Sequel to 'Catch 22'.
Thirty-three years and over ten million copies later . . . the classic story continues. Yossarian returns - older, if not wiser - to face a new foe.
An instant classic when published in 1961, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' still ranks among the funniest - and most serious - novels ever written about war. Now Heller has dared to write the sequel to his 10-million copy bestseller, using many of Catch-22's characters to deftly satirise the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II.
In 'Closing Time', a comic masterpiece in its own right, Heller spears the inflated balloons of our national consciousness - the absurdity of our politics, the decline of society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture - with the same ferocious humor that he used against the conventional view of warfare.
Back again are characters familiar from 'Catch-22', including Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and little Sammy Singer, as they come to the end of their lives and the end of the century - all linked, this time, in uneasy peace and old age . . . fighting not the Germans, but The End.
Outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as 'Catch-22' itself, 'Closing Time' is a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.
