SOURCE: Heller, Joseph, and Charlie Reilly. “An Interview with Joseph Heller.” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 4 (winter 1998): 507-22.

[In the following interview, which took place on October 24, 1996, Heller discusses his themes, influences, and techniques for writing his novels.]

Despite the fact that he has also composed two memoirs (No Laughing Matter [1986] and Now and Then [1998]) and a drama (We Bombed in New Haven [1967]), Joseph Heller's reputation rests, in general, upon his six novels, and in particular upon the first of those six, Catch-22 (1961). Although Catch-22 remains his most celebrated work, each of Heller's novels was written and has been received as a work of literary fiction, and each has been praised in that special context. His rich humor, high satire, and relentless experimentation have earned him professorships (at Oxford, Yale, and Penn, to name a few), honors, and literally millions of readers during his four and one-half decades of writing.

Though laced with humor, Heller's novels are fiercely critical of his times. As is often the case with satire, again and again his works involve a startling confrontation with the reader. The world of Heller's fiction is an eerily insane one—perhaps an eerily sane one—filled with preposterous characters mired in outrageous circumstances. But long before each novel's end, the reader recognizes the connections between Heller's apparent absurdity and the target of his satire. Though speaking about Catch-22, Heller described his overall modus operandi when he said to me, “My objective is not merely to tell the reader a story but to make him a participant—to have him experience the book rather than read it” (Delaware Literary Review Spring 1975).

With more than ten million copies sold, Catch-22 remains one of modern literature's most admired novels. Drawing upon his World War II experiences as a bombardier, Heller plunges the reader into a world in which generals cheerfully send men to be slaughtered, officers lie and steal, whores become heroines, and, as Falstaff puts it in a similar context, “Honor is a mere scutcheon.” Time has been turned upside down in the world of Catch-22. Characters killed off in early passages pop up noisily in later chapters; dead men live on in empty tents; living men are “disappeared.” Some characters get rich selling chocolate-covered cotton; others vault hundreds of miles in apparent seconds. When all is said and done, Heller composed a brilliant attack not only upon the horror and lunacy of a just-completed war but upon the hypocrisy and savagery of the ongoing McCarthy witch-hunts. In addition, as he explains in this interview, his work was closely entwined with Homer's Iliad. And, with “Catch-22” itself, he added a phrase to the language.

Conscious of his first novel's extraordinary success, Heller spent thirteen years “doing something different.” The result, Something Happened (1974), is a chilling description of the deterioration and breakdown of a Manhattan business executive. Again, Heller's work operates in the worlds of literature and satire. The author does not hesitate to credit Samuel Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable for the book's most striking feature: the forlorn, almost detached voice of its first-person narrator. Heller's attack on the aridity and agonies of corporate existence is superbly handled, but more than anything else it is the narrator's description of his own dissolution which makes the novel so arresting.

Each of the next three works reflects Heller's determination not to repeat himself and his continued use of satire and literature. Good as Gold (1979) ferociously criticizes modern politics in general and Henry Kissinger in particular. Its method of narration is reminiscent of a Barth-like postmodernism: the unnamed third-person narrator plays an important role in the tale and at one point butts in to concede that he could have better served the protagonist. But Heller's inspiration predates postmodernism: much of his manipulation of point of view, he has said, derived from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (“Talking with Joseph Heller,” Critical Essays on Joseph Heller [Hall, 1984] 178-79).

God Knows (1984) continues the march. Again, the work is filled with satiric humor. Again, it is rich in literary allusions. God Knows is a lengthy deathbed monologue by the Bible's King David. On the one hand, David seems like a stand-up comedian, railing against a God who owes him an apology, deploring the thick-wittedness of his son Solomon, and shaking his head over Michelangelo's depiction of an uncircumcised member. On the other hand, Heller comments tellingly about the misapprehensions and misery that have followed in the wake of far too many Biblical passages.

Picture This (1988) raises Heller's fascination with narrative point of view to new heights. Reduced to its simplest terms, the book considers Rembrandt's famous painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. But the novel is really a satire on war and politics—in ancient Athens and Sparta, in seventeenth-century Holland and Vietnam, and in twentieth-century America and Vietnam. Heller's use of point of view in Picture This is his most ambitious to date, with his tale alternately “told” by Rembrandt, Aristotle, and Homer, each brilliantly re-created.

