Something Happened by Joseph Heller

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Psychological melodrama

Time of work: The late 1960’s or early 1970’s

Locale: New York City and a Connecticut suburb

Principal Characters:

• Robert (Bob) Slocum, the protagonist, a middle-level executive with a large company
• His wife, a housewife who drinks throughout the day
• His daughter, an unhappy fifteen-year-old
• His son, an unhappy nine-year-old
• Derek, his brain-damaged third child

The Novel

Bob Slocum is a character who uses dreams and memories, which make up a substantial portion of the novel, as part of his ongoing struggle to determine the key event, the “something” that “happened” to him, to cause him to be the man he is. Very early in the book, he thinks, “Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur. I dislike anything unexpected.” Because life is unpredictable and the unexpected happens daily, Slocum has come to dislike his life, but because death and change are also unpredictable and unexpected, even those alternatives provide no hopeful option for him.

Bob Slocum is a character suffering what pop psychologists would call a midlife crisis. The outer circumstances of his life change very little during the first three-fourths of the novel, but within his mind he contemplates changes in almost every area. He considers divorce. He contemplates how a proposed promotion might affect his life. He tries to face the necessity of institutionalizing his retarded child. Through dreams and memory, he even tries to re-create the happy and sad experiences of his growing-up years in search of a security that he feels he once had but which is now missing. He becomes particularly obsessed with the memory of a girl he knew when he was seventeen and working part-time for an insurance company. After many years of knowing that the girl, Virginia Markowitz, committed suicide while he was in the army, Slocum still clings to the hope represented by their innocent and unconsummated passion for each other.

Slocum’s exploration of his life is, in part, a struggle to establish a valid point of view from which to make the decisions he faces. At one point he asks himself, “Where is a frame of reference now for any of us that extends even the distance to the horizon, only eighteen miles away?” Although Slocum understands other people fairly well, he cannot translate that understanding and perception into actions or relationships. He remains trapped within his own mind, which he imagines oozing excess matter and ready to explode.

The relationship between Slocum and his wife is neither happy nor unhappy. He says that he has always wanted a divorce, even before he met his wife and married her. Yet he has not. He is regularly unfaithful with both whores and women he meets at work and at parties, but it is his wife who is his most satisfying sexual partner. He must sometimes use her as a fantasy figure in order to be fully aroused with others. He is terrified by the possibility that she might be unfaithful to him. Finally, her main failure seems to be her inability to make Slocum feel the same absolute and total security he remembers from very early childhood. He is somewhat annoyed by her drinking habits, but only when they cause her to embarrass him at parties or to be too assertive in the home. Their relationship is essentially unchanged over the course of the novel.

Slocum resents his daughter’s sullen, aggressive personality and her sexual maturity, from which she refuses to shield him by dressing in ways to obscure it. He feels compelled to best her in arguments and battles of wit, even as he realizes that besting one’s fifteen-year-old child is no real victory. He feels enormous rage and anger at the thought that some male might seduce her, and he wants to protect her from her own unhappiness and all the world’s dangers. Yet he also wants to be her superior; thus, he fails to develop any relationship beyond the hostility that he initially sets out to comprehend and control.

It is the nine-year-old son whom he calls his “boy” that Slocum says he loves more than anything in the world. The most positive actions in the novel are made in the boy’s behalf. Slocum intervenes to spare his son the macho wrath of a physical education instructor. He tries to persuade the boy not to give away his money, pennies and nickels mostly, but takes secret pride in his spontaneous and generous nature. Perhaps the most terrible alienation Slocum feels, in a novel entirely about his alienation, is the feeling of isolation from this boy, who suddenly takes to spending all his hours at home behind a closed bedroom door, exactly like his surly sister. The novel’s climax, which comes very late, occurs when the boy is injured by a runaway vehicle in a shopping plaza. Slocum, anxious to help him, holds the child so tightly to his chest in an effort to comfort him that the boy dies of asphyxiation.

The third child, Derek, is never actually present in the novel’s action, but his offstage presence is overwhelming. For both Slocum and his wife, Derek’s birth seems to be a turning point, the place where life’s hopes and possibilities are irrevocably diminished. Although both know that they must eventually send the child away, they cannot, even by the novel’s end, bring themselves to do so.

Woven through what is essentially a static story about upper-middle-class family life are scenes at the vaguely defined company where Slocum works. His promotion, at the expense of a man who trusted and confided in him, coincides with his son’s death, making the climax of these secondary plots part of the larger family story. For Slocum, the world of the office is as disillusioning and frustrating as is the world of the family. When the romantic notions of his recollected youth collide with the hardened cynicism of his middle age, his emotions lead him to conclude that his personal inadequacies are the cause of his failures: “I am guilty. . . . I am numb with shame. I feel so helpless and uncertain.”

The Characters

Bob Slocum reveals himself and all the other characters in the novel through his own tormented consciousness, a tricky decision on Heller’s part because Slocum is essentially unlikable, especially with regard to his perceptions of others. Thus, the novel is filled with characters in whom the reader can find little to admire.

Despite his apparent distaste for the flux of human experience, Slocum is an acute and perceptive observer of those around him, even when he tries to ignore their presence, as he does with Derek, his wife, his daughter, his coworkers, his lovers, and almost everyone whom he encounters at some point in his relationships with them. These observations give the reader an understanding of the book’s other characters—an understanding, however, that is obviously limited and erroneous, the product of what Slocum himself recognizes as a flawed perspective.

