Product Description

Bob Slocum is a promising executive and society demands that he should be happy. But his wife is a drunken flirt and his daughter wages her own cunning campaign against him. Slocum's soliloquy moves to a shocking climax as fate hands him a tragic focus for his despair.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124445 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Customer Reviews

A Highly Under-appreciated Work
It is easy to only judge this book against Catch-22, but can any book worthily be judged against Catch-22? Something Happened is quite simply a moving novel which delves deeper into the culture of twentieth century despair than any other. In years to come it will be appreciated as an even finer work than its predecessor. Someone on this page has commented that 'nothing happens' in the novel. Well, that's the joy of the book. Heller doesn't need to barrage us with action or incident, he lets his beautifully languid style guide to what has to be one of the most tragically depressing climaxes ever written, a climax which can only be fully appreciated against the background which Heller creates. This book simply must be read, and savoured. I envy those who are still to read it.

Funny in parts
Has the Heller humour and yes, something does happen. It is not a surprise and it did not make me suddenly appreciate what I had read before. I like his humour in the book but it is repetitive and I ended up rushing to the end to get the whole process over with.

I found the style hardest - he hates paragraphs and he loves using brackets. This is very difficult to read, for example a sentence may start

My daughter is unhappy (then he tells a long winded story, that he has already told 5 times previously, about a time he has been unhappy) because she is.

She is what? You have to flick back to remember what the start of the sentence is. The lack of breaks and the long chapters make this heavy going and can only encourage the reader to skim.

I would only recommend this for Heller fans (which I was). It will burst the bubble.

Excruciatingly good.
Yes, it's one guy ranting about his life, and his dreadful relationships with his wife, his daughter, his son, and his other son, and his work colleagues, and yes nothing happens (except that it does), but what is astonishing is the way in which he is able to maintain the interest, varying the ranting, contradicting himself, illuminating the terrors of family life afresh on every page.
What happens? If you were skimming it, you'd miss it, and I think some of the reviewers here did just that. Just two paragraphs very close to the end, the content of the first shockingly, unbearably sad, the content of the second making the first explode with a grim tragedy (I missed this before I reread it a few hours later).

I read Catch 22 years ago, and enjoyed it, but it was nowhere near as technically skilled as this.

But not one to read if you're feeling a bit low.