Closing Time (1994), the subject of this interview, reflects a startling change for Joseph Heller. For the first time in his fiction, he comes face to face with the legacy of Catch-22—and does so in a sequel which resurrects some of the more memorable creations of that legendary first novel. In the interview, Heller speaks tenderly of the “real life” characters in his book, the most realistic he has ever created, and describes the intricate and carefully planned method he uses to create his novels. In addition, he speaks at length about his use of a dual point of view, the relationships between Catch-22 and Closing Time, and the connections between Catch-22 and the Iliad.

This interview took place on October 24, 1996, at Joseph Heller's home in East Hampton, New York. Words cannot express my gratitude for Mr. Heller's generosity, his hospitality, and his wise responses to my often fumbling questions. To make a splendid day perfect, Mr. Heller took me for a post-interview stroll on a windswept beach, then led the way to “the Hamptons' best tomato stand.”

And there was no catch.

[Reilly]: A few years ago Mordecai Richler wrote that the Brooklyn passages in Something Happened contained some of best writing you have ever done. Closing Time spends a lot of time in Brooklyn, especially in your old Coney Island section, and it contains some of the most grippingly realistic characters you have ever created. Did they play an important role in the original plan of the novel?

[Heller]: My ambitions lay elsewhere. To one degree or another, the characters you are describing were based on people who have been on my mind for a long time—maybe it has something to do with being in my seventies. I never wanted to write an autobiography, but part of my plan was to write a novel which contained autobiographical elements. The structure of Closing Time was very carefully planned; everything in there was intended to be in there. It was a different matter with Catch-22, where some of the characters, like Milo and Major Major, had a far greater effect than I had originally intended.

My original plan, and I can't think of a good word for it, was more literary than anything else. I knew from the start I wanted to develop a sharp contrast between realistic and surrealistic techniques, and I wanted to keep two sets of characters and styles apart for most of the novel. With one exception, when Sammy visits Lew in the hospital and sees Yossarian, the scenes with the Brooklyn characters were consciously written in a realistic style.

That hospital scene, by the way, illustrates another difference between Closing Time and the other novels. In Catch-22 I probably would have further developed the discussion about the extent to which modern medicine has become unnatural, the extent to which it interferes with the natural direction of biology.

Those scenes seemed different from ones in your other novels. Certainly Bob Slocum is realistically portrayed in Something Happened, but Lew, Sammy, Claire, and Glenda seemed so real that I feel I could drive over to Coney Island today and bump into them. Are they based on real people?

Glenda Singer is a combination of three people, one of them my ex-wife, but she is mostly based on an old friend. When I was at Time magazine, I became close to a guy named Jerry Broidy and his wife, and she died of ovarian cancer pretty much the way Glenda did. At times Sammy Singer is me, but only at times; ultimately he's a literary character. The story of Claire Rabinowitz is no story; it actually happened: when they met, how they married, even the business about her virginity. Lew is a very real figure. We met in elementary school and remained close friends until the day he died. You could call us disease-ridden pals: he lived fourteen years with Hodgkin's disease and I've been living with the residual weaknesses of Guillain-Barre Syndrome since 1981.

I've never talked about it much, but I have a very special memory of Lew and Catch-22. When the book came out and got that terrible review in the Times book review section, my first wife and I got out of town. We went up to Middletown to spend the weekend with Lew and his wife. To this day I don't know how he managed it, but he arranged for the one bookstore in town to fill the window with copies of Catch-22. It was the perfect gesture at a time when I would have been grateful for any gesture. You know, despite our lifelong friendship, I have no idea whether he ever read the book. Or any of my books. It didn't matter; he was a friend, not a reader.

Claire Rabinowitz and Glenda Singer were so vivid, so convincing. They are beautiful creations.

Thank you; they were intended to be. I'm happy to hear your response to them, and I think I know the reason why. Closing Time is the first time in my work, and, I think, the first time in the work of any American male novelist in this century, where women are consistently treated with respect and where marriage is consistently described as a desirable condition. Three strong influences on me when I was younger were Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, and John O'Hara. I don't think you can find a woman in any of their works who is treated with sympathy of a marriage which is described as nourishing.

Closing Time is not all about disease and death, but there is a lot of disease and death in it.

You're right: there is a recurrent theme of cancer, of malignance, and, I hope, a not too obvious attempt to link that malignance with imperialism and social behavior. If you read the book again, you'll find there are remarks linking the way cancer cells spread to the way imperialist nations colonize and destroy. I didn't want to beat the point to death because at this stage of the history of novels, and at my own stage in my small history of novels, it would be emphasizing what is fairly obvious. Nor am I the first one to compare certain industrialists of the past to malignant forces. The unfortunate difference is, unlike empires, they don't wind up destroying themselves. They wind up getting rich.

