Backlisted - Something Happened by Joseph Heller

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

Authors Matt Thorne and Nikita Lalwani join John and Andy to discuss the ‘other’ masterpiece by Joseph Heller, Something Happened, first published in 1974. Also in this episode John talks about Brother, a new novel by David Chariandy, while Andy has been reading Ursula Bentley's 1983 debut The Natural Order.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)5'45 - The Natural Order by Ursula Bentley, 17'11 - Brother by David Chariandy21'24 - Something Happened by Joesph Heller* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Don't talk about the floor this time. I don't need to talk about the floor. You said it. I don't need to talk about the floor this time. I don't need to talk about the floor. There's no need to talk about pigs. I've got 13 piglets at home, but that's fine. Have you been up at all hours with those?

Not really. Pigs are brilliant. I mean, they are amazing. I watched four of them being born. You can always tell before you get to them because they make this incredible sort of rhythmic grunting noise. So you think, yeah, well. Rachel had also said the day before she made her straw into a pile in the middle of the pen in the indoor shed where she's kept.

And it's incredible. The little piglets just literally crawl out themselves and then they kind of nibble off their umbilical cords and then go around and find a nipple. It's just the most... It's like, you know, there's none of this sort of mother licking it business. They just do it themselves. Sows out. Sows out.

Anyway, it's mesmerising to watch. And they are very, very small, but you're wondering how many more can come out. And then she had, there was one stillborn, but there were 14 altogether, and she's only got 14 nipples, so any more would have been tricky. This is, the animal husbandry element of this podcast is something to recommend i mean you

know she's good mother the big danger is them because she's big sort of 200 kilo sal you don't want her leaning on the school you can crush they can crush them but they do make incredibly loud noise if they're being squashed. Right. I mean, there's nothing cuter than a very small pig, other than 13 very small pigs, all gallant. But you don't, we talked about this before, you don't name them all, do you? Because you don't want to... No, I mean, the boys have named her Notorious P.I.G.

We've established that, yeah. And the runt of the litter has already got the name Piggy Smalls, which is predictable. But no, I mean, I don't, you know, it's, as somebody said on Twitter, oh, how could you possibly eat them? It was you, I think. How could you possibly eat them? I said, you're right, there's almost nothing on them at this point.

All right, babe. Yeah, they are cute. But they become pigs quite quickly. I mean, six months, they're not. What's your best pig impression? No, I think I'm going to do the pregnant sow is the best one giving birth it's a pig giving birth i think that's enough to get you this on the new yorker the new pork

can i just say reading joseph heller while kind of having to go out and it was probably it was The new book. Good, good. Early, you did that early. Can I just say, reading Joseph Heller while having to go out, it was an odd experience. Was it? It was quite odd. Was it indeed? The wonders of nature and family life at its most idyllic. And they're not. Anyway, shall we start?

Yes. Let's start. Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in the orange and sea green offices of a successful middle-sized company in early 70s Manhattan, mulling over mortality, marriage and the miseries of middle age. I'm John Mitchison, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is the award-winning Matt Thorne, author of six novels, including Eight Minutes Idle, three children's books,

and most recently, Prince, an epic account of the man and his music, which is published by Faber. Also, Matt is the first person I call in an emergency, and by an emergency, I mean the release of a new Neil Young album. Some emergencies can be stronger than others. Indeed. That's a fairly regular... Well, that's why. Four or five times a year.

What's his response? He's great. Well, you can rely... He and I can rely upon to to come together and go is this any good or not is this this one any good usually we can say there's one good song yeah we usually agree on which one is yeah that's true and then we get on with our lives um we're also pleased to welcome the novelist and uh critic nikita law, whose first book gifted won the inaugural Desmond Elliot Prize and whose second, The Village, was published in 2012 by Penguin. Thanks very much both coming in.

Thank you. The book that you're joining us to discuss today is the other masterpiece by Joseph Heller, Something Happened, first published in 1974. But before we probe the underbelly of 70s middle-class life, we're delighted once again to welcome this episode's sponsor, Bloom & Wild, the UK's top-rated flower delivery company, a company that, as we learned last week, is close to Andy's heart. Anyway, just to remind you that Bloom & Wild send fresh seasonal flowers through your letterbox, freshly cut, hand-packed, sent in bud, which means they last for more than a week. Plus they offer free next day delivery across the UK and even to Ireland, France and Germany.

As a backlisted listener, if you go to www.bloominworld.com and place an order, you'll get 20% off that first order. Just use the code backlisted. I was sent Blo Bloomingwell once, and I have to say that they're lush, as we say in Cardiff. Right, switching from blooms to blurbs. Andy, what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading a novel that was published in 1982 called The Natural Order, and it was written by Ursula Bentley.

Ursula Bentley, who died about 10 years ago, in her career published four novels. The Natural Order was her first. She then published a follow-up, then there was a gap, and there were two more in the 1990s. And this book had been recommended to me by several people. I decided to read it because I've been reading novels by several of the writers on the 1983 Granter Best of Young British Novelist list. I'd just finished Midnight's Children. And so I thought, well, I've read Rushdie as featured on that list. I'm now going to read Bentley as featured on the same list. And actually looking at that, before I talk about the book, looking at the names on that list, the famous names on that list

or the names with which that list is synonymous are the Amos, Boyd, Barnes, McEwan, Swift, Rushdie, Mob. No, Carter isn't on that list. Wow, that's interesting. Presumably because she wasn't under 40 in 1983. Maybe. I think. Close run thing.

But also on that list, Maggie G, Pat Barker, Rose Tremaine. Amazing list. Also, much to my surprise, looking at the people gathered around the table, did you know A.N. Wilson was on that list? I did. But then I had to say I judged that it was one of the judges on the 93 so i'd sort of studied the form quite carefully but philip norman was on that yeah very philip shout norman author of

the Beatles by a famous novelist called shout which paul mccartney calls shite um anyway so the list is quite and there are other clearly other writers on that list but ursula bentley is probably the least well known of that list and uh i found this story that i thought people might find amusing that julian barnes tells he says i remember lining up with my fellow young novelists of 1983 and after we had left our images in Lord Snowden's Canberra one of our more sardonic members remarked well they chose the best 20 from seven you can you can I wonder who which sardonic friend then friend of Julian Barnes that may have been couldn't possibly comment anyway Anyway, The Natural Order by

Ursula Bentley. This was compared on its publication to Beryl Bainbridge. I thought it was really good. I thought it was quite old-fashioned. Certainly, it has nothing of the fireworks that Midnight's Children does. It's quite weird reading them next to one another and thinking that they were both published in the same year if you read midnight's children i i think you would you know midnight children is 84 is that right so they're published in the same in the early 80s i think you would read midnight's children and think a well this probably was written in the late 70s early 80s i think 81, isn't it? Yeah. 81. 81. Whereas this sort of feels like it could have been written in some ways much earlier, yeah.

And it really reminded me of not just Beryl Bainbridge, who I like, but other writers that I really like. It really reminded me of Sheena Mackay and it really reminded me of Jane Gardham. It's very much in that kind of zone and it's about three friends from the suburbs of Surrey who see themselves as a Bronte-esque trio who go to work in a Manchester grammar school for boys and various unpleasant and surprising things happen to them in the course of their first year.

