Now and Then; From Coney Island to Here, by Joseph Heller, Simon & Schuster, 259pp, £16.99 in UK.
Unconventionally and to disastrous effect, Joseph Heller has taken to vanity publishing at the end of a famous career rather than before it started. It is one thing for a biographer to pick through the trivia of an eminent writer's life for narrative colour and interpretation. It is quite another for the eminent writer himself to dole out his own trivia so unconditionally.
Heller's "memoir" is assembled in the apparent certainty of our interest, because his importance has imposed itself on everything that has touched him or even simply occurred to him in a dull moment. So by the third paragraph of this bizarre exercise Heller is explaining, at length, how he watches his weight by keeping fattening foods out of the house. To show he thinks this disquisition on his eating habits is the stuff of literature rather than the supermarket checkout magazine, he puts down a marker; "Like the evocations of the cookie to Proust, a meditation on ice-cream soon takes me back to the age of eight or nine. . .
Nearly everything tat follows this simile, both immediately and then on - "On and On" as one chapter title confesses in a rare outbreak of self-awareness - until the end of the book, suggests Heller is not making redeeming fun of himself in the comparison to Proust. The ice-cream flashback only takes us back to more random banality, soon left behind in the fidgety shuttling to and fro in time that passes for narrative structure. Whenever we feel we may have settled back into the "Then" of the title, principally his childhood neighbourhood of Coney Island in the Depression years, he whisks us forward towards "Now". Sometimes this effect seems simply silly. As in "Rome was a wonderful city to go to (and still is)", frequently it insecurely reminds us just how substantial this author reckons himself, with references to his Catch-22 or "that excellent novel Something Happened" (again the braggadocio defeats any effect of irony).
Nearly always Heller's zigzagging through time reads not as design but as lazy windbaggery. There are two consequences. Heller has previewed some episodes so many times that when the book's residual chronology catches up with them it simply feels redundant. Various stories get told at least twice - his reasons for enlisting for the second World War rather than waiting for conscription, his Rorschach tests for a job application - whereas others are never really told at all.
In the first chapter he throws us forward to "another tome, nearing the age of sixty, while experimenting with psychoanalysis as a remedy for alleviating stressful moods in the throes of a rancorous divorce. . ." Neither the rest of the anecdote, nor the eventual chapter, "Psychiatry", tells us anything more about the divorce. Instead, Heller digresses on how cleverly he impressed his shrink with his standing ("one of those readers I've heard praise Catch-22 for having had, they felt, a wholesome impact on their thinking when young") and intellect ("I was flattered and quick to agree when he said that be kid's stuff for me"). Eventually and uncharacteristically he admits he has strayed off course, having forgotten "that the core of this chapter was to be not my escapades in psychoanalysis at the time of the breakup of my marriage but the death of my father when I was a small boy".
Subsequent attempts to retrieve memories, impressions, consequences of his father's death bring Heller to the conclusion that he has never really wanted "to find out more about him. I prefer not to. I make no difference now either. I know him by his absence." The confession has an elegiac honesty about it, undermined by the thinner indifference that permeates the book and the self-absorption that takes us to another chapter and a more unsurprising conclusion. An extract from his novel Grand Gold portrays Coney Island much more evocatively than Heller has managed in the preceding anecdotage, and then he brings us to his supremely complacent "Here", "I have much to be pleased with, including myself, and I am. I have wanted to succeed and I have." The vanity of the remark overwhelms the possible joke - is this the same writer who, in the mordant comedy of Catch-22, wrote: "he was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody"?
Charles Hunter is a journalist and critic.