When I contemplated the death and destruction in Closing Time, I found myself thinking about Swift's epitaph, about his savage indignation. I wonder what the effect was of writing about the deaths of characters who were part of your own life, and about the deteriorating condition of the planet. Did it take its toll? Did you find yourself savagely indignant?

No, no. It's something I discovered while writing what became the first draft of Catch-22. The attitude of the writer is very much different from that of the reader—at least I hope it is. Writing is a ruthless process, a detached process. I can be furious about a subject before or after writing, I can be furious during research. But during the act of writing, if it's done well, I'm happy. Elmer Edgar Stoll once made a very wise comment about Shakespeare. He said it was ridiculous to assume Shakespeare was depressed when he wrote Hamlet and Lear. Depressed people, Stoll said, don't write.

The way Snowden's death is, ultimately, described in Catch-22 is a good example. I wrote it in longhand—I still write my first drafts in longhand—and I deliberately described it in a traditional manner: precise details, normal time sequence, and so forth. I've reread it on a number of occasions, and, even though I knew what was going to happen, it had an extremely powerful effect on me. But at the time I wrote the scene it took me two, maybe three, nights to get it right, and when I finished I knew it was good. I'll never forget it: at that moment I had an impulse to laugh out loud. Giddy, triumphant, relieved? But certainly the effect it was intended to have on the reader was profoundly different from the feelings I was experiencing. I had a similar detachment with those realistic scenes in Closing Time.

I suspect this is true of all the arts. It became clear to me while writing Picture This that, while Rembrandt was working on The Crucifixion, he was at least as concerned with the painting as with the crucifixion. Certainly he didn't break down and start praying to the image he was creating. Probably the most moving of the literary arts is the theater because it's actually taking place in front of you. But if you stop to think of the process of putting on a play—all the rewriting, all the rehearsals—you can see the subject matter becomes increasingly less important. And, when it's done, the experience of watching it in the audience is not the experience of putting it together.

I do an enormous amount of planning, of prewriting, so in the process of writing I always know what the next chapter will be about and where the book is going. Emotionally, the writing is not difficult. What takes its toll is the act of writing, the struggling for the right word or sentence or image. And, of course, the revision; I cut more than two hundred typed pages from Closing Time. So any time I find the fight word for a sentence or get an idea which I know is the right one, I am exhilarated. I am tempted to say that's probably true for all novelists, but “exhilarated” might not be the right word to describe Samuel Beckett. He always seemed depressed.

I guess I'm headed for another “No” because I was deeply touched by No Laughing Matter and wondered if you were using all you went through with Guillain-Barre Syndrome when writing about the suffering in Closing Time.

How about, You're right in that you're not right? In Closing Time you'll find the emphasis is on the natural deterioration of the human being. What you have with Sammy, Glenda, and Lew are natural processes. Sammy's wife gets cancer and dies; Lew gets Hodgkin's disease and lives—lives well, in fact—until his time runs out. By the end, the emphasis is on the inevitability of death. Yossarian and Sammy are in their seventies. Each of them knows he is not going to have much more time. Sammy's resigned to it; he doesn't expect anything surprising or important to happen to him. Yossarian is the eternal optimist. He's falling in love again and he's going to live for the day.

Something that fascinated me about Closing Time was its dual nature. There were times with Milo and Yossarian when I was almost helpless with laughter, the satire was so biting.

Yes, good.

And then, all of a sudden, wham! The scenes with Lew and Sammy were so riveting. With Lew you can see him slipping, you can feel the pain, and you get to like him so much. Did you write the two “halves” of the novel the way I read them, or were they written as separate pieces?

I wrote the chapters consecutively—in other words, just as you read them—and I had that dualism in mind from the very beginning. I was consciously working with two different forms of fiction: realism and something which is at least analogous to surrealism. I wanted to write a novel which was consistent with the way the human mind works. It works consciously, it works unconsciously, and it very much deals with memory. George C. Tilyou is literally a fantastic figure, and yet there is a scene where he shows up with Lew and with a couple of “real” characters from Catch-22. I was dealing there with what we might call consciousness and the part of the human mind that remembers.

I'm not sure I follow that.

Think about the idea of an afterlife and the existence of a fantasy life. At one time or another, everyone speculates about some form of afterlife, whether we believe in it or not. In Closing Time there is an afterlife of sorts—I'm thinking of J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, George C. Tilyou, and the other dead characters who seem to return to the world of the living. With Tilyou, you are aware you're dealing with fantasy, and, within the context of the novel, you know Chaplain Tappman is a real person. When the two almost meet, there is a fusion, a fusion between the real and the fantastic. Again, think of the way the human mind works.

