Yossarian Lives -- Heller Catches Up With `Catch-22'

"Closing Time" by Joseph Heller Simon & Schuster, $24 -----------------------------------------------------------------

At one point in Joseph Heller's new novel, one character asks another:

"Could God possibly make a mistake?"

"If God can do anything," comes the reply, "he can make a mistake."

Another character, this one named Noodles Cook, becomes an adviser to a president of the United States who is never named but who bears close resemblance to Dan Quayle. Cook decides to join the presidential staff after thinking: "If I'm going to be trivial, inconsequential, and deceitful, then I might as well be in government."

This is unmistakably Heller country, as defined 33 years ago in "Catch-22," his first novel, to which "Closing Time," his sixth, is a sequel. "Catch-22" was a publishing as well as literary phenomenon, a serious, groundbreaking book that split critics into adoring and warring camps and that to date has sold more then 10 million copies.

It tells the story of an Army-Air Corps unit in the Mediterranean during World War II. Its protagonist, bombardier John Yossarian, eventually figures out that people he doesn't know, namely enemy soldiers, are trying to kill him. He decides he doesn't much like that idea because he doesn't want to die. The Army construes this as insanity.

What if everybody felt that way, Yossarian is eventually asked.

Then I'd be a damned fool to feel otherwise, he says. Yossarian simply wanted to stay alive.

Similar themes

The question, of course, is why would anyone attempt a sequel to a book like "Catch-22"? Its incredible success could hardly be matched, and the book's nature argued against anyone ever trying. It had no plot to speak of that the author could resume. Even Heller has joked about the fractured narrative. Most of its characters were caricatures, cleverly constructed but hardly beloved.

What the book had was a powerful vision of what a difficult place the world is - and an irrepressible desire to rail against it. In its way, "Catch-22" and its characters looked forward; "Closing Time," and its characters, look back.

Some things haven't changed. In the new book, Yossarian is fond of saying he wants to live forever, or die trying. Once again, though, people are dropping like flies all around him. Most of the characters in "Closing Time" are members of Yossarian's WWII generation, and many of them are dying the less-dramatic but bewildering variety of deaths associated with growing old.

Heller, in a preface to a new hard-cover edition of "Catch-22" (Simon & Schuster, $25) brought out as a companion to "Closing Time," recounts that after the first novel was published, NBC newsman John Chancellor had printed thousands of bumper strips saying: Yossarian Lives.

He still does. "Sooner or later," Heller writes, "I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away, too. But it won't be by my hand."

"Closing Time" opens, as did "Catch-22," with Yossarian hospitalized without apparent ailment. He is afraid of being well because it means he can only get worse. He is, he is told, a prime candidate for late-life depression because he's too old for any other kind.

A few other characters from "Catch-22" also return. Noodles Cook, to no one's surprise, turns out to be a friend of Milo Minderbinder, who has risen from deceitful junior officer to deceitful billionaire, along with his major-domo, ex-Pfc. Wintergreen, who, you'll remember, was an ex-Pfc. well before the war ended. Chaplain Albert Tappman also is back; he is regarded as a national security risk because his body is manufacturing heavy water.

But most of the characters are new. They include an oncologist who has come to believe the cancer cell is a Darwinian improvement over the weaker cells it hunts down and kills. He checks himself into the psychiatric ward of his own hospital to think about it, but continues to practice in the meantime. There is a detective who uses the Freedom of Information Act to find out everything about everybody.

And there is Milo's chief competitor, Harold Strangelove, an influence peddler who makes no bones about it. His business card advertises "Bombast on Demand" and "Secondhand Influence Bought and Sold." There are underground rivers where people live forever, until they find out that not even damnation is eternal.

Plain-spoken characters

None of this stuff is new to Heller. The corruption of government, the absurdity of living and the inevitability of dying were at the heart of "Catch-22."

What is new here are the stories of Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, two old friends whose first-person narratives are decidedly ordinary and simply told. Singer was the tail gunner on Yossarian's flight crew; Rabinowitz was an infantryman captured (along with a young soldier named Kurt Vonnegut) during the Battle of the Bulge.

They are both at the end of successful careers. Singer, like Heller, worked in the advertising department of Time magazine and Rabinowitz built a fortune out of junk.

Over the course of "Closing Time," the plain-spoken Singer and Rabinowitz take on an emotional heft that the cleverness and conceits of "Catch-22" obscured. That novel's lasting achievement was not its portrayal of war, but its prediction of the post-war rise of the corporate and governmental bureaucracies in which individuals are lost and no one is responsible for anything.

"Closing Time's" achievement is less grandiose, but no less grand. It invests the lives and deaths of its awkward and plainer people with grace and nobility.