An update: In April, I had a post where I mentioned reading Joseph Heller Something Happened and how much I was enjoying it. Now that it's mid-September and I'm just inside the final 100 pages of the book, I feel confident that I was absolutely wrong and the book kind of sucks. I thought it was, for lack of a better comparison, Pinkerton, meaning a weirder follow-up to a classic, but it was a lot closer to Green, a later effort that occasionally captures the feeling that hooked you in the first place but has mostly lost the plot.
The book centres around a WASP-y republican businessman in New York and the goal of the book is to demonstrate, entirely through first-person narration, how shitty the dude is and, by extension, how shitty American culture is. But is 530 pages too much? Especially when it's mostly one-note? How long can we listen to him talk? Does devoting that many pages to this lifestyle not validate it?
I was speaking to my friend Val about this last night. In satire, where is the line between competently taking something down and valorizing behaviour through attention? Good satire obviously doesn't do that, but it's a razor-thin line. So, as a satirist, you need to aim insanely high and then hit that almost unattainable peak to succeed. Seems almost impossible!
It also sucks that most people seem to be happy to slurp up shitty base-level satire and then tell you that you "just don't get." How do we stop that? Do I have to resign to the fact that most people's taste is bad? Why can't everyone like good things?
