Closing Time
by Joseph Heller
Scribner, £7.99, pp. 464 ISBN 0743239806
Fortune granted Joseph Heller’s generation, raised during the Depression, not only service in a war whose good intentions were universally applauded but, once in uniform, a standard of living previously unknown to a boy like Heller himself, brought up on Coney Island in a modestly poor immigrant family. Thank you, Hitler and Mussolini. ‘For war there is always enough,’ Heller’s father says. ‘It’s peace that’s too expensive.’ Many young men did not return, but the survivors enjoying the GI Bill of Rights and entry into college felt no guilt about Dresden or Hiroshima — that kind of pain did not inflict itself until Vietnam 20 years later, when their kids led the rebellion. The satirical novel which made Heller famous, Catch-22, published in 1961, a tribute to absurdity as a force for sanity, was written towards the end of that age of innocence.
Catch as Catch Can is a collection of early short stories and other pieces, many of them written during the decade after Heller’s return from service with the Air Corps in Corsica.
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