How long did Closing Time take?

The usual, between four and five years.

And right from the start did you know where you were going?

Oh yes. With all of my novels, by the time I really start writing I know where it's going and how it will end. In fact, with almost every one I had a precise opening sentence in mind before I began. Sometimes that particular sentence didn't wind up at the beginning of page 1, it wound up somewhere else in an early passage. But from the very beginning of Closing Time, I had that sentence: “When people our age speak of the war it is not of Vietnam but of the one that broke out more than half a century ago and swept in almost all the world.” That sentence was the genesis of the novel. Then I decided, if I'm going to do a work about the war, it's got to be somewhat autobiographical in nature, and then I decided it made sense to work in my own novel, Catch-22, in some way or another.

Had something like Closing Time been in the back of your mind for a long time?

No, it hadn't; it was a sudden thing.

Do you think somewhere in the back of your mind you were avoiding a return to Catch-22?

No, I neither consciously avoided it nor sought to improve upon it. I have enough trouble coming up with an idea for a novel, so I certainly wouldn't be inclined to avoid anything. Throughout my career I've always had only one idea for a novel at a time. This one started out as a wish to write about the war and a subsequent wish to include autobiographical materials. If I had begun by thinking about a sequel to Catch-22, I probably would have rejected the idea out of hand. Although Closing Time is a sequel.

At the same time, so much of it was inspired by current events. With the wedding in the Port Authority bus terminal, I know I had The Great Gatsby somewhere in my mind, and I know I had been struck by a social event in East Hampton where the hostess put together living tableaux of her favorite paintings. But once I decided to include the wedding scene, my real inspiration was newspaper and magazine clippings about real, spectacular weddings. It was fascinating reading, and by the time I started to write that chapter, I had quite a portfolio. Then it was largely a matter of exaggeration.

It was a wonderful touch to use the Port Authority bus terminal. I've been in and out of it since I was a kid and was always struck by the way it seemed a cross between a bustling urban transportation center and, well, a zoo.

It was just what I had in mind. You'll find just about every level of American society there except the very wealthy—who don't take buses and who give their galas in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the New York Public Library. Closing Time reflects the fact that, even in the best neighborhoods, homeless people and beggars can no longer be hidden. At least I was trying to make that statement.

Could we talk about the climax of Closing Time?

I'd be happy to. I worked hard on it, and while I won't say it's even better than the ending of Catch-22, I wouldn't want to choose between them. Closing Time began with Sammy, and I knew I wanted to end with Sammy. As a rule I have the final chapter of a book at least in rough draft, sometimes in finished prose, very early in the writing process. With Closing Time I had those last pages written before I was halfway through the book. The same thing was true of Catch-22.

When I finished the novel I was deeply stirred and quite confused. Characters are descending forty miles below the ground, dead people are walking around, Gaffney says we don't need the wedding now that we have it on tape, Yossarian goes back up the escalator, apparently convinced he and Melissa and the baby will survive. And, at the same time, the sun is an ashen gray, McWatt and Kid Sampson, the “ghost riders in the sky,” have to go in again for yet another bombing mission, and the radio system on Sammy's airplane seems to have failed. The book ends from Sammy's point of view, and he reports, “the yellow moon turned orange and soon was as red as a setting sun.” I don't know quite how to ask this question, but it seems clear the world is about to be blown up.

Exactly.

To be honest, I had been counting on the reviewers to help me out, but with two exceptions they all but ignored the approaching apocalypse. Would you comment on the ending?

Either the world is ending or it's not. Yossarian doesn't know what he'll find when he goes outside, and I don't know either. Whether the end is taking place fight there on that page, or whether it will take place in a week or two when the missiles come back, or whether it will take place in a billion years when the sun explodes, it's going to take place. Some of the imagery in the final pages comes from Revelation—for example, the comments about the ships being turned over and the moon being red.

I deliberately included contradictions between what Sammy and Yossarian see and think. I don't know the answer. The people you want to ask are Yossarian, Sammy, and Claire. Me, I have no idea, and I don't want the reader to have any idea. They asked me the same question about the ending to Catch-22, and I have the same answer: I really don't know.

Fair enough; you're the author. But after all the uproar about the “fairy-tale” ending of Catch-22, the critics went back to what you wrote and decided what you had in mind made sense. And I think you cleared matters up in Closing Time.