So the structure is their first year as teachers at that school. A teacher novel, that's... A good premise. Female teachers in an all-boys school. It's what she does. I can see you're thinking of it as a kind of slapstick comedy. Yeah, that's what I'm imagining. And I'm looking at the cover and it says wickedly amusing,

a new and original woman writer. It doesn't pretend wickedly amusing, does it? Is it sort of wickedly amusing, Barbara Pym, wickedly amusing? No, it's more... Harsh? It's funny, but it's also... What I liked about it was I expected it to be funny because, as you say, you think it's bearable.

It's going to be quite funny, bittersweet, like it says on cover. It's much darker as it goes on than I thought it was going to be. And where the places that the darkness come from very pleasingly and never quite where you think they might do. So there's a kind of originality of imagination with what she's done with that set-up. When I was reading it, I was thinking, well, the prose is very good.

I'm not quite sure why somebody would pick on this particular novel as evidence of that level of budding talent. By the end of the book, I sort of did understand it, that it works overall as a novel with a beginning, a middle and an end in a way that's very sophisticated for somebody who'd never written a novel before. So the fact that we can look back on it now and go, well, she had this career and it didn't quite pan out. And, you know, she had a lot of personal struggles, I think, of finding space and time in which to write. lot of personal struggles, I think, of finding space and time in which to write.

What people said about her in her obituaries, which I had a look at, was that she was, Bill Buford in particular, says, well, she wasn't a guy. And that... Thanks, Bill. For that list, he's been... He's got a point. That's the word he uses. He's got some women. Are there any women around? But he says specifically, he's that's the word he uses but he says

specifically it's not just their guys because in my head when you're thinking of the early 80s for me Angela Carter

is the same yes who is the female champion you send forth against yeah but I think that issue

of finding time and space as we used to call it time and space to write is still working itself out isn't it

it's still at least there's dialogue about it now. But I think back to, yeah, A Room of One's Own and what that means now. I think back to this short story by Tilly Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing. And in that, it's all about, it comes down to the basics of standing there ironing and trying to think of a short story

and the childcare, not particularly wanting to do it. Jane Garden, when we did the Jane Garden book on the podcast, there was that amazing thing where she said she wanted, it was literally, she could only do it when she'd got to an age where her children were no longer, she was no longer having to... And that's very common for that era, isn't it? You're always seeing the logistics being talked about. It's always about stolen hours and the actual logistics of the writing

and when do the kids go to sleep and I don't mind having a dirty house and the pride in that. At that time, you're always seeing these kinds of justifications, stroke, explanations for why it's so hard to write. I'm just going to read this paragraph because this was the... was the while i was reading i thought you know if i gave you this paragraph any point in any era i think you would recognize somebody whose talent was really coming through loud and clear so i don't want to tell you too much about the plot i think many listeners would really enjoy this book. It's called The Natural Order by Ursula Bentley. It's out of print. All her books are out of print.

And they don't deserve to be out of print. So I'll just read you this paragraph. She has, the narrator has just realised, or is in the process of realising, that she has developed, without realising it, a crush on one of her pupils, who is a sixth form boy. I was looking at myself in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe as I spoke. He'll notice that, I muttered. He'll like it. It assisted the impression that another had spoken, that this other creature inhabited my body, and more particularly mind, and spoke in my place. Late though I already was, I backed away from the mirror and sat down on the unmade bed, staring out of the window at the top of the rowan tree that grew beside the front gate.

A kind of flabbergasted joy possessed me, such as one might feel on meeting someone one had thought was dead. I had spoken his name, or at least his pronoun, and it was the abracadabra that opened up onto the full realisation of what had happened to me. I had been on the lookout for him. I had had his image on my mind. I had probably picked up every opportunity to talk to him. Had anyone noticed? I could not but think but once of Damaris and how I had ridiculed the same state in her, but of course her obsession with Shackleton, with the boy, had been of a different order, a wild, romantic, proselytising nonsense, merely an emotional perversion of extraordinary sexual frustration. I do not know what Damaris saw when she had looked at Shackleton, an amalgam of tender

genius and steely musical intelligence, most likely. It was not difficult to see him as the natural successor to Chopin, Mendelssohn and other beautiful consumptive musicians. But what I saw was the boy himself, flesh, blood, soul and, yes, divinity, a kind of divinity. As the thought came to me, I clapped a hand to my mouth and rocked with astonished laughter. And yet it was not laughter, only a cathartic noise. Anne put her head round the door. We each had our own room now. It's 20 to nine, Carlo. We're going to be late. Yes, I'm coming. Are you all right? Yes. I knew that I must seem strange to her, transformed possibly, sitting on the bed half dressed, grinning at her in a way that must have told her I was already grinning before she came in. My newly discovered passion spilled over into tenderness for her, but it would not have been

fair to tell her, to try her affection with the absurdity and the hopelessness of it. At that moment, these aspects did not worry me as long as it was kept secret. It was too new, too different, too outrageous and fascinating to depress. Nature's way, no doubt, of giving the spirits a brief holiday before the descent into the pit. Pretty good. That's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah it yeah that's pretty good i love that descent into the pit at the end so there's a sort of this is fine this is fine this is fine this is not heading anywhere good which indeed is what happens so touch the bellway bridge maybe kind of in there yeah yeah i mean that's's... Have anyone read her? No, no, no.

I was vaguely aware. I mean, I was vaguely aware. Rachel, when I said that I was reading this book on Twitter, this Ursula Bentley novel on Twitter, and Rachel Cook piped up and said, I read this when I was still at school. I absolutely loved this book. It was inspirational to me

that someone was writing this kind of thing then so so it's not really you know it's a it's a shit business hey mitch what have i been reading come back come back what have you been reading i've been reading i've been reading a very short very short very powerful short, very powerful, very beautiful new book by a Canadian writer called David Chariandi, whose first book was called Sukuyo. And this book, Brother, has already won awards in Canada,

and it comes with comparisons to Junot Dias, and it comes with Marlon James saying it's great it's it's I can't get it out of my head it's one of the best short novels I it really I know it sounds weird but it really reminded me it's completely unlike So Long See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell in its in its themes it's about it's narrated by a young black man living in the Toronto suburbs, sort of crappy Toronto suburbs. He's working very, very hard in a store at a supermarket, looking after his mother.

What has happened is that 10 years earlier, his older brother, Francis, was killed. And I won't go into exactly why he was killed, but it's a book about grief. It's a book about brotherly love. So the narrative flips between 80s, when the brothers are watching Dukes of Hazzard on television and kind of dropping out of school, becoming involved in gangs. And then the present day, when his mum is sort of broken by what's happened,

the eldest boy, Francis, has been killed. It is a simple story, but it's a book about growing up, growing up black in a city like Toronto. It's a book about the filial relationship, the mother-son relationship is one of the most beautiful I've done. It's very short, so there's absolutely nothing wasted. But God, he can write. And I mean, I defy anyone not to read this. The scene, the book is built up towards finally the moment when Francis is killed. And that is one of the best scenes I think I've read in fiction in a very long time. I'd go back and read his first novel. I haven't read his first novel on the basis of this.

