Now and Then
From Coney Island to Here
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The demented Army Air Force of Catch-22, the lethal business world of Something Happened, the dysfunctional family of Good as Gold-all these, we have assumed, had their roots in Joseph Heller's own past. Now, more than thirty-five years after the explosion of Catch-22 into the world's consciousness, Heller gives us his life.
Here is his Coney Island childhood, down the block from the world's most famous amusement park. It was the height of the Depression, it was a fatherless family, yet little Joey Heller had a terrific time--on the boardwalk, in the ocean (dangerously out of his depth), playing follow-the-leader in and out of local bars, even in school. Then a series of jobs, from delivering telegrams (on his first bike) to working in a navy yard-until Pearl Harbor, the air force, Italy. And after the war, college (undreamed-of before the G.I. Bill), teaching, Madison Avenue, marriage, and-always-writing. And finally the spectacular success of Catch-22, launching one of the great literary careers.
The strengths of Now and Then lie in the energy, humor, and mischief that have characterized all of Heller's work, along with the dark undertones that lie beneath them. He brings back a Coney Island that is not only a symbol of fun and fantasy around the world but a vision of what seems today to have been a golden age of carefree innocence. For the first time, he writes about the people and the events, both tragic and hilarious, he was eventually to translate, in Catch-22, into such memorable characters as Hungry Joe, Orr, Major--de Coverley, Natel's whore, and (of course) Yossarian, and such moving and frightening scenes as the death of Snowden. Now and Then is both an account of a remarkable life and a glimpse into the creative process of a major American writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heller (Catch-22) is always worth reading, but this not-quite-chronological memoir--mostly concerning his youth--seems a bit deceiving. Though the book is not presented as the first volume of an autobiography, at about page 195 Heller offhandedly promises a sequel, thus leaving for another volume discussion of his post-Catch-22 writings, plus much of his adult personal life, some of which was covered in the memoir No Laughing Matter (written with Speed Vogel). That said, Heller, who was born in 1923, writes with affection and wit of his Coney Island youth in a Jewish community that was poor, nurturing and mostly supportive except for ingrained silence about Heller's father, who died when the author was five. Along the way, Heller hints at his own capacity for anxiety and denial; he recounts his psychoanalysis, as well as his recognition of the enduring theme of death in his books. Curiously, Heller writes more about his teenage jobs in Manhattan and his wartime assignment in Virginia than about the air force experience that produced his landmark first novel. He also sketches his youthful writing ambitions, his days as a postwar college student and his time working in advertising. He returns finally to Coney Island, recounting the fates of neighborhood characters. However engaging, the book--which includes chapters titled "On and On" and "And On and On"--seems incomplete.
