Perfect and profound.

I really enjoyed reading this book but I’m not sure that I liked it that much. Bob is not a pleasant person by design, but the amount of detail we learn about him makes him compelling by default. He constantly disagrees with himself, loves and hates everyone around him, is fearful and determined: there is a level of relatability to him but not the pleasant kind.

Overall I was expecting to love this book, as Catch-22 is one of my favorites, but I don’t think I’ll be rereading it.

Anxious people should not read this book.

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. (13)

Anxious people should not read this book!

There is this crawling animal flourishing somewhere inside me that I try to keep hidden and that strives to get out, and I don't know what it is or whom it wishes to destroy. (111)

ANXIOUS PEOPLE SHOULD NOT READ THIS BOOK!

I have a feeling that someone nearby is soon going to find out something about me that will mean the end, although I can't imagine what that something is. (16)

Shudder. This whole book made my mind race and my skin crawl. Heller dumps us immediately into the petty, unforgiving, and constantly roiling mind of Bob Slocum - very much an unlovable loser, very much different from any protagonist I've spent this much time with, and sadly very much familiar to myself, as a highly anxious person who, as stated above, really should not have read this book. Slocum's unendingly negative thoughts wind and flow serpentine in lengthy diatribes against himself, those who have the misfortune to be around him, and the world writ large which, if it can't be said owes him any favors, it can be said maybe doesn't have to be so goddamned mean about it - though Slocum surely deserves the lion's share of the blame for the unpleasantness he finds himself mired in.

There are things going on inside me I cannot control and do not admire. (133)

My soul is fragile; my mind is tissue thin and easily pierced by emotions and images. I can do nothing at all. (170)

My mind is a storehouse of pain, a vast, invisible reservoir of sorrows as deep as I am old, waiting always to be tapped and set flowing by memory. (535)

3 stars. I hated and enjoyed it all at once, and damn if it didn't hit home for me personally. Slocum's kind of like a midlife crisis Holden Caulfield for the office-and-middle-management world. The book runs on much too long though, asking us to spend far more time on each section than is probably necessary. Plus it's full of backwards-thinking sentiments towards women and minorities which are intensely off-putting. All told it might have been great at maybe 350 pages, but 560 is overkill.

(I know how it feels to have to feel this way.)
(It doesn't feel good.) (221)

Although Heller's novel Catch 22 is an iconic work for portraying the absurdity of war, Something Happened takes on the much more terrifying idea of the average man. The main character becomes a self proclaimed failure partially because he is a product of his times, but also because he fails to take control of his own life. The idea that something happened that he was unaware of that leads to his miserable adult life is much more resonant, at least to me, than Heller's earlier work. The novel serves as a reminder to actively cultivate the life that you want, and not become a lost and unhappy adult like Slocum who doesn't understand how his life turned out the way that it did.