But I think he'll be around for a while. But I'll read just a really, really short, just to give you an idea of the sort of, it has the same thing of, I guess what happens is that, like in So Long Till You See Tomorrow, something happens that doesn't seem terribly important early on in the book. You know, they make a mistake. They're the wrong place at the wrong time. And just the fact that you can do that and you're in a society where you're not seen as a human being, you're seen as a representative of something. And how these two bright funny witty kids end up in a tragic situation this just gives you an idea of the writing and it's not not very long mother's face seemed ready to break she's just discovered the for the first time the two

brothers have come home and they're in trouble with the police the police have brought them home mother's face seemed ready to break it's to describe, like watching a glass ball being dropped in a slow-motion movie. That fraction of a second just after the glass hits the ground and it's still a ball, but the cracks are everywhere and you know it's not going to be a ball much longer. It took another ten minutes for the next bus to arrive and climbing on, Mother paused, gripping the bars before recovering. The bus headed off, the cooked up fumes of diesel and hot asphalt as it went. The shimmer of the street and the world all around, a deep gut sickness, dizziness.

I managed to avoid falling, sliding down the glass side of the shelter to the sidewalk. It's just a lovely little, lovely, I mean, it's a sequence of luminous moments. But... Matt, you said that you... I started it, yeah. It's interesting, I mean, the first thing I noticed was him saying that although it was a short book,

it had taken him a very long time, which I think is the right way round. Yes, the old yeah more of that later i'm sorry i couldn't write you uh i'm sorry i didn't have time to write your short one i mean as short fiction goes i think it's the cumulative power comes you know the final third is is pretty hard to read but i mean you know it's he's a proper writer so it's he gets you to the end and you it is devastating but it's very beautiful and not without hope um yeah i definitely read other stuff by him let's pick this up again shortly so we had a tweet this morning from one of our listeners another ian on on twitter hello another ian and he was very nice about the

episode that's just gone up about uh the townhouse byour Nost with our guest, Lucy Mangan. He says some very nice things about that. Thank you, Ian. And then he says, another good one. My faves are always the ones on once massive, now forgotten authors familiar from secondhand shelves. Open brackets. My least faves are the ones on cognoscente acclaim, but unknown to the masses works about unlikable people. So Ian, you might want to fast forward to the end of this particular podcast not the cognoscente bit necessarily we're talking about a novel with a with a very current issue of likability in fiction is that will be at the forefront of our minds something happened by joseph heller this is the novel that people who love Catch-22,

generally, in my experience, I did a straw poll in the office and three people in the office had started this book and abandoned it before page 100 because they just couldn't deal with the unpleasantness of the narrator, the narrator who is a sort of early middle-aged, naturally dressed, middle management, early 70s New York executive. I want to say immediately, before we ask the traditional question about where you first came across the novel,

that I have to say, particularly to Matt, who chose this book, that I found this the most stressful novel I've ever read. Not one of them. I was thinking as I was reading, I've never read a novel that stressed me out like this. Why has Matt made me read this? What does he want me to know about myself?

I thought it was an incredible experience to read. I sent you an email earlier in the week. It's 570 pages of being in the head of really, really difficult, difficult complicated unpleasant human being but we're going to talk more about what just so down to that stress point i just thought it's

quite interesting that on the back of the book you've got mr mark lawson saying it's the most reassuring book he's ever read yeah i've seen that polar opposite yeah where matt did you first come across something happened okay so i was on holiday i was about 11 years old and i think i was somewhere terrible like swanage and and i my dad had let me go over to the sort of second-hand bookstore and i had a pound coin and i bought this this something happened book and i took it back to him and i said dad i've bought this this Happened book and I took it back to him and I said, Dad, I bought this book about a man who works in an insurance agency.

He works in an insurance agency. He was a systems analyst at an insurance agency. He said, why on earth? Why on earth have you bought this book? It sounds like the most boring thing in the world. And I, you know, I love, I've always loved as a kid the idea of working in an office. It was something that I've gone on to write about. So I was really enjoyed the idea of reading to him.

Oh, look, all these funny things that are happening in the office. And he's going, well, that sounds like my job. That doesn't sound fun. There's nothing exciting about being, working in an insurance company and having all these office politics going on and all the rest of it. But for me, it was absolute catnip. You know, it was really exciting to sort of see the adult world. At 11?

Yeah. Of 11? Yeah. Of course you were. And you brought with you, is that the copy you bought for a pound in Clonage? Yeah, Sandy and Nikita would be like, no, you didn't win, not when you were 11. So that's the copy. No, I couldn't believe that you did it when you were 11. I also love that whenever you have a dad anecdote, it always fulfils its potential. It's always brilliant.

Whenever Thorn has a dad anecdote, it's good. Well, for the rest of the holiday, I sort of sat there, you know, reading it alongside him, and he'd look over occasionally, and it would be, you know, strange descriptions. Let's part. I think we need to, look, we could just spend an hour talking about the effects of this book on an 11-year-old child, but we'll come back to it.

So you have very kindly you've read hella before right you hadn't read this book before you read hella before when did you can you remember when you first read hella or what you read yeah i can remember it quite well actually it was sketch 22 and it was when i was 19 i was just it was just around my 19th birthday which is in the summer holidays after my first year at university and I was studying medicine but unsuccessfully it wasn't going very well I kept trying to study in medicine but it didn't work yeah and um and so I in that summer holidays I was supposed to be um studying medicine and dissecting and doing those kinds of important things for a first-year medic and instead I would go to the library a lot to

the humanities library which seemed impossibly exotic to me as a medical student and I attempted a sort of nerdish read the canon you know so I would just go through the greats and so I read it quite quickly in a day or two because of because of the approach which was the sort of speed reading not I wouldn't recommend it right yeah approach um but I thought I've got the gist of it I understand what the fuss is about okay Henry Miller next yeah um did you I didn't go back to it but I have to say I preferred this book to Catch-22 really controversial we'll come on maybe it's just that I'm older Jonathan Franson we might take us we might just be that I'm older we might take a vote at the end yeah and and maybe even share it with listeners what the result is but I think age has got a lot

to do with it, so reading it now is very different from being 19 and obviously Matt being 11. But 11 is interesting because it does strike me that, I mean, for you to have got on it at all at 11, it does tell you something about Heller's language in this book. Although it is, you know, one of, I think also I was pretty traumatised by reading it, but I have come to the view that it is a truly great novel, though difficult.

But the language is, the language is absolutely, I think it's one of, is it in Vonnegut's review where he said it's, you know, cut like a diamond. I mean, it's... Yeah. There's not a lot of... We'll get some readings from it, but there's not a lot of slack in this book, although it's so long. So did you read Catch-22, Matt, after something happened? I didn't read Catch-22 until much later on.

