SOURCE: Murtaugh, Daniel M. Review of Closing Time, by Joseph Heller. Commonweal 122, no. 4 (24 February 1995): 57-58.

In the following review, Murtaugh finds Closing Time to be ultimately disappointing in its “central organizing idea.”

In Joseph Heller's two best novels, Catch-22 and Something Happened, the narrative circles obsessively around a repressed memory that it is the stories' business finally to confront. We feel the tremors of its eventual eruption in each book even as the narrator frantically distracts us with slapstick improvisation. In his newest novel, Closing Time, Heller brings back the (anti-) hero of Catch 22, John Yossarian, and once again something horrific is building beneath his life and those of his generation and their century as they all draw to a close.

But this time it is not a brute fact lodged in memory, the something that draws its power simply from having happened. It is instead something that...