Word: slocum
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...terms of the character's mental operations--he, like many men, when they think of certain members of their family never think of them by name, or almost never think of them by name. The only one who does have a name is the brain-damaged kid, and Slocum doesn't think of him as a member of his family. That's why I decided to give him a name...
...choose this particular portrait of Robert Slocum, of all the different ideas you might have had for a second novel...
...less than was taken from my war experiences for Catch-22. What I got from that experience was some sense of the corporate operation. It was not mine--I enjoyed my job very much, I didn't stay nearly as long as Slocum does. I never aspired to as much as he does. I was not his age as when he's there. If I had one of my jobs and knew I was going to stay there for twenty or thirty years I might have gotten very depressed over it. But I was writing Catch-22 and knew...
...They were able to do that in Catch-22. I think it's pretty much the same thing for Something Happened. It doesn't attempt to be a complete history--it's not literal realism. If anything, it's psychological realism, and most everything is perceived or determined through Slocum's reaction to them. There's a high degree of what can only be called surrealism in this book; things that you know he's thinking but could not be literally true, even when presented to you literally. Even though he picks up the man-nerisms of the people...
...people he thinks about, the people who infest his dreams. Sometimes he thinks he wants to get them all out in the open, like a policeman and line them up to see who they are. That's the kind of thing, I think, a schizophrenic would have. Except Slocum never is a schizophrenic; it's a schizoid formation, which normal people have, it's about being schizophrenic. And I'm using that deliberately...