The trouble with writing a truly great first novel — as Walker Percy, Alan Paton and both Charlotte and Emily Bronte, among others, could all attest — is that you spend the rest of your career trying to live up to it. Joseph Heller, who followed “Catch-22” with a handful of ambitious but less celebrated novels, developed a clever response to what must have been an exceedingly annoying question: “How come you’ve never written a book as good as ‘Catch-22’?” His parry: “Who has?”
This repartee appears in both his daughter Erica Heller’s memoir, “Yossarian Slept Here,” and Tracy Daugherty’s biography, “Just One Catch,” timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Heller’s brilliant satire on the illogical absurdities of war and bureaucracy. The two books are very different, but when read in conjunction, they present interesting counterpoints.
(Simon & Schuster) - ‘Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22’ by Erica Heller
(St. Martin's Press) - ‘Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller’ by Tracy Daugherty
“Just One Catch,” the first full-scale biography of Heller, offers a more complete, cosmetically burnished picture of his life. Daugherty covers the author’s modest roots in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where he was born to Russian immigrant parents in 1923; his service in Europe as a bombardier during World War II; his 1945 marriage to Shirley Held, whom he met in the Catskills; his work in academia and as a copywriter in the Mad Menschish world of magazine advertising; and, most significant, his evolution as a serious comic novelist.
Daugherty, the author of eight books of fiction as well as “Hiding Man,” a biography of the writer Donald Barthelme, combines a novelist’s flair for character and narrative with astute critical analysis of Heller’s work. He’s especially strong on context, providing the political, literary, personal and broader cultural milieu in which each of Heller’s books was produced. Discussing “God Knows” (1984), for example, he sums up Heller’s oeuvre to date: “With this fourth novel, Joe’s prophecy skills improved. Just as Catch-22 seemed to anticipate Vietnam, Something Happened the ‘Me Decade,’ and Good as Gold the neoconservatives’ lock on political power, God Knows sketched the greedy, grab-what-you-can entrepreneur who would spark the United States’ deepest economic crisis since the 1930s.”
“Yossarian Slept Here” is a more personal project. A dozenyears after her father’s death, Erica Heller joins the sorority of daughters who have penned memoirs striving to come to terms with their often difficult literary lion papas — including Susan Cheever (“Home Before Dark”), Janna Malamud Smith (“My Father Is a Book”) and Alexandra Styron (“Reading My Father”). All share the experience of reading books that occasionally struck too close to home. Discussing the hurtful portrait of the sullen teenage daughter in her father’s second novel, “Something Happened,” Erica — who has worked as a blogger for the Huffington Postand an advertising copywriter — asks, “In the name of literature, is writing about anyone fair game? I wasn’t sure, still am not sure.” (Daugherty notes that “Joe’s relationship with Erica had never been easy” and that Erica responded publicly to “Something Happened” with a Harper’s article titled “It Sure Did.”)
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