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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Something Happened
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $10.20
Your Save: $ 4.80 ( 32% )
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780684841212
ISBN: 0684841215
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 1997-11-12
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Editorial Reviews:
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Bob Slocum was living the American dream. He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house...and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all -- all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until...something happened. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain -- recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Your Patience Will Be Rewarded
Comment: Sometimes, this book is a pain. It does not have a strong, linear plot. It uses lots of parenthetical thoughts (some of them pages long). You may find it hard to read on occasion.
And yet, it is a joy. Something Happened superbly captures affluent suburban America of the sixties and the corporate culture that made it possible. Many of the features Heller describes inside main character Bob Slocum's company still ring true today. Many an honest male reader will recognize elements of the often unlikable Slocum in himself.
I'm glad that I hung in there with Something Happened. Give this book a chance and you may be, too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard work but very much worth it
Comment: People have compared this book to _Catcher in the Rye_, and I think that's fair not only because the main character seems to be in the process of falling of the cliff of Holden's fantasy, but also because when people try to talk about this book they end up describing themselves.
This book is a lot of work to read. I spent three months on it and enjoyed every minute. I actually delayed finishing it out of mingled reluctance to let it go and worry about what the ending would be.
It feels very Freudian. It's repetitive and long, so you should be prepared for that. Also, if you dislike books without a traditional plot arc, you may not get anything out of it. The message of it -- the feeling you get when you look at yourself with horror and wonder, "why am I like this??" can be found elsewhere ("American Beauty" for example). However, I give this book the highest possible recommendation. What it does, it does better than any movie or book I've ever seen. If you can read it, you should. You can't believe how rich our culture is within the apparent cultural vacuum of professional and social success.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Something Happened. . . but just took long to happen
Comment: You're hard pressed to find a bigger Heller fan than me, but this was Heller's weakest effort. The book was just way too long. Something Happened could have achieved the same thing with half as many pages. The problem isn't really the length of the book but the redundancy of the content. Heller achieves a very affective description of Bob Slocum's existence and the drudgery and competition that is found in middle management corporate America rather early on in the book, but then he drags the pages out painfully for hundreds of more pages.
Also the use of parenthesis throughout the book becomes confusing when he goes for a full page in the parenthesis and then goes back to normal. I found myself losing the original thread so many times that the book lost any semblance of continuity very early on. This practice was extremely disruptive to my reading and caused much of my disappointment with this work.
The flow of the book was terrible which only emphasizes the fact that the book is much too long. The something that does eventually happen falls way short of redeeming this gawky, poorly constructed novel. Though I might have fallen asleep during a few pages, I did sludge my way through every last page of this book which is an achievement comparable to climbing a mountain in and of itself.
Heller has so many very good books out there that this one can and should be skipped for the really good ones.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Chilling, funny investigation into the rotting underside of the human psyche
Comment: Joseph Heller's "Something Happened" is more than just a brilliant stylistic exercise, or a period piece portraying the social mores of the 1970s. It is nothing less than a deep and insightful novelized investigation into the human psyche, with a distinct Neo-Freudian bent.
A short synopsis with no spoilers: Bob Slocum is a middle-aged middle-management executive who's worked for his company for decades. He hates his job, dislikes his family, engages in extramarital affairs, longs for a past he knows is a fiction, and worries about his sanity.
Littered throughout "Something Happened" are textbook-perfect depictions of human phobia and neuroses. Bob Slocum feels that the things around him lack meaning, and his life itself is bereft as well. He is too intelligent to not recognize that the symbols of his society are arbitrary, but too weak to rebel against them and to inject meaning into his own life.
The book is told from a first-person monologue perspective, and is so deft and pitch-perfect that it feels like nothing less than inhabiting the character's mind. It is difficult not to empathize with the protagonist, and to feel your world view slowly but surely morph into his. This is a book that stays with you, and is difficult to shake when you're finished.
A wonderful non-fiction companion piece for this book is "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker. In this book, Becker discusses the singular existential problems of humanity from a psychological perspective: we are creatures with symbolic-analytic brains capable of thinking with vast complexity; but that brain is tethered to a sweating, defecating meat-sack which decays and dies. We are part angel and part animal - and unlike the lower animals, we know we're going to die. This pervasive fear and foreboding of death plays itself out in all our myriad fetishes, fears, prejudices, and societal exercises.
This is not a book for everyone. Its perspective is unremittingly bleak, and the first-person stream of consciousness narrative is not for those who like action-packed Dan Brown-type escapades (not that there's anything wrong with that). If you are a reader who enjoys black humor and psychological complexity, you may well be mesmerized. I could not put this book down, myself.
Highly recommended. Not for the faint of heart of the short of attention span.
Customer Rating:
Summary: worth the read
Comment: Heller's novel is indeed a bit plodding compared to some of his other work. but the central story line is an important one. We see inside the mind of the man caught up in corporate America, with his completely unsatisfying family life and purposeless competition at work. Instead of "something happened," I might have titled this book "What the hell happened?" The theme of unrealized expectations rings through prominently, leaving the reader realizing that the protagonist of the story probably can't wait to just be done with it all, with death as the only real way out.
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