I went on to the next one, Good As Gold, which is sort of another standard kind of comic novel. It's about a novelist who goes to work in the White House or a non-fiction writer who goes to work in the White House. And it didn't, I didn't do anything for me. It just felt very wisecracking, very, you know, that kind of humour, the same humour as Catch-22. And so when I went back and looked at Catch-22,

I didn't really like that either. So it was a long time actually before I started reading Catch-22, before I read Catch 22, and I've never really felt the same sort of affinity that I have with this one. I'm going to give you my, everyone's got a Catch 22 story. I think Catch 22 is one of those books that you either, I do think the world seems to be divided into, let's give it a Heller-esque formulation,

two types of people, those who pick up Catch 22 and can read it straight through, and those like me who just... I tried to start it half a dozen times. I know where... I can tell you exactly where... I always say about Catch-22, it took me 22 years to read it. One year for every catch. You know, I started reading it in a hotel room in Pitlochry in Scotland the week after my dad died in 1985

because we had a holiday booked and it was in the keeping with our family that we that we carried on regardless so we went on this holiday which was quite a weird I now think a weird thing to do but anyway we went on the holiday and I had the book with me that I bought to read to cheer me up and I started reading Catch-22 in a hotel room and I finished it 22 years later on the top of a number 12 bus in Notting Hill Gate in London I mean I did go back and start it again several times I found I found that you have to get to about what I discovered about it was you have to get to about, what I discovered about it, was you have to get to about page 75, and no pun intended, something happens on about page 75 of Catch-22. And then I started to think, okay, this is like a map.

This is like a terrain with each chapter is a light in a different place on the map, lighting up a different thing. And that's how he wants to tell you the story. I'd love to read it again, actually. I was hoping I'd have time, but um i'd love to read it again actually i was hoping i'd have time but i i didn't to do it for this podcast but then i'd have you know i think in a way it's it's it is a fun i think it's a fundamentally different book something happened i'm not sure very different i'm not sure what the hell something happened is i feel like having read

it something has definitely happened i you know when I said I'm not sure I could ever read it again? I've revised that opinion since we had that exchange. Yeah, yeah. It might be really nice to just hear the beginning and sort of the beginning of the book. Yeah, it's not the very beginning but you were saying it's the first bit

that you wrote. Yeah, Heller tended to Heller said that what he did was when he wrote a novel, he would wait to come up with the same thing happened with Catch-22. He would wait to come up with a phrase or a paragraph that even if he didn't understand where it would go, he was so inspired by it, it would push him through writing the rest of the novel to back it up.

And so this came to him, he wrote it down, he said, and then spent the next 12 years backing it up. As you know, one of the things about the book is that it sort of runs on endlessly, so I'll go until I find a natural end point because it doesn't feel as if one is there particularly. In the office in which I work, there are five people of whom I am afraid.

Each of these five people is afraid of four people excluding overlaps for a total of 20 and each of those 20 people is afraid of six people making a total of 120 people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these 120 people is afraid of the other 119 and all of these 145 people are afraid of the 12 men at the top of the company who helped found and build it and now own and direct it. All these 12 men are elderly now and drained by time and success of energy and ambition. Many have spent their whole lives here. They seem friendly, slow and content when I come upon them in the halls. They seem dead and are always courteous and mute when they ride with others in the public elevators. They no longer work hard.

They hold meetings, make promotions and allow their names to be used on announcements that are prepared and issued by somebody else. Nobody is sure anymore who really runs the company. Not even the people who are credited with running it. But the company does run. Sometimes these 12 men at the top work for the government for a little while. They don't seem interested in doing much more. Two of them know what I do and recognise me because I've helped them in the past and they have been kind enough to remember me, although not, I am sure, by name. They inevitably smile when they see me and say, how are you? I inevitably nod and respond, fine.

So, I mean, immediately, it does sound like, it does sound in a way like a satirical comic novel. Yeah, he does, you can hear even in the beginning of the book, it's the thing that happens again and again and again when I was reading this. I thought, this is amazing. There's this kind of mesmerisingly dull yeah parade of process yes right yes and then he drops into it one as a writer one mo just after another yes so that was pretty neutral yes as a piece of progress apart from every so often he he drops in just one word for flavour. Yeah. And he keeps it up.

He just keeps going and keeps going. But there is that sort of feeling, isn't there, of just it's just like sort of milk on the turn, always through the book. You know, you just, it's just, you can't relax into it. Yes. I was thinking about, you know, voice, because it's all in, it your 560 pages in this voice,

thinking about Richard Ford and Frank Bascombe and how luxuriant it is to be in Bascombe's voice. Being in the head of Bob Slocum is not. It's hard to relax. Sorry. I was going to say he does the same thing with Pace as he does with the Mojus in that every time you're involved in the processes of the office, he'll go and do something very weird, like get very angry with the person who's wearing the wrong outfit. And imagine beating him up, even though he's a cripple, as he calls them.

I admire that mastery of pace. But on how luxuriant it is to be in the voice, for me it felt like it's so self-aware. He's so self-aware about all of his horribleness. It's like a kamikaze sort of need to confess, isn't it? Yeah, it's somewhere between a confession. He cannot help but tell you everything in his head as it's happening. But at the same time, you're focused on every bit of language because you think something important's coming up.

It's one of those books where not very much is happening all the whole time. And that's what I don't like about Catch-22 or Good as Gold so much is that it's an obvious joke rhythm. It's like, here you are, here's the punchline, here's the setup. And something happens, you don't know where the important details are going to come. I would agree with that. We've got a clip from Heller here. This interview was done in the mid-'70s.

I think this was done just after the publication of Something Happened. It's a terrific interview. And this is a clip where he talks about both the title and the idea of Something Happened. And in Something Happened, there is nothing specific that I give that enables Slocum to recognize as the source of danger. There's a vague source of anxiety. Slocum does not know what it is that has brought him to this position in life where he has everything he's always wanted, and yet feels a sense of loss, a sense of loneliness, an inability to thrive emotionally. Now, one thing Yosair does have is he is emotionally expressive.

He's sensitive. He has appetites. Bob Slocum is almost impoverished. And the reason there's a lot of care in my choosing the title Something Happened. Something is such a vague word. Slocum is trying to find out what did happen to him, what happened to that little boy I used to be.

And he can't find out. In fact, I've constructed the book in a way so that no one interpretation would explain it. And that, I think, is the contemporary condition. What a place to come out of. Thanks, Joseph.

I mean, one of the senses of this book, I think, at the time was that he'd gone loopy, you know, that it'd taken him such a long time to write this book after Catch-22. It was 13 years. And the idea that this was Joseph Heller, you know, writing fairly autobiographically in a kind of crazy way. And I think you can tell from what he was saying there, I think it sounded genuine.

I know writers sometimes lie about their intent, but that sounded like he genuinely had thought about him as a character and thought about that voice, even though you don't really see that in the book. It feels very artless. It's sort of deliberately artless. Yeah, what's interesting for me is that it feels somewhere between a confession and a talking cure,

as though it's an act of therapy and that he can take control of his life. Or you feel it's so artfully bound up with Heller that Heller might be in the act of creating art, taking control of something. Because there's a lot of this Freudian stuff that he tries to stitch together, a constellation that goes from parent to child to parent,

again and again and again, as though he's trying to work out who that little boy is he's got a little boy the little boy is crucial to the plot um and where he comes out and one of the things that i thought when i was reading it is i didn't actually find the voice repellent even though it's so misogynist homophobic and racist and he assumes that all the readers he has are misogynist, homophobic and racist. Slocum. Slocum assumes that as he tells the story. And it's that feeling of being allowed to be those things or to be allowed to be the worst parts of the self.

