far more to do with the differences between the era of the 40's and the era of the 90's than it does with Joseph Heller's abilities as a satiric writer.

When "Catch-22" was published in 1961, the United States military was still in revered domination of American public life. It was the military, after all, that had saved America and the world from the Nazis and the Japanese, and was even then squaring off against an even more formidable foe...godless, soulless, unsmiling communism. Dwight Eisenhower, the beloved ex-general and architect of the World War II victory in Europe, had just finished two terms as president. John Kennedy, the young war hero, had just been inagurated as the new national leader, and Congress was peppered with World War II veterans. It is also instructive to remember that Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. Senator who ruined the lives of thousands of citizens in the 1950's by labeling them Communists, met his match only when he tried to accuse the United States Army of treasonous activity. If anything was sacred in America of the early 60's, it was the U.S. military.

Dropped on such a landscape, "Catch-22" had the effect of a B-52 bombing. Heller highlighted all of the absurdity and inanity of war and the military culture. John Yossarian, Heller's great anti-hero, tried to find some sense in the midst of death and the great struggle being waged all around him, and couldn't. Eventually, in the only form of protest left to him, he refused to wear his uniform and simply went around naked. It was not an indictment of the military, it was a mooning, and so there was little the military could do in retaliation. How can you keep your dignity in response to a clown? A generation of American high school students were weaned on "Catch-22"'s anti-war irreverence. Ten years later, when the U.S. entered the war in Vietnam, a great portion of that generation did not take the military's pronouncements quite so seriously...

So now comes Joseph Heller with his sequel to "Catch-22," 30 years later, taking on America of the 90's. Heller's wit is still razor-sharp, as is his great sense of ferreting out the absurd. And yet where "Catch-22" sailed a bright, fierce course and hit right on target, "Closing Time" merely thrashes around aimlessly and then crashes and burns without ever illuminating a thing.

After all, how can you satirize the 90's?

"Closing Time" gives it a good try. Dan Quayle is now President, identified only as "the little prick in the White House." He spends much of his time playing in what he thinks is the computer game room, but the various game-boys are in reality the Defense Department's war-readiness computers. Predictably enough, Quayle fiddles with the wrong keys and starts a real war. Computers themselves play a big role in the book: they have become so good at the virtual reality creation of upcoming events that there is no longer any need for the events themselves to take place. The social event of the year is held in a vast and decaying city bus terminal, where all of the whores and hustlers and the homeless are hustled off to jail so they can be replaced by actors playing (what else?) whores and hustlers and the homeless. Some of the old war buddies of "Catch-22" are now defense entrepreneurs, trying to sell the Pentagon an updated version of the stealth bomber, and leading to classic bits of Helleritic absurdities:

"Why should your bomber be noiseless?" one Pentagon official asks. "We have supersonic planes now, and they surely make noise with their sonic booms, don't they?"

"It would be noiseless to the crew."

"Why should that be important to the enemy?"

"It could be important to the crew," emphasized Milo, "and no one is more concerned about those kids than we are. Some of them may be aloft for months."

But there is a great sense that we have heard all of this before, better, wittier, and in real-time. Dan Quayle already has gotten a heartbeat away from the Presidency. The Pentagon has loaded up its warehouses with $200 toilet seats and screwdrivers. Clarence Thomas survived a "high-tech lynching" in order to become the foremost hanging judge on the United States Supreme Court. Ted Kennedy, our great national boozer and womanizer, sits in the United States Senate advocating women's and health rights. California voters mandate more time for convicted criminals and, simultaneously, less money for jails to house these criminals, and then, also simultaneously, cannot fathom for the life of them why so many criminals are being let out of jail. Republicans push term limits until they take over the Congress and then, suddenly, miraculously, discover that term limits may not be what the American people wanted, after all. Michael Huffington rails against hiring illegal aliens while hiring one himself. Bill Clinton struggles mightily with the great issue of the day: is he John F. Kennedy, or is he Harry S. Truman?

How can you satirize an era that is already a satire itself?

"Closing Time" can't, and that's a shame, because there are some awfully good parts to it, too. Stories of World War II veterans growing old, lost in nostalgia for the days of their youth, losing their purpose, losing their wives and companions, losing their lives to old diseases. In these stories there is no parody, no pratfalls, just some warm, sad laughter from a slowly disappearing circle of old friends. There's a lot here, and perhaps another generation will be able to pick up "Closing Time" and appreciate it all. I think that we're a bit too busy caught up in all this madness to be able to pay much attention to the insanity around us.