Good. I guess some critics didn't want Catch-22 to end the way it did. I suppose it could be called a fantasy ending.

But in fairness to you, at the end of Catch-22 your text makes it clear that Yossarian isn't doing anything fantastic. As he says, the point is he is trying, and someone's got to break the chain.

That's correct. Yossarian is running into danger, not away from it. He says there's a little girl in Rome whom he might be able to save. It's ironic that, after all the discussion about the ending of the novel, the film depicts Yossarian trying to row to Sweden. Nothing could have been farther from the case in the novel.

I loved the way in Closing Time someone asks Yossarian, Didn't you get away on a little yellow raft? and he replies, That only happens in the movies.

A couple of people who have written about the book, especially after the film came out, seem to think the book ends that way.

Catch-22 doesn't end that way, and neither does Homer's Iliad. You've said there are connections.

Conscious ones. Catch-22 was not an imitation of the Iliad—for example, there is so much fantasy and humor in my novel. But I was very conscious of Homer's epic when writing the novel, and at one point, late in the book, I directly compare Yossarian to Achilles. At the same time, I'd be the first to agree that, as a hero, Yossarian is different from most heroes of antiquity. From most heroes, period.

My ending had the same problem the Trojans had, that damned horse. Most people think the Iliad ends with the Trojan horse, but Homer's work, and mine, stop long before. Just as the Iliad is ending, there's that magnificent scene when Achilles meets with Priam and his sympathy and emotions finally come pouring out. The ending of Catch-22 shows Yossarian going through a similar experience.

Were you thinking of Homer's ending when you wrote the conclusion to Catch-22?

Very much so. The Iliad was one of the first books I read and enjoyed as a child. The first version I read was a children's version, and it came “complete” with the horse and the fall of Troy. I recall that the first time I read the real Iliad I was shocked; I thought I had stumbled upon a corrupt edition. But the more I thought about “Homer's ending,” the more I admired it.

The opening lines of an epic are so important. The Iliad's very first line talks about “the dreadful anger of Achilles”—not about the fall of Troy or the Trojan horse or anything else. And the final scene with Priam shows Achilles' nobler side overcoming that wrath. Catch-22 went beyond that, of course; it was very much concerned with attitudes toward war, attitudes toward bureaucracy. It occurred to me at one point that I could draw an analogy between Yossarian and Colonel Cathcart, on one hand, and Achilles and Agamemnon on the other. But it wouldn't have worked. Agamemnon and Cathcart are completely different people.

There is another echo of the Iliad insofar as the hierarchy of power is concerned. At the beginning Homer makes it clear Achilles isn't interested in acquiring another concubine; he wants Agamemnon to return the priest's daughter. When Agamemnon returns the girl and then steals Briseis, Achilles finds himself powerless. He broods in his tent until Patroclus is killed and then he finally takes action. Yossarian is faced with a similar problem. He is powerless until, after Nately's death, he is driven to break the chain.

And yet in Closing Time some of the chain seems unbroken. I thought one passage in the conclusion was heartbreaking: when two characters who were killed in Catch-22, McWatt and Kid Sampson, almost sigh as they realize they'll “have to go in again.”

It is heartbreaking. Since I began Closing Time, we've had Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War. They'll find a reason to go in again, and again, and again.

In Closing Time you provide some fascinating information about what happens “after” Catch-22. For example, you have someone explain to Yossarian that “they sent us home as soon as they caught you.”

I've been asked that question by so many readers: what happened to the rest of them after Yossarian broke the chain? It was a case of feeling that anyone who read Catch-22 with some respect was entitled to an explanation.

Dante's and Thomas Mann's works play very important roles in Closing Time. Were they on your mind from the start?

Death in Venice was there almost from the start. The scene when Yossarian was in the hospital seemed a good place to make a literary analogy between Yossarian and Aschenbach, although it didn't occur to me at the time that Yossarian was a good deal older. I especially had Dante in mind in the final chapters. The references to a sea of ice and lake of blood are from the Inferno. In the scene where Yossarian is walking with his son, the images of blood under the wheels of the limousine and the cartridges that look like arrows are from Dante.

At the risk of going too far, why?

You might ask the same question about the literary allusions in Catch-22, and the answer would be the same: I don't know why. It seemed appropriate to me in those books to make use of them. Now I'll say this: Closing Time is very much about literature, contemporary literature, as expressed in its various literary styles.

I didn't mean it to be a smart-aleck question.

