Something Happened

Blurb Pages:

BESTSELLER! BOOK OF THE YEAR! NOVEL OF THE DECADE!

Something Happened

tells the story of:

Bob Slocum, inching his way up the slippery pole to success, with all the money he needs, all the women he wants — yet longing for the one girl who has eluded him, and the life he has not lived.

* His wife, who has learned to settle for sex instead of love, and is an eager apprentice at the art of infidelity.

* His teen-age daughter, who is into doing her own thing on the far-out side of the generation gap.

* His son, who stubbornly refuses to learn to compete in the all-American way.

* His other son, whom nobody wants to talk about.

How Joseph Heller tells their story, and the shocking surprises he has in store, demonstrate once again his power in driving home human truths in a way that entertains even as it exposes the agonies and absurdities of our time.

"Joseph Heller has discovered and possessed new territories of the imagination, and he has produced a major work of fiction, one that is as distinctive of its kind as Catch-22, but more ambitious and profound, a brilliant commentary on American life that must surely be considered as the most important novel in at least a decade!"

— John W. Aldridge in Saturday Review/World

"Endlessly fascinating. Maintains Heller in the first rank of American writers. The vision we get is one of chilling recognition. What is revealed is not really the hero at all, but ourselves. Me. You. Them."

— William Kennedy in The New Republic

"Catch-22 became the novel of the 60s. Now Heller has provided the novel of and from the 70s. In his first book Heller took on the military system. This time he's undoing the American Dream."

— Larry Swindell in the Philadelphia Inquirer

"Riveting. with a brilliant and exquisitely prepared-for shock ending that makes everything fall into place. you have to take it seriously!"

— Mary Ellin Barrett in Cosmopolitan

"It will be read and read and read!"

— Kirkus Reviews

"One approaches it with awe. It leads you on hypnotically. Where Catch-22 was about men and men, Something Happened is about men and women. Where the first book dealt with the war of societies, the second treats the war of the sexes. It's a whole new shuffle of the deck!"

— Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times

"It's an extraordinary revelation. enriched by some of the best dialogue written in English today."

— Don Rose in the Chicago Daily News

"Do you dare allow a book to bruise you like a kicked apple? If so, you will — no, you must — read Joseph Heller's Something Happened."

— Cincinnati Enquirer