Slocum is an insecure and frightened man, perhaps on the verge of a breakdown but ironically also on the verge of his greatest professional success. The reader comes to know of the deep-seated nature of his irrational fears and emotions through Slocum’s own thought process. He analyzes his dreams, his memories, and his past and present experiences in a frank, sometimes brutally honest way. His ego appears to be all-absorbing and all-consuming. Even when his speculation and self-analysis lead him almost to acknowledge that other characters might deserve his (and the reader’s) sympathy and compassion, he cannot, ultimately, stay outside his own overwhelming need long enough to give the others what he knows they deserve: “Whenever I feel sorry for someone, I find that I also feel sorry for myself.”

The minute detail that characterizes Slocum’s observations of all the other characters in the novel suggests that he is, in addition to his other qualities, sensitive in a way that his behavior belies. He knows from the merest body stance, the subtlest facial expression, how his wife and his children, except Derek, feel, and he knows that Derek cannot feel. One of the many ironies of his character, however, is his inability to turn sensitive observation into equally sensitive behavior, a failure which makes his existence more tortured than it would be were he not so acutely aware of others around him. At times, Slocum longs for the insensible world he believes his idiot son to inhabit, for without feeling, there is no pain.

Because Slocum is a first-person narrator, and because he chooses not to reveal the names of three of the members of his family, preferring instead to identify them in terms of their relationship to him, the reader can assume that they are being revealed only as they relate to him. The reader never sees his wife or his daughter engaged in any activity outside the home. Slocum does narrate several incidents that involve his older son, the one of whom he is particularly fond, in a way that generates sympathy and compassion for the boy. In one scene, the child is being harassed by playground bullies while Slocum watches from a distance. The reader sees that the boy is passive and afraid, qualities that mesh precisely with his father’s sense of his character. Yet these more objective scenes do not really increase the reader’s trust in Slocum as a narrator and a judge of character because this is the one character of whom he is entirely fond.

All three of the unnamed family members are afraid of Slocum—they frequently accuse him of “yelling,” behavior which he sees as emphasizing his point. Yet all three are apparently desperate to receive his attention and affection. The total inability to love or acknowledge Derek, coupled with the overwhelming guilt he feels about this inability, seems only a more extreme version of the way Slocum feels about the entire family, and perhaps about all others. The reader is left only with a very strong sense of what sort of people Slocum perceives his family to be; there is no way to know what kind of people they really are.

In many ways, the minor characters are more fully realized in traditional terms than are the members of Slocum’s family, in part because these minor characters do not so currently and directly impinge upon his consciousness. With characters such as Virginia Markowitz and even his mother, Slocum seems better able to hold simultaneous visions of what he wanted them to be and what he now, with disappointment and cynicism, perceives them to be. Thus, the innocent voluptuousness of Virginia’s body is not destroyed by his older, wiser sense of her psychological problems. The mother whose last words stick in his mind as a complete dismissal of his worth is also the woman who provided the only real security and love he has ever felt, the woman who sent out for ice cream on hot summer nights. With his own present family, Slocum is apparently incapable of such dualities.

The men and women with whom he now works and the women with whom he has affairs are much more stereotypical than the novel’s other characters. The men at his office tend to be named for colors: Green, Black, Brown, and White, one indication of their being types. All of them seem to be unhappy and competitive, modern-day Babbitts, relentlessly and sometimes ruthlessly pursuing things they no longer want for reasons they themselves could neither state nor respect, if they paused for reflection. It is their apparent lack of self-analysis that separates them from Slocum. Some of his coworkers, such as Andy Kagle, turn to Slocum, asking him to analyze their lives, but Slocum does so only as it pleases him at the moment. No one can ever trust his motives or his answers—it is Andy Kagle’s job that he gets at the novel’s end.

Critical Context

Something Happened, Heller’s second novel, was published thirteen years after Catch-22 (1961), his most famous novel and the one on which his reputation most securely rests. In Catch-22, the military and war are the objects of Heller’s satire. The worldview in Something Happened is not so different from that in the earlier novel, but the shift from the military setting to a domestic and corporate world somehow seems to remove the playfulness and comedy from the vision. Perhaps the reason that the situation in Something Happened produces less comic satire than is found in Catch-22 is that military service can never be permanent in the same way that family life and a chosen career can.

In Good as Gold (1979), Heller turns his satire to the political world, and some of the comic flair evident in Catch-22 returns. His fourth novel, God Knows (1984), looks at the religious world with the same basic vision that pervades the previous work. Heller has also written a play, We Bombed in New Haven (1967). Something Happened remains the darkest and bleakest of his books, as well as the longest and most labored.

Bibliography

Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Craig analyzes the form and structure of Heller’s novels and includes a discussion on Something Happened.

DelFattore, Joan. “The Dark Stranger in Heller’s Something Happened.” In Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, edited by James Nagel. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. DelFattore explores Heller’s treatment of the stranger in Something Happened.

Heller, Joseph. “An Interview with Joseph Heller.” Interview by Charlie Reilly. Contemporary Literature 39 (Winter, 1998): 507-508. Heller discusses several of his books including Something Happened. The interviewer also comments on the detached voice of the first-person narrator of the novel.

Keegan, Brenda M. Joseph Heller: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. A comprehensive bibliography of criticism on Heller and his works.

Mellard, James M. “Something Happened: The Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Discourse of the Family.” In Critical Essays on Joseph Heller, edited by James Nagel. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Mellard details the narrative structure, symbolism and applies psychoanalytic approaches to the novel.

Merrill, Robert. Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Merrill provides a critical and interpretive study of Heller, with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. An extensive critical and interpretive study of Heller’s novels. Useful for an overview of Heller’s works.