You asked me earlier, why was it stressing me out? earlier why was it stressing me out i felt i was being confronted with a parade of my least attractive exactly traits my my own humanity at its worst was we had been dragged out and put in front of me in some sort of a bizarre display of honesty and self-awareness. But also in a kind of, he does this wonderful thing of sliding from subject to subject. And sometimes, like we were saying earlier, you've got a bit, haven't you, we must read this bit. There are transcriptions of family arguments. He has a wife and two children,

transcriptions of family arguments, he has a wife and two children, which contain not only the dialogue between Slocum, his wife, his daughter, his son, but not his second son. We will perhaps talk about that at some point as well. But also Slocum's analysis of every parry and jab that each family member makes in the row, right? The need to win. Oh, God, it's so painful. It's so painful.

What I find so poignant about those sections are that, I mean, this section I'll read now is from a conversation with his daughter. And even though it's a big argument, and he's constantly having arguments with her about, as he says, everything from money, smoking, sex, marijuana, late hours, dirty words, schoolwork, drugs, blacks, freedom, hers, and insults to my wife. Even though he's always having these arguments, I feel like he could really get on with her. And it's a tragedy. They're kind of good friends. She keeps coming and saying, why aren't you interested in me?

Yeah, yeah. friends yes she keeps coming and saying why aren't you interested in me yeah yeah and um and then they have this parrying good time but it's all done in argument and in this section so he says that he you know he argues with her about those things that i just listed and then he says what will you do she will ask basingly if i come home with a black boyfriend. This is a peculiarly ingenious stroke of hers that requires lightning dexterity to counter and with which she does succeed in confounding and vanquishing my wife. There is no way out and I am tempted to award her accolades. If I tell her I'd object, I'm a racist. If I tell her I wouldn't, I have no regard for her. My wife succumbs by taking her seriously. I survive by skirting the trap. I would still ask you to clean up your room,

I reply, nimbly, and to stop reading my mail and showing my bank statements to your friends. And then he says, of course I'm a racist. And so is she, who the devil isn't. And I think he's asking the reader those questions all the time so who wouldn't if you were a white male who was works high up in an office want to go and fumble someone in the storeroom again and again and here you are let's do it together you know it's an odd relationship it's strange isn't it because a lot of it you know you don't know whether he's trying to reflect the period of the time or is actually reflecting the period of the time or, you know, whether he's deliberately trying to be offensive. So some of the time you're reading it and you can think,

OK, I can go along with that. And then suddenly they're all off sleeping with prostitutes and you're thinking, well, this is something that he's actually accurately reflecting. We should say that one of the things that's fascinating about this book is that it was tremendously commercially successful. Really? It didn't just go straight to number one and then fall out two weeks later after people started trying to read it and couldn't get on with it. It stayed at number one for weeks and weeks and weeks. And I would have thought it presents an almost unique challenge to any publisher to try and present it in such a way. unique challenge to any publisher to try and present it in such a way um i'm going to read the blurb and then john might read a little bit of kurt vonnegut's famous review relating to how

this book was packaged um so this we've got a blurb here which matt and i compared blurbs and we worked out is fundamentally the same one so that that's yeah this is like a corgi paperback from the mid-70s bob slocum is a promising executive he has an attractive wife three children a nice house and as many mistresses as he desires his life is settled he has conformed society demands therefore that he should be happy or at least pretend to be but the pretense is becoming more and more difficult as desolation frustration and fear take over it was the madness of war that inspired the magnificent lunacy of catch-22 it is the malaise of modern america which prompts this brilliant novel a book as splendidly unique as its predecessor i mean in a way splendidly unique and they're trying to say

you know it's it's it's iconoclastic and it's satirical but john the the vonnegut review sort of gets to the heart of it doesn't it there's so many great bits of the vonnegut review i mean he describes it as black humor indeed with the humor removed which a feeling. I'll just read you a little bit. There will be, he says, Kurt Vonnegut, a molasses-like cautiousness about accepting this book as an important one. It took more than a year for Quatch 22 to gather a band of enthusiasts. I myself was cautious about that book. I am cautious again.

The uneasiness which many people will feel about something happened has roots which are deep. It's no casual thing to swallow a book by Joseph Heller, for he is, whether he intends to be or not, a maker of myths. One way to do this, surely, is to be the final and most brilliant teller of an oft-told tale. And he goes on to say, the proposed myth in Something Happened is that those families, the families of middle class veterans of the Second World War, were pathetically vulnerable and suffocating. It says that the heads of them commonly took jobs which were vaguely dishonorable or at least stultifying in order to make as much money as they could for their little families.

And they used that money in futile attempts to buy safety and happiness the proposed myth says that they lost their dignity and their will to live in the process and he goes on i mean obviously i've got a bit i've got a bit here john i i this is the bit i mean this we've all read this review i think is this book any good? Yes. It is splendidly put together and hypnotic to read. It is as clear and hard-edged as a cut diamond. Mr Heller's concentration and patience are so evident on every page that one can only say that something happened is at all points precisely what he hoped it would be. This book may be marketed under false pretenses,

which is all right with me i have already seen british sales promotion materials which suggests that we have been ravenous for a new heller book because we want to laugh some more this is as good a way as any to get to people to read one of the unhappiest books ever written i mean yeah i mean hella responded he said that he thought that catch 22 was the best book he'd written, and then when he read that review, he thought something happened. It is, and it's great. I love it, and he also says he's counting on a backlash. He expects, Vonnegut, younger readers to love Robert Slocum

on the grounds that he couldn't possibly be as morally repellent and socially useless as he claims to be. What's interesting about that review is you get the feeling that Vonnegut's battling with that review is you get the feeling that vonnegut's battling with how depressed he is from the novel he says at the top doesn't he something like life has become very small now that i've read this book it's like a grave life has become like a grave yeah and at the end he says something about i can't that he can't laugh it's he's supposed to be laughing at this book but in actuality it tells you that i

can't remember exactly but as far as i know though joseph heller is the first major american writer to deal with unrelieved misery that's it yeah now the thing is we people might be listening to this thinking why would we want to read that answer because it's artistically what vonnegut says which sounds like a backhanded compliment is true that hella set himself this task but it is quite funny too it is funny and it's absurd it's a triumph of sort of absurdity made large isn't it and it's it he does something it's important to say he does something i think so audacious at the end of the book that that you almost and we're not going to say what it is but that that it's almost it does make you think it does make you rerun the whole narrative again i

think and and and he the fact that he's prepared you there's a great review um from a few years ago making a claim for this as being one of the great greatest novels of the 20th century by uh critic carmen pataccio and the la review of books and it says works before and after something happened have played with a similarly paradoxical magic creating a presence out of absence crushing their characters hopes and certainties as a way to provide their readers with certainty and hope. And it is that strange, cathartic feeling that by making this book so dark and hopeless, because, I mean, without giving too much away, Slocum doesn't, you know, you think, the usual thing is you have a bad character

and the bad character gets judged and the bad character doesn't. The Slocum at the end of the book is very similar to the Slocum. Yes, it's interesting. I mean, it's funny that we were talking about the ending because I remember one time I went in to meet with a film company and they said, what book would you like to adapt?

Go for something really big. We've got an unlimited budget. We're not unlimited. We've got a big budget. We could buy you a book for you to adapt. And I said, oh, I want to do Something Happened. And they said, oh, hello, that's really exciting. Yes.

