Keeping in mind that Catch-22 is one of my favorite books - is its sequel worth reading?
I’ve heard a lot of negative opinions of it and some positive as well. So should I read it, or is it better to leave the greatness that is Catch-22 untarnished?
Double post because I’m an idiot. Sorry.
I personally didn’t like Closing Time very much. However I didn’t think it was totally bad, just confusing and a bit disjointed. I reread it about a month ago just after finishing Catch-22 and it certainly didn’t tarnish Catch-22 for me. If anything it made me realize how good it really was, since the sequel wasn’t anything special. I’ve read every Joseph Heller book except Good as Gold and I still like Catch-22 better than all the rest, with Something Happened a close second. I would rank Closing Time as my least favorite among those I’ve read.
Anyway, my recommendation would be to read it because it’s worth seeing if you like it, rather than if other folks do, and I doubt it will hurt your love of Catch-22.
Catch-22 is also one of my favorite books, and while Closing Time is a less spicy meatball, it’s not horrendous. Didn’t quite have the madcap zaniness of Heller’s masterpiece, and I’m not sure if it makes total sense, but there is a very poignant scene at the end featuring McWatt and Kid Sampson. That seems to be all I specifically remember about the novel.
Closing Time has some of the same twisted logic as Catch-22, but I think it suffers from being set on such a large scale. The world of Catch-22 was a closed system, a small Army Air Force base where everybody knew everybody else. The surreality with the eggs and the parachutes and the bombings all tied together. There was no escape or appeal to the outside world, and no way to live within that world without dealing with it all. Closing Time is missing that crushing inevitability.
I think if you read Closing Time expecting a continuation of the same kind story as Catch-22, you’ll be disappointed. It’s a different book, but with some of the same characters, centering on Yossarian and Milo.
Personally, my favorites of Heller’s after Catch-22 are God Knows and Picture This, both of which I unreservedly recommend.
Given the choice between Closing Time and Something Happened I’d go for the latter. Heller was certainly in a slightly different frame of mind when he wrote the former - personally I’d read them both anyway, just out of respect for his original.
Catch-22 is one of my favorite books of all time, but Closing Time is one of the few books I gladly quit reading and never went back to.
I knew it couldn’t be as good as the original, but, these didn’t come across as the same charcters to me. They were like some kind of pale imitation of old friends and enemies. The same people in name only, not a view of them much later in life.
Go ahead and read it, but think of it as a book unrelated to his earlier work. I think it does as good a job as any book I’ve ever read on what it means to grow old and face the fact that it’s almost time for you to die. It’s a good book, it’s just not comparable to the original in that there just isn’t the same connection with the characters that there was in Catch-22.
P.S. The first time I read it, I stopped 20 pages from the end because I got confused as to what was happening. It took me two years to go back and reread it through the end. Make sure you take notes about who all the characters are and read it all the way through. The ending’s pretty surprising.