Review: Closing Time by Joseph Heller (1994)

Heller's first novel, Catch-22 (1961), is easily one of my favorite books of all time, so the existence of a sequel was both exciting and worrisome.  Closing Time, written more than thirty years after its predecessor, features an elderly Yossarian, who has survived the war, gone on to start a family and, eventually, work as the conscience of M & M enterprises, a major conglomerate run by Milo Minderbinder and ex-Private Wintergreen.  The life of Yossarian and his companions make up about half the volume of the novel, the other half is written as a first person account of two other WWII vets, Sammy Singer and Lew Rabinowitz, working class Jews from Coney Island who moved up after the war.  Their stories are much more grounded than Yossarian's, whose life gets crazy again when Chaplain Tappman finds him. (Tappman, it turns out, has started naturally passing heavy water, a nuclear compound.) Sammy and Lew are tangentially connected to Yossarian, and to be honest, I preferred their sections to those centered on the Catch-22 characters.  The best word I can use to describe Yossarian in 1994 is 'weary.'  He's an old man now; a virile, sardonic old man, but an old man nonetheless.

This is a book about anti-climax, about Heller's generation, the young men who went to war, saw and endured great and terrible things, then came back to a country that was economically booming and with the benefit of the G.I. bill, many of whom grew up poor then made good, raised families, and were now starting to die of old age.  In Catch-22, death was cataclysmic and unexpected, in Closing Time it's a slow, inevitable wasting away.  The problem with the Yossarian segments is that they are often incomplete attempts to recapture the Yossarian of Catch-22. At one point, he paraphrases Camus to his son, saying that the only freedom we truly have is the freedom to say 'no.'  But this Yossarian isn't the kind that would refuse a medal by appearing to the pinning ceremony naked; this Yossarian says no, then does it anyway.  While I can appreciate the contrast between the Singer/Rabinowitz sections, showing how vast a gulf separates the lives of these men from the defense contractors and politicians and billionaires Yossarian deals with, it harms the Yossarian sections.  Yossarian away from the war is like Ahab away from the sea.

There are a couple other aspects of the novel that need mentioning.  The structure seemed very messy, especially compared to Catch-22, which is meticulously organized, whereas Closing Time meanders.  There's also a strange supernatural element to this novel, that I'm still not sure how I feel about.  It most reminds me of the heaven scenes in Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970).

But while it has many faults, Closing Time is worth reading.  Heller is one of those authors cursed with a debut novel that was not only a masterpiece, but a commercial success.  Unlike, say, William Golding, whose first novel (The Lord of the Flies) is certainly his most famous, but went on to win a Nobel, Heller never managed to recapture the success of Catch-22.  And Yossarian in Closing Time has had to come to terms with the limits of his success, the realization that there isn't much more he can accomplish.  Yossarian frequently talks about author William Saroyan, regretting obscurity falling on the man's life and works, and it is all too easy to see in these passages Heller's struggles with his own legacy. Too often Yossarian et. al. seem like wraiths of their former selves, but, as unpleasant as it is to see our literary heroes withered, that may very well be the point.   Despite how the novel ends, this is a book about old age and the inevitable anti-climax that entails.

1961: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

The Author:

Irving Stone (1903-1989) was born Irving Tannenbaum, but later adopted his step-father's last name.    A San Francisco native, Stone attended UC Berkeley where he studied political science and economy.  He received his BA in 1923, and attending graduate courses at Berkeley and USC in Los Angeles until 1926.  In 1933, he published his first novel, Pageant of Youth, about life at college in California.  The novel did not succeed commercially, and even Stone later declared it to be of poor quality.  A year later, with the help of editor Jean Factor (soon to be Mrs. Jean Stone) he published Lust for Life, a 'biographical novel' about Van Gogh which quickly became a bestseller.
 
Stone was known for extreme research on his subjects, going so far as to live in Van Gogh's asylum cell.  He worked within the biographical novel genre for most of his career, writing novels on, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Jessie Fremont, Andrew Jackson, and Sigmund Freud, among many others.  He published 24 books of fiction and non-fiction, in addition to editing several more. He died of heart failure in 1989.

The Book:

Length: 755 pages
Subject/Genre: Michelangelo/ Biographical Novel

People who know nothing about art know Michelangelo.   They know his paintings:

The Creation of Adam

They know his sculpture:

David

They know his architecture:

St. Peter's Basilica

So how do you tackle the life of one of the greatest artist's in history?  Well, The Agony and the Ecstasy is extremely well-researched.  Stone went so far as to have all of Michelangelo's surviving letters translated into English, besides living in Italy and immersing himself in Michelangelo's world.  

The novel follows Michelangelo from his early adolescence, a son of the nearly destitute, once noble Florentine, Buonarroti family, as he decides to defy his father and become an artist.  From there, we have his life story: his training, the patronage of the Medici's, his conflict with the Pope. 

The novel's greatest strength is also its greatest flaw.  Stone provides a huge amount of information, which is frequently overwhelming.  When trying to blend the conventions of the biography and the novel, he frequently swings too far on the biography side, providing information that would be interesting and useful for a non-fiction (e.g. details about the fashions and foods of the day, long passages of Florentine history, etc.) but turn into clunky dead-ends in a work of fiction.  I would be remiss if I didn't mention a point that is brought up by critics of this book, that it overlooks Michelangelo's sexuality.  There are numerous extant love poems and letters written by Michelangelo to other men.  While I feel this is alluded to in the novel, it's kept completely tucked away between the lines.     

Stone gives us a vision of Michelangelo as a man with a very clear ambition from the start, to be a great sculptor, but whose life and work are incredibly complex.  Even with any omissions about Michelangelo's personal life, we have a very dense and well documented work.  This is the only novel I've ever read to include a works cited bibliography, which in this case spans ten pages.  A question many have asked is, if there is so much research, why write a novel instead of a biography.  Stone answered this question himself, saying: "I know from experience that biographies have a limited audience. We have thousands of readers who love [the biographical novel] and are thrilled by it, who'd never get near a conventional biography."

Like other of Stone's popular novels, The Agony and the Ecstasy was adapted for the screen.

The 1965 film version starred Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

The question I ask myself when giving recommendations is "who is this book for?"  If you are an avid history/art buff, you'd probably be better off with a biography than a biographical novel.  If you are interested in the subject, but don't have the background in it, The Agony and the Ecstasy would be a good choice.

Best Sellers of 1961:

1. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

2. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger    

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

4. Mila 18 by Leon Uris

5. The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins

6. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

7. Winnie Ille Pu by Alexander Lenard (a Latin translation of Milne's Winnie the Pooh)

8. Daughter of Silence by Morris West

9. The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor

10. Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

Also Published in 1961:

Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones (first translated in English)    

Roald Dahl - James and the Giant Peach  

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Joseph Heller - Catch-22

Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth  

Stanislaw Lem - Solaris

Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road

Sources:

Stone, Irving. The Agony and the Ecstasy. 1961. New York: Signet Books, 1963. Print.

"Irving Stone." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. Web.

"Irving Stone, Author of 'Lust for Life,' Dies at 86." New York Times. Web.