So they said, what's it about? And I told them told them what's about and i could see they weren't that interested but they were still going okay tell us a bit more what happens at the end and i told them what happened at the end and she crossed off the the the name of the book in front of me but that ending is so interesting without giving it away um because it you you do want to sort of laugh and cry at the same time like you genuinely feel for him even as he doesn't redeem himself and hella the novelist has won he's got you into he's beaten you up you do feel for him let's hear another clip there's a clip here this is hella talking about what he was trying to do with the structure of the novel most of what's happened in each book has taken place before the beginning of the book and

the character. In your setting, I am the main character and I will bring the reader back to certain events each time. It's a structure that William Fortney used very well. I didn't originate it. In Something Happened, I'm more concerned with the workings of a mind, particularly memory. I think memory is the biggest character in Something Happened.

And the organization of Something Happened works the way I imagine memory works in other people. And as we keep returning to certain periods in our life, there may be four, five, or six certain people who, for one reason or another, make very deep impressions on us as we grow up, as a child, as an adolescent, as a young man. And consequently, a slogan with memory as the transporting device will return to things in his past and work with his present and future as well. So in that sense, themes are repeated. And I really had a sense of music, more so with Something Happened than with Catch-22, and also a sense of an artist's palette, very much conscious of spatial relationships, of the themes and ideas in Something Happened. It's that thing I was talking about, about him,

how he does this fascinating thing of, because the book is layered in the way he describes, that he slides in from subject to subject. Sometimes he'll spend 30 pages on it, sometimes he'll spend half a page on it when he's been talking about something else. The idea in your memory that you kind of anxiously return at four in the morning to something you said 30 years ago

that you still feel embarrassed about, where you'll never be free of. It is musical like that. The recapitulation of themes that are coming, the speech that he doesn't get to give at the conference yeah and that even little phrases i mean he you know i think vonnegut uses that fantastic thing he's sort of tapping on a bit of metal kind of and and creating this sort of this sort of carapace of of of of huge kind of it's a it's a it's a massive book which not very much happens in yeah i mean i

tried to think to look at the plot this time because i hadn't when i read it again and i you know i thought that the office politics in it were a bit more structured than they were because you know there is this thing about him wanting a promotion and and that sort of set up at the beginning about him taking over the job but that doesn't really go anywhere you don't get anything back from that for about another 400 pages and instead of which he focuses on details like the, the woman he wanted to sleep with when he, when he started at the office who committed suicide, you know, and he goes after that, he recapitulates that again and again,

that doesn't comes back and worries away. And that, that, I mean, really terrible. I was thinking of Black Mirror, actually, where there's a thing where you're in somebody else's head and the rape scene yeah i don't want to be having to be in this room watching this woman kind of effectively be on the point of rape i mean without again giving that rape seems very interesting because i think he's using it to um hell is using it to make him sympathetic uh because he does intervene just like he when he's about to bash the guy whose job he's going to take yeah um he's actually looking after him and saying don't wear these weird clothes to the office try and keep your job because he's angry that he's going

to be promoted and take his job and i think that there's sort of classic attempts to make us sympathize with him but he regrets it though doesn't he yeah but with the with the rape scene it's very nuanced because at the end he says yeah he reverses it at the end he says so he intervenes and screams yeah and then and so he sort of saved her from the rape and then he says but was i a fool that i didn't make her put out to three people and be one of them yeah which is incredibly harsh and then she he goes to see her and he says i wanted her to be more grateful than i thought she would be yeah me saving her with that scream and instead she was back to being cheerful and doing what she obviously had to do to survive yeah which is just start flattering everyone in the office again

even though she's just escaped a rape situation i At various points in this book, I said it made me uncomfortable. One of the things that I was thinking while I was reading it was, oh, my God, you could walk into a bookshop and buy this in 2018. Its potential to cause offence, which must have been significant when it was published, has multiplied now. And it made me think, you know, I... A lot of trigger warnings.

Yeah. And I like a bleak book, right? I like Jean Rees and Hubert Selby. Welbeck, I'm a big Welbeck fan. Welbeck who cops a lot of flat. This makes Welbeck look like Val Duning, right? In terms of the bleakness and the willingness to say almost anything yeah but as

you've just said the case of within a framework it's quite yeah and i think that that section on rape i looked at it a few times it's quite interesting hella's not condoning it he's trying to be honest about so he looks sympathetic and then he isn't sympathetic and it's that honesty it's just going that one step further and saying oh am i the I the fool for doing it? And why isn't she more grateful? Well, it is a sort of total nihilism as well, though, isn't there? You know, there's that thing about all these, you could think of the fact that it's the back of the books saying, oh, look, there's a novel, lots of mistresses, that will be exciting.

But he hates sleeping with the mistresses. You know, it's like the worst thing in the world. It contributes to his unhappiness. He's just on and on and on about, I don't want to have to sleep with another one of my mistresses. This is the worst thing in the world. I mean, this is the thing, the reversal thing. He kind of despises his wife for becoming the person that he's turned her into

and hating the fact that she's allowed him to do that. The double thing is there all the way through. Especially the way in which she approaches him sexually. He doesn't like that, but he claims to have taught her that. You know, you can't go... You have to mention Derek, the severely mentally handicapped child sexually. He doesn't like that, but he claims to have taught her that. You know, you can't go, you have to mention Derek, the severely mentally handicapped

child that they have. All the book is about, should we even get rid of him? It's so brutal. It's so... My man is laughing. I'm trying not to laugh. Laura trigger warning. What's making me laugh is out of respect for...

Hell has put that in his book, and he's put it as a constant thing to come back to to make the reader go, for fuck's sake! Yeah. The lack of compassion for that particular character. You do feel a bit... No-one, no-one who's got children has not had the, Daddy, stop shouting.

I'm not shouting. I'm just raising my voice to make emphasis, which he goes through all the time. It's the most brilliant family argument. But that technical thing as well, you know, the boy who he wants to get rid of, Derek, is the only one who's named. So he says my son. We don't find out their name.

My daughter. But then you find out Derek's name. So that has a weird effect to it as well. You know, there's a, that, that Hela was talking about the musical element, about the, the fugal element. And the way, the way that when often scenes will reach kind of crescendos of prose and then slide off into other subjects. So he has this weird, there's a little bit I'd like to read here,

which does that, which I think... Listeners, if you want to just go and make a cup of tea for a minute, you might want to do that. Here we go. And there you have my tragic chronicle of the continuity of human experience, of this great chain of being and the sad legacy of pain and repudiation that one generation of Slocums gets and gives to another, at least in my day.

I got little, I gave back less. I have this unfading picture in my mind, this candid snapshot, ha ha, and it can never be altered, as I have a similar distinct picture of my hand on Virginia's full, loosely bound breast for the first time, or the amazingly silken feel of the tissue things between her legs the first time she let me touch her there, of this festive family birthday celebration in honor of my little girl, at which my old mother and my infant daughter are joyful together for perhaps the very last time. And there I am between them, sturdy, youthful, prospering, virile, fossilised and immobilised between them as though between bookends, without knowing how I got there, without knowing how I will ever get out, saddled already with the grinding responsibility of making them and others happy, when it has been all I can do from my beginning

to hold my own head up straight enough to look existence squarely in the eye without making guileful wisecracks about it or sobbing out loud for help. Who put me here? How will I ever get out? Will I ever be somebody lucky? What decided to sort me into precisely this slot what the fuck makes anyone think i am in control that i can be any different from what i am i can't even control my reveries

virginia's tit is as meaningful to me now as my mother's whole life and death. Both of them are dead. The rest of us are on the way. I can almost hear my wife or my second wife, if I ever have one, or somebody else saying, won't you wheel Mr. Slocum out of the shade into the sunlight now? I think he looks a little cold.

