When Reader’s Digest editor, Ashok Mahadevan, offered a one-year free subscription of the magazine to anybody who can name the author of a book that had sold more than a billion copies in the twentieth century, college students came up with J.K.Rowling, Dan Brown and Tom Clancy. There were more than thirty curious students sitting cross-legged in the bookstore then. I mentioned Joseph Heller and Harper Lee, but my candidates were wrong, and to my surprise Mahadevan said that I was standing one inch closer to the right answer. Nobody gave the correct answer, the free subscription was thrown into the bin, and he didn’t tell us the author’s name either.
One thing disturbed me though. An alarming number of people of my age think Dan Brown and Tom Clancy are writers. They do not see that their books are marketing gimmicks and they are marketing managers as well. But all too soon the debate would boil down to personal choice, and I do not want to take the seat of God. I had read Something Happened when I was in tenth standard, sitting morosely in our school library while my friends were busy playing tic-tack-toe. We still meet to dine or drink, but now they are corporate employees and I a better human being. And it is here that I feel I must write a review on that book. The reason is typical: a book review must not always be attached with the latest release, but it must serve as a guide to sway opinion gently from wrong to right and offer original viewpoints that is closest to the theme. And it must suggest, if possible, ways to understand and improve existence.
Something Happened deals with degradation of values in family, workplace, and life in general. Heller had published it at the time when Hippies were smoking the best joints available and were on the peak of their career in America. Many would say that the novel’s relevance has died today because no parents or kids would run away to become zombies or go crazy, and since it discussed the chaos haunting spiritually depraved American citizens then, it has no relation whatsoever with people living in another culturally different geographical area. Sounds right. But is not.
The protagonist, Mr.Slocum, is a father of two kids as well as a good husband, who goes to office from nine to five, comes home to eat dinner, plays with his children, and goes to bed with his wife. The only problem is that he is helplessly confused in making everyone satisfied. The more effort he puts into everything, the more brickbats he gets in return. It is a first person narrative. The story starts from Slocum’s office; he narrates why his colleagues were slowly going crazy, why he had to work so hard for the company for no good reason except for that the owners pay him a bare minimum, and why many people hate him because he was a good employee. At home, his daughter gives him a lot of trouble; she wants something from him but could never tell what is it that she wants – she is a spoiled teenager whose brain is filled with trash, and thus unable to study or learn anything useful, frets her anger on her father. A common case of what we usually know as “biting one’s parents for one’s worthlessness.” His son is quiet, reserved, and reticent. He is a meek little boy who fears the ways of the world, and prefers to stick to his parents for safety. Slocum gets irritated because his son would always give him headache by asking questions such as: “Would you abandon me when we go to the woods next time? Are you going to send me away?” His daughter is no less. She pointed her finger at her parents’ room and said to her brother: “They f in there.”
One thing that caught my attention was this paragraph: “What happened to us? Something did. I was a boy once, and she was a girl, and we both were new. Now we are man and woman, and nothing feels new any longer; everything feels old. I think we liked each other once. I think we used to have fun; at least, it seems that way now, although we were always struggling about one thing or another. I was always struggling to get her clothes off, and she was always struggling to keep them on. I remember things like that. And there am I between them, sturdy, youthful, prospering, virile, saddled already with the grinding responsibility of making them, and others, happy, when it has been all I can do from my beginning to hold my own head up straight enough to look existence squarely in the eye without making guileful wisecracks about it or sobbing out loud for help. Who put me here? How will I ever get out? Will I be somebody lucky? What decided to sort me into precisely this slot? “What a difference there is between a baby and the person it becomes.”
The novel has seven chapters: I get the willies; The office in which I work; My wife is unhappy; My daughter’s unhappy; My little boy is having difficulties; There’s no getting away from it; My boy has stopped talking to me. In the end, Slocum takes control of everything. How he did that is for the prospective reader to find out. Quite aware that I must omit certain information about the novel to maintain curiosity, however, I recommend this book.