Thomas Powers writes:

In October 1962, when the paperback edition of his big book was beginning to sell in truckloads, Heller told an interviewer for Newsweek that his second novel was ‘about a married man who is working for a large company and who wants to work himself up to the point where he makes a speech at the company’s annual convention in Bermuda.’ The novelist and biographer Tracy Daugherty relates this moment in his masterful and fluent new life of Heller, Just One Catch. He pauses after the word Bermuda, very much, he imagines, as Heller must have done. ‘Married man working for a large company’ was not the sort of plot point to get a reporter begging for more. ‘It has implications,’ Heller added.

(LRB 8 March 2012)

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