Oh, it's genius, though, as an arrangement of rhythm and prose. It's brilliant. If somebody starts listening now, they're going to think, what happened to Andy? You fully inhabited that role. I'm not going to read. There's another bit I wanted to read.

And while we've been talking, I think, you know what? If I read this out loud, I would actually find it almost too painful to read. There's a section where he's talking about his uh his mother when elderly which i would not want to hear my own mother who to be fair does not listen to that but i would not want to hear my mom hear me reading those words out loud because probably because they have horrible grains of truth in them can i I read a funny bit? Please. The sort of balance to that. I was reading out bits to my wife, Leslie, as we were going along, and this, she said, this was an accurate reflection of our relationship, this bit.

I have it on her. It has nothing to do with love. It is more to do with hate. We hoard pillows. We have big, fluffy, soft ones now, and she steals mine when I'm asleep. Also, she sleeps better than I do, which arouses so much wrath in me that I can hardly sleep at all. And then she maintains she's been awake all night with heartburn, headache and humanitarian concerns over the well-being of others. I'm the one who's been awake. She won't stay in her part of the house,

as my son and daughter prefer to do now. She won't answer the telephone, even though the calls are for her. When one call does come for me, she'll wait until I've been talking for 30 seconds and then pick up the extension breathlessly to shout, hello, we've run out of light bulbs. There is face to be saved in this tug of war, and I want to save mine.

This is the one victory she cannot pluck away from me. I have the advantage because I do not care if she never says it to me although I might begin to care if I felt she didn't. Good insight. It was the hoarding of the pillows. Later on he has that bit where he wants

four more pillows and his wife and he wants to be up higher so he can look down upon her. The thing is the marriage does function in the novel. Just when you are about to give up on slocum he kind of wins you back by doing something that's sort of you know all the way through the book his head is inhabited by you know he's always trying to find himself the forsaken child he's trying to find he wants to you know when i grow up i want to be a little boy but i love this towards the end of the book. Kegel, who's one of the guys in the office, and he wants to kick Kegel. But he then, being Slocum, he can't even own that. He says,

the man who, inside he said, the man who wants to make me kick Kegel in the leg is a worldly relaxed fellow with black silk socks and a grey pinstripe suit. He's a man about my age with neatly trimmed white hair. He is little, of course. He has to fit inside. Even... Even all those sinister and gigantic ogres who've been menacing me in my nightmares all my life have been small. It's just that I am so much smaller. He seems to know his way about the stone passageways of my brain

much better than I do, for he reappears in different settings, often reading a newspaper with one ankle crossed comfortably over his knee, biding his time. He thinks he's got more time than I have. He hasn't. I think there's a sauna for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts. Let's see the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely

after playing squash. I suspect there's a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. The shops are all about it, which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished that's the inside of I really enjoyed Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris yes with which this has much in common and

I don't want to criticize there's no criticism of that novel intended when I say this but you know Then We Came to the it's in some ways like an easy listening cover version of Something Happened isn't it? I mean it has the tedium of office life without quite the psychotic kill or be killed element I mean it makes Don Draper

look I mean pathetically weedy although I think Matthew Wynand must I wondered if you were going to try it. That sort of anti-hero sort of tradition, I mean, in long-form drama, I think maybe Heller's in there. So this character must be... And also that character who he refers to as the 28-year-old woman.

She's sort of tall, blonde, and as he puts it, huge, just huge in every department. And I wondered about that character in Mad Men. The one who gets laid on the desk by the guy that goes down in the storeroom. I agree with you, John. We've all watched Mad Men, right? I'm looking at all five of us around the table.

Yes. But Slocum does make, I mean, makes Don look like a pussy, really. Do you think so? I don't know. Yeah, because he doesn't, that's the point I was saying about, he doesn't enjoy any of this. You know, he's not. Like Don Draper.

Like Don Draper. But Don Draper does enjoy it for a while, doesn't he? There's always, there's a bit of kind of. But so does he. He enjoys it. He says about Virginia, Slocum says, I was just grateful for whatever she gave me. I mean, he talks about other women with Virginia,

but he's always grateful for whatever happens in the cupboard, even though it's not the full works. Yeah, but Don Draper's a glamorous figure to begin with. Although he's got the history and the background, other people think... He's not going to kick Cagle. He's not going to go around. I mean, there is a bit... There is that similar bit where he goes into the meeting

and he says something to him. He says, did that just happen? Oh, it must have done. Oh, it's the most boring dream I've ever had. And it's a similar sort of thing. You know, he has that attitude. I mean, basically, the similarity between them is they don't really care about their jobs and they hate their jobs and they hate the people around them.

But I don't think anybody would identify with Slocum as a sort of hero in the same way. He doesn't have that kind of, you don't read this and think, God, I wish I lived in the 70s when people could do these terrible things. But if you like Mad Men, would you like this book? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, the mood is very similar. No, you don't think so?

No, I don't know. That's interesting. I think this exposes the underbelly of Mad Men, so I think, you know, as we've discussed, you're always thinking... I kept thinking back to mad men and how a lot of the things we accept as glamorous are actually quite hideous yes in it and we enjoyed them week on week i guess i guess the difference would be matt that mad men

yes the underbelly they weren't shy of showing you the unpleasantness of it while at the same time as making it nice to look at at. I don't feel this is nice to look at in the same way. I think the reading experience is first more difficult. It doesn't slide down as easily. But grab them by the pussy kind of culture, you do feel that this is what that

kind of worldview, that Trumpian worldview is. But it shows the horror at the same time. It doesn't have a glamorous... I mean, you don't think of Bob Socombe as an attractive man. He describes himself as all his physical ailments, all the things he's going through. Yeah, you're constantly wondering how he can sleep with whoever he wants in the office, but he tells you that he can so confidently

that you believe him. Well, he says it's not going to last for much longer, doesn't he? He says his hair's going to grow soon, and he's not going to be able to keep functioning in this way which is not something you would have ever seen in in you might have seen it in the secondary characters in mad men but not in the in the male lead he's outwardly successful but his his inner life yeah yeah the stone passageways of his mind being inhabited by all these sort of strange it reminded me in some places of uh of uh beyond black you know that thing of being of ghosts you know the ghosts of the past inhabiting him.

And all the moaning, the wife and the husband moaning in his sleep and him not waking her up. You know, funnily enough, our former guest, Andrew Mayle, when I told him that we were doing Something Happened by Joseph Heller, he said, you know what, my feelings about something happened and beyond black almost exactly the same it's a masterpiece please don't make me read it again i would definitely read this again i think yes matt how many times have you read it do you know what i've read it endlessly as a in sort of 11 12 13 and it sort of went into my head And I didn't read it again till I reread it for this. And after our conversation, I just thought this is something that I would like to talk about.

