WHY THERE ARE NO MORE JOSEPH HELLERS: They seem to be everywhere: articles on Joseph Heller and
Catch-22, that is. Now Walter Kirn is
giving his two cents. He seems to be a fan:
It was a peculiar sort of fame for a mocker of privileged
complacency, not cultish at all but handsome and expansive, a catered
affair with top-shelf liquor. Heller, unlike the Pynchons and the
Vonneguts with whom he was often grouped artistically, wrote
best-sellers, drew record-setting advances, and hauled in paperback
royalties galore, all at a time when America's reading public didn't
need Oprah to steer them toward serious literature. The notion that art
must keep its distance from commerce simply didn't compute for Heller.
His big-shot literary lineage went back to James Jones and other such
titans of wallet-fattening, shipped out by the vanload,
see-what-your-whole-office-is-talking-about prose. Heller belonged to
all of society, not just to the refined minority. To consider oneself
half-civilized, one had either to read him or pretend to.
Kirn seems to feel that Heller was one of a dying breed, perhaps even the last of his kind. Although I'd be lying if I said I'm not sceptical of this, it must be said that his critiques of authors like Roth and Franzen ought to be highlighted. I'm inclined to disagree on Wallace, though; he was a genius – not one of Heller's type, but in a class and style of his own.
As I
said, not a type we have with us, quite, anymore. Philip Roth, you say?
Too inward, too high-strung, too trapped in the gravity field of his
obsession. Jonathan Franzen? His exhaustive, itemized emotional
inventories of comfy but unfulfilled Midwestern types and his
virtue-fueled indictments of baddies such as corporate polluters are
controlled releases of steam, not savage, concerted do-or-die assaults.
And David Foster Wallace's lampoons, though verbally lavish, tended to
end up as tight, self-conscious spirals. They're engrossing but seldom
explosive.
I noted earlier that there has been a slew of articles in high-brow magazines as of late on Heller, mostly to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his magnum opus. See
here and
here for two of those articles.
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