Just One Catch
“The Willies “IT WAS AFTER THE WAR, I think, that the struggle really began,” says Bob Slocum in Something Happened.
Just as Joe had arrived many years late with his great war book, he straggled in the rear with his business novel. Sloan Wilson and Richard Yates had tackled corporate facelessness in the 1950s in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road, respectively. William Whyte had thoroughly analyzed the organization man. But when Joe finally addressed the matter—the “thousand...-and-first version” of “this written-to-death situation,” Kurt Vonnegut said in his ultimately ecstatic review of Something Happened—he made the subject his own, the way a great singer’s cover version of a standard links that song to one voice. Joe stepped beyond Wilson’s sentimentality and Yates’s bitterness to eviscerate modern America’s success ethic.
The subject screamed at him daily: middle-aged men, veterans of the war, muttering past one another on the sidewalks, indistinguishable in their suits, propelled, it seemed, by briefcases; frowning wives, wailing kids … the shouts of irritated drivers, convinced that if everyone else got out of the way, they would arrive at fulfillment, only to find, at their coveted destination, the parking lot full or the doors boarded up.MoreLess
Just as Joe had arrived many years late with his great war book, he straggled in the rear with his business novel. Sloan Wilson and Richard Yates had tackled corporate facelessness in the 1950s in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road, respectively. William Whyte had thoroughly analyzed the organization man. But when Joe finally addressed the matter—the “thousand...-and-first version” of “this written-to-death situation,” Kurt Vonnegut said in his ultimately ecstatic review of Something Happened—he made the subject his own, the way a great singer’s cover version of a standard links that song to one voice. Joe stepped beyond Wilson’s sentimentality and Yates’s bitterness to eviscerate modern America’s success ethic.
The subject screamed at him daily: middle-aged men, veterans of the war, muttering past one another on the sidewalks, indistinguishable in their suits, propelled, it seemed, by briefcases; frowning wives, wailing kids … the shouts of irritated drivers, convinced that if everyone else got out of the way, they would arrive at fulfillment, only to find, at their coveted destination, the parking lot full or the doors boarded up.MoreLess
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