Closing Time - by Joseph Heller (Paperback)

About the Book

More than 30 years after his Catch-22 so memorably--and hilariously--captured the ultimate absurdity of war, Heller brings his ferocious humor and intelligence to bear on what has happened since the Second World War, revisting many of the original characters, now older, if not wiser.

Book Synopsis

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22.

In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22.
Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.

Review Quotes

The New York Times Contains a richness of tone and of human feeling...Powerful and disturbing.

The Philadelphia Inquirer Score one for Joseph Heller...Closing Time is Heller's best novel since Good as Gold.

Carlin Romano The Philadelphia Inquirer Score one for Joseph Heller...Closing Time is Heller's best novel since Good as Gold.

Christopher Buckley The New Yorker A summing up by one of the last of the great writers of the Second World War generation...we can celebrate Catch-22's anniversary by welcoming Yossarian, Sammy, Milo, Lew, Wintergreen, and Chaplain Tappman even as we take leave of them.

Christopher Buckley, The New Yorker A summing up by one of the last of the great writers of the Second World War generation;...we can celebrate Catch-22's anniversary by welcoming Yossarian, Sammy, Milo, Lew, Wintergreen, and Chaplain Tappman even as we take leave of them.

Robert Pinsky The Washington Post A lively, brilliant and influential writer's look back at the 20th-century American culture he has seen.

Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post Manic, knockdown verbal comedy.