Now And Then

Joseph Heller

Simon and Schuster £16.99, pp259

Joseph Heller's memoir begins with a carousel ride and goes round in circles from there. A fatiguing blend of total recall when it doesn't matter and gutless evasion when it does, you come away with the sense that the author feels every one of the 35-plus years that have passed since Catch-22 chucked blackly comedic acid into the face of modern war.

Judging by the passionless hash he makes of Now And Then, Heller certainly wouldn't be up to the challenge of doing that now. The alarm bells start ringing with the endless, exhausting, air-brushed passages dealing with Heller's childhood and early adulthood. He grew up poor, fatherless and Jewish, on Coney Island, the tacky entertainment centre that most Americans only visit once a year for fun. Great, you think, expecting 'Heller on Hell'. What you actually get is 'Stand By Moi'.

There is little explanation as to why Something Happened, the follow-up to Catch 22, took 13 years to write. Still less about his numerous infidelities, or the break up of his first 35-year marriage. Indeed, both Heller's wives waft through the book like bland phantoms from a sitcom-themed ghost train. His second wife merits three lines, one of which is: 'I think she still likes me.'

There are good moments, of course. The source material of Catch 22 is reheated so beautifully that it shows up the rest of the book for the shameful lump of undercooked dough it really is. I use the food imagery advisedly, for Now And Then is a work that marches on its author's stomach. Every second chapter, there is a page-long snack-attack, with Heller droning tirelessly about the ice-cream, shish kebabs and poppy-seed rolls that he has consumed in the name of literature. The way Heller tells it: he came, he conquered, he was absolutely bloody starving. It gets so bad that, when Heller offers the opinion that he deserves the Nobel prize, you wonder what the hell for - standing in line at the carvery?

Worst of all, Now And This commits the most heinous memoir crime of all: it is astonishingly dull. When he should be asking 'Who was I?', Heller prefers to whine 'Will this do?'. The result is a litany of repetition, flippancy, fudging and reliance on past glories. If this book fails as an insight into a once-great author's spiritual and creative genesis it serves wonderfully as an indicator to the state of play now. After all, a writer of Heller's stature must really hate himself to want to do such a second-rate cowboy job on the story of his life.