All the screwy, bitter black comedy of Catch-22 (I could fill up pages of this blog with a comedic greatest hits) crawls to a climax near the end of the book in The Eternal City episode. It is a classic night journey, a wandering among horrors, perhaps hallucinatory, perhaps not. Perceptive early critics called this […]
Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category
Chapters and episodes…
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Chapters. Everybody in Catch-22 gets, at least, their own chapter, or two. It’s one of the reason’s the book was mostly panned early on—“it’s not a novel,” and “it gasps for want of craft and sensibility” (how about sense?), “it’s a collection of anecdotes, a parade of scenes.” Heller is a “brilliant painter who decides […]
I shouldn’t have seen the movie…
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008I first read Catch-22 back in 1970 or so after the Mike Nichols movie came out—Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Jon Voight—studded with stars of the day and a few fine actors to come, like Martin Sheen or Bob Balaban. Hell, even Art Garfunkel was in it. The movie mostly flopped. It was a hodge podge, […]
What’s so funny?
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008Lucky Jim is not a fall-down laugh riot. But it doesn’t have to be. It’s a long series of pleasure bursts fueled by screwy situations and a quirky British style that, in 1954 was fresh, cheeky and new. Maybe now a little threadbare and weedy, not state of the art. But it’s still a pleasure. […]
Why Kingsley Amis?
Saturday, July 19th, 2008I came to Kingsley Amis by way of his son, Martin. (That fact would have greatly irritated Kingsley.) Hipster postmodern Martin, essentially my age, whose novels I have tried to like, er, finish…Jesus, I oughta be able to do that, right? Being a long time Anglophile, I was just drawn to Martin, his stuff like […]