And I remembered it all almost verbatim. It was there. I can remember which one pages. I mean, I don't know whether it's because I hadn't read much at that time and it sort of stayed there. But so I didn't, I felt as if I was very familiar with it. And did it, you think it influenced you as a writer? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, my second novel, Eight Minutes Idol, which was set in a call centre and is about office life. I mean, it's very different because it's a 20-something guy rather than a, you know, a middle-aged ad man. But the office politics was in there. And also just the rambling kind of thoughts, or hopefully not actually real rambling, but feeling like rambling and having that kind of flexibility. I mean, it wasn't something I even consciously thought about, but it just felt as if it had been stuck in my brain and then came out later on.

It's really interesting hearing that, because I read it when it came out at 8 Minutes Idle, and I can see all the connections. I can see how you would have been influenced by it now and did you you hadn't read this one before did you it's a hard thing to say but do you did you have preconceptions about it do you know much about it no i didn't know anything about this so i had a lot of preconceptions about catch 22 when i read it in the speed reading way and i wasn't really affected by it i just wanted to know as I say what the fuss was about and I couldn't really I could see the format was inventive and I could see this idea of point of view that was going around was very interesting in Catch-22 and with this I just read it much more

as a novel we were talking earlier about whether you see it as a documentary of the time and I accepted a lot more than maybe many of you did when I read it I accepted it as a documentary of the time. And I accepted a lot more than maybe many of you did when I read it. I accepted it as a document in the way that you accept Mad Men as a document of what was going on in the office and the way the secretaries were reliant on what was happening with their bosses and not happy about it, consent, race, all those things. I read it with a kind of sense of this is what it was like, you know, this is a documentary.

So it's interesting to hear Heller talking about how he's created this crazy, unsavoury character. I know that we all accept that it's not a particularly savoury character. Vonnegut says about this book and Catch-22 taken together, Mr Heller's two novels, when considered in sequence, might be taken as a similar statement about an entire white middle-class generation of American males. My generation, Mr Heller's generation,

Herman Wook's generation, Norman Mailer's generation, Owen Shaw's generation, and so on. So I think that idea of... I think that is a kind of... the malaise, the condition that he's trying to pin down. So we have to stop in a minute. I was kind of interested, but I never think of Heller in the same bracket as Bellow, Updike, Roth. You know, those are the literary New York American male titans,

in a sense, having read Something Happened, I can't understand why you would not put Heller in. Well, it's really interesting because when Heller died, Updike said something like he wasn't in the first order of American writers and he wasn't particularly that great. And you could see he was very much deliberately separating him from them. And I think that's because some of the later books that hella wrote weren't as good but i did want to say it's interesting that you know if you read up dyke or bellow or roth the kind of things that are being spoken about in this novel sort of satirically and you know critically

even though it's coming from a character you know you're not always aware that he's doing that these sort of things are presented without apology in up dyke and roth and character, you know, you're not always aware that he's doing that. These sort of things are presented without apology in Updike and Rothenbellow. Exactly, yeah. When they're talking about the woman that they wanted to sleep with when they were younger, it didn't happen, you're supposed to think, oh, God, you know, and totally identify with them.

You're not supposed to have that with Slocum. That's interesting you say that, because there's this remarkable ring of self-conscious irony and self-awareness whenever those things take place in this book, I think. And yeah, you could say it's not dissimilar from a Philip Roth novel. And there's a lot of self-loathing in Philip Roth for thinking that way or being that way. I mean, his character is him, however you're going to separate it. But in this right from the start, right from the bit that you read from that page, you've got that self-awareness as a sort of

elastic band around the event that's being described. It you've got that self-awareness as a sort of elastic band around the event that's being described it's always there i think whenever he thinks about how he does he's not attracted to his wife or how he wants to kill his son those kinds of things he wants to kill all of them he's always there isn't it he's always presenting my wife isn't happy my daughter is unhappy but you know he's not an academic. He's not a writer. He's not any of the things that Updike and Rob's characters, Bella's are.

He's an admin. No, sorry, not an admin. He's an insurance salesman. Yeah. We're going to take two votes very quickly, right? The first vote is, just for the hell of it, there are five of us gathered around this table. Which novel do you prefer, Catch-22 or Something Happened?

Raise your hand for Catch-22. Raise your hand for Something Happened. Unanimously carried by Something Happened. Okay, my second thing we're going to vote on. Would you recommend our listeners read Something Happened by Joseph Heller? Yes. Raise your hand. It's not working for radio, this. I think that's another unanimous.

It's another unanimous, yes. We've talked a lot on this particular episode about how challenging this book is, but hopefully from what we've talked about, you've also heard we've laughed a lot and it's given us a lot to think about. And I think this is a magnificent book. It made me so unhappy while I was reading it

and I can't wait to read it again. It turned realised. I agree, I agree. And I think there's so much to unpack there. I will definitely go back. I think it dwarfs a lot of the novels by those other writers, I have to say. I would say it's worth sticking to

till you get to the end because that actually transforms the book in some way. We can't talk too much about the ending because that actually transforms yes the book in some way you know we we can't talk too much about the ending because it gives a lot of it away but it does i mean i am loving i am loving vintage trying really hard to make it on their cover a little bit more the years were too short the days were too long and then dot dot dot something happened a marvelously funny sad wise rewarding book i mean it is all of those, something does happen. A marvellously funny, sad, wise, rewarding book. I mean, it is all of those things.

Something does happen, though. It's important for listeners to know that. You might read it for 400 pages and think nothing's happened. But this time when I read it again, I had a totally different feeling about the ending than I did when I read it before. I think it can be read in lots of ways. I think that's true, but I think what it does

is you realise that he's engaged in something much more than you thought he was. We're at the end now and something is about to happen. Well, as Bob Slocum might say, it's time for us to move on. I don't want to move on. So we've got this episode's Unbound Project worth backing is hashtag sonnets, beautifully designed sequence of 155 Shakespearean sonnets, amusing Shakespearean

sonnets on subjects such as Kim Kardashian, Tinder and Pikachu by the comedian Lucian Young. I was particularly drawn to sonnet number 14, entitled Walter White. Oh Heisenberg, did not that shaven head contain the thought that thy wicked deeds could scar thee? Thou shouldst have taught thy chemistry instead of cooking crystal in some antique RV. It's a nice rhyme. It's a good rhyme.

As ever, if you pledge for it or any of the other 364 Unbound projects currently live on the site, you backlisted listeners will get free postage on that pledge by entering the special code HELLER as check out that's h-e-l-l-e-r thank you to matt thank you thank you to keith nikita thank you thank you to our producer nikki birch to unbound and to our colorful fragrant sponsor bloom and wild you can get in touch with us on twitter at backlisted pod on facebook backlisted podcast and our unbounds online magazine bound list unbound.com forward slash bound list also if you felt like rating us on itunes five stars or fewer we'd be really pleased and i'm going to add at this point we're tantalisingly close to a highly significant star rating. Please, Mum, if you did listen to this one, thank you.

This isn't the one for your mum to listen to. No, that's not. I don't want to get home. No. Well, thanks for listening. I'm apologising to my father for laughing. He thinks we laugh too much in this podcast. I wasn't expecting to laugh in this particular one.

We'll be back in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. There are five people around this table. I am afraid of four of them. There should be five of them. Yeah. Oh, brilliant. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.