Joseph Heller

Plebeian?
Contrarian?
Patrician?

why is it important?

It's funny

Yea Vonnegut kinda funny, which some consider reddit tier intolerable trash. But if your if you still have a soul, and it's not jaded beyond all enjoyment, or you're not the type who can't enjoy something if normies like it, you'll get a chuckle or two out of it.

Heller is funny. Vonnepleb is pure crap.

>Vonnegut

>definitively contrarian
would be patrician but they made a movie about it

It's really funny. It's got some serious comedic value.

I personally recommend it to anyone that asks for good books.

stuck in the middle with you desu

They're both great, but each only had one good novel in them. Which is a lot more than most novelists can say for themselves.

Catch-22 and S5 have the benefit of still being entertaining, and so they still deserve to be read. They're not artifacts of humor, like Don Quixote, that gets outclassed by more sophisticated examples of sitcom writing.

They also had some thoughtful things to say, and said them plainly, which is always neat to find in a novel.

Patrish.

Mediocre in thought and writing.
Vonnegut is pleb but he at least has a sense of original style to his prose (which gets grating depending on the book)

Too boring to read desu. Not even funny

Wonneschlecht is unbearable in large doses

Ok in small doses.

Hilarious. Walks a line between patrish and plebeian. Its more deadpan/less obvious than Vonnegut'a stuff. I really don't like him. I've been meaning to read more of Heller's work. I know a lot of people think he's a one hit wonder, but I've heard some mention of his other works being very underrated.

Picture This is like Catch-22, but better. Something Happened is like Picture This, but far better. Closing Time is fucking horrible with a few spectacular scenes sprinkled in. Just started Good as Gold, hasn't done much for me yet, but I'm only about 30 pages deep, so we'll see.

I read Catch-22 in one sitting on a large dosage of Adderall (60mg of IR, if anyone cares). I thought it was pretty shit - I compared it to watching a comedian bomb his set for 500 pages.

Oh also Milo was by far my favorite character and I thought he was the only redeeming quality of the book.

Me again. Just wanted to add that I would actually consider Something Happened to be easily one of the greatest novels of the 20th century that I've read.

>>They're both great, but each only had one good novel in them.

Neither of those works are even close to the best work of their respective authors. You are either baiting or have never read anything of theirs outside of those two books.

I already named two of Heller's books that are better below, as for works by Vonnegut that are better than Slaughterhouse-5:

Sirens of Titan
Galápagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Cat's Cradle
Timequake (although I read that in one sitting after dropping a few tabs of acid, so my opinion on this one is definitely questionable)
2 B R 0 2 B
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Probably a couple other novels, haven't read them all yet.

overrated trash. Redditors probably swear by it though.

>Abbot and Costello "who's on first" bullshit for 2/3 of the book
>then it becomes high school senior-tier "the pointlessness of war"

Who is your favorite author if Vonnegut sucks so damn much?

Something Happened is unimaginative tedium that lacked the characters or humor of 22. It desperately needed an editor that had the balls to tell Heller to get to the point and write something worth reading. It is correctly disregarded.

Cat's cradle is carried purely by Vonnegut's craftyness as a writer. The climax is a big, fat platitude, and the interesting characters are disappointingly undeveloped. It's not worth reading.

I almost never say this.

You didn't understand the point of something happened.

Also, catch 22 isn't supposed to be funny.

Kjell Askildsen

>They're not artifacts of humor, like Don Quixote,
stopped reading there

It could have been a far better novel if it were half its current length. I read it and the first third flew by, but then I just kept seeing recurring joke after recurring joke, and realized how shallow it is. The point it tries to make about bureaucracy being bad and inefficient is lost in the absurdity of it all.

It becomes a HUGE slog near the middle.

Thanks for the reply. I'll absolutely read them soon.