Closing Time is a sequel to Catch 22, set many years later, where familiar characters like Yossarian, the Chaplain, and Milo Minderbinder navigate through an equally ridiculous plot involving an accidental nuclear war and a wedding in a New York City bus station. The story is a mix of absurdity and down-to-earth experiences of WWII veterans, intertwined in a narrative that explores the characters' post-retirement lives and their interactions with each other.
The book is filled with allusions to other art forms, written in Heller's quirky humor style, and includes themes from Wagner operas. Closing Time delves into the characters' backstories, their struggles, and their experiences, illustrating specific points about the U.S. federal government's overspending on defense and its failure to learn from past mistakes, all while weaving in elements from various sources gracefully.
Genres:
Tropes/Plot Devices:
Topics:
Notes:
Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
The content warnings for Closing Time include themes of war, mental health struggles, explicit language, and references to sexual situations.
From The Publisher:
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.
Ratings (3)
Loved It (1) | |
Did Not Like (2) |
Reader Stats (5):
Read It (3) | |
Want To Read (2) |
What can you read after
Closing Time?
About the Author:
Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22, which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time, and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. Heller died in 1999.
When you click the Amazon link and make a purchase, we may receive a small commision, at no cost to you.
