Something Happened by Joseph Heller

If you give a book a title such as Something Happened, you better bloody well expect critical reviewers to pounce on the obvious rejoinder. Yes of course, you were expecting it, and it's been said before, but indeed: nothing happened.

If you think about it though, nothing happened in Catch-22 either, but that was okay somehow. The rest of that book made the lack of actual action forgivable. This book doesn't have the luxury of being innovative or good to fall back on. Which is a shame, poor Joseph Heller, never coming close to the success of his famous first novel for the rest of his life. That happens.

There are a lot of parentheses in Something Happened, be warned. I think if you counted words that you would find that about a third of them in this novel came between parentheses. There was one parenthetical aside that lasted for seven pages. At first I thought it was a typographical error, missing the closing bracket; but then i kept looking, and there it was, seven pages later. Nasty. Now that I think about it, it's kind of ironic that the music I am listening to now is Sigur Rós' "()" album, which is often pronounced "Parentheses."

On a completely unrelated note, I've named my fantasy hockey team The Howling Fantods. I have Crosby, Stillman and Nash. Although Nash is injured and useless, as are Yzerman and Tkachuk, who are also on my team. But they're old, and injuries are expected; Nash has no excuse. And now Curtis Joseph is out for a while, leaving me with only one goalie, Khabibulin, and I don't think he's won a game yet. If it wasn't for Crosby, Miroslav Satan, and Eric Lindros, I'd really be in the toilet.

Back to Something Happened though. I have a calendar from Half Price Books. There are coupons in the back of it. And in the calendar itself, for each day it lists famous/literary persons whose birthday is/was on that day. For example, today it shows the birthdays of Charles Gordone (1927) and George W. Cable (1844). I don't know who either of those fellows are/were. Usually authors are listed, but sometime musicians and actors are there too. The point about the calendar though is that the monthly picture is a different illustration by a different artist, depicting some scene from some book, and it never says what book or what author or anything. It has a sentence of text that the scene is a depiction of. I've never recognized any of the pictures/scenes/sentences. Last month it had something to do with Sam Spade, so I gathered that the quoted sentence was from Dashiell Hammett, but I didn't know exactly which book it was from. Still don't.

But this month the sentence was "I get the willies when I see closed doors." The illustration is a concerned-looking man near some closed doors, done in creepy blues and greys. It's the opening line of Something Happened, which I was thrilled to recognize right away. Weird coincidence that it should happen to be from the book I was reading right then.

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