It feels like I’ve been reading Joseph Heller’s Something Happened for an inordinately long time. When I check my reading notes, it is only three weeks since I began; slow reading to be half way through a six-hundred page book, but I have moved house (and library) within that period.

There is more behind my slow reading though. Rereading after an interval of twenty years, my reading of the book is so very different to my memory of its emotional resonance. My recollection was of dark comedy, but this book is barely comedic. It is painfully tragic, lacerating in impact. How did I fail to recall Bob Slocum’s painfully neurotic stream of consciousness? I read thirty pages and am shredded.