I didn't take it that way. I took it as an effort, like Einstein's, to get a unified theory. It was important to me that Closing Time maintain a literary approach and not be unduly concerned with physics and quantum mechanics and atomic bombs. The potential of nuclear destruction is such an important issue, and so often it's treated the way they treat Chaplain Tappman when he starts passing heavy water: “He's a big problem and we're kind of sorry we discovered him.”

Closing Time contains some gripping descriptions of the fire-bombing of Dresden, and Kurt Vonnegut appears in the novel. What were your descriptions based on?

I did some research—a book which very much impressed me was an autobiography of a woman who had lived through it as a girl—and many of the details came from Kurt Vonnegut himself. My wife and I have gotten to know him and his wife. They're very nice people.

It occurs to me for the first time that you were a bombardier and Vonnegut was bombed on. Did you ever talk about it?

No, never together.

Are you ever haunted by the memory of the bombs you dropped?

No. Remember the first line of Closing Time: “When people my age speak of the war. … ” It was a different time. If I had had orders to bomb Dresden, I would have bombed Dresden. At the same time, most of our sixty missions were directed at bridges, and I know I concentrated on the bridges, not the people who might be nearby. There was one mission, though—it found its way into Catch-22—where we had to bomb a village into a road. We had to destroy it, in other words, in such a manner so it would become a roadblock.

Yes. That's where Dunbar deliberately misses the target, and Yossarian reaches a point where he is able to say he no longer cares where his bombs fall. That really happened?

It happened. That time I was aware we were bombing civilians, but I can't say it had much of an effect on me. Even when I got to that part of Catch-22—it was almost ten years to the day—the writing didn't affect me. But thinking about it did. Thinking about it certainly affects me now.

You know, I have often thought about the differences between a German soldier and an American soldier back then. I can't carry the idea too far myself since, if I had been a German, they would have put me into an oven instead of an airplane. But I guess while I lasted I would have been as patriotic a German as I was an American. Which is not that patriotic. You do what you're told, to become socially acceptable.

I guess anyone who didn't live through it can only imagine what it was like.

I can't say I lived through “it.” I've talked to some of the people in the infantry and read about what was going on in Eighth Air Force, and I feel I was not in that war. They had a totally different experience. Paul Fussell has a new book out—its title, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, says so much—and his description of combat is harrowing.

This is my “Say it ain't so, Joe” question. Closing Time closes down so many things …

Oh no, it's not my last book—if for no other reason than I'd have nothing else to do all day out here in East Hampton. I enjoy writing more than anything else. I enjoy spending two or more hours a day being lost in it, being absorbed by it. It's not that simple, of course. A problem I always have is, What do I write next? I don't want to imitate myself, ever.

I think of Catch-22 and Something Happened and Picture This and Closing Time. You'd have a hard time imitating. …

Actually it would be easy, but I would never be what I call absorbed in such a project, and it would not be successful. I've often been asked to describe my “literary talent,” and when you get asked that enough, you get to thinking. As a rule the basic story line, the sequence of action, plays a minor role in my books. It's the texture, the approach, which makes them distinctive. I don't deal with conventional plots, most of my novels don't even follow chronological sequence. To write, I need a new idea, a complicated idea—not an imitation of something I've already done.

For a time I toyed with another biblical book but it wasn't right for me. I had the first line, though: “God's wife had been against the idea from the start.” It's a good beginning, and if I had been younger, if I had thought of it after Catch-22, I might have done that book. But it would take me a year just for the planning, and I've done too much of it already—the biblical humor, the feminism, God's life.

I guess part of the fun with Joseph Heller is that the reader has no idea what the next book will be about.

Joseph Heller doesn't know either. He puts together a vision of a novel that he feels ought to be written, a novel that he, that I, can write. Imitation has nothing to do with it. There are some authors whom I find delightful, but I know I would be foolish even to attempt to imitate them. Right now I am fascinated with John Barth's latest book, On with the Story. I read it once and was so intrigued I sat down and read it again. It's a collection of short stories, but I found myself reading it as a novel. There are connecting episodes which I suspect deal with the same couple, and I feel there is a good deal of autobiographical material too. It's a terrific book—well conceived, well executed. Now I could never write like John Barth, and I'd be foolish to try. He has such an impressive mind and such an array of literary techniques. Right from the start, from Floating Opera and End of the Road, you could see how talented he was. And he wrote them both in a very short period of time, some say in a year.

In any case, no, it's not closing time for me. I am working on something new, but I try never to talk about works in progress.