I'm sure they're not but I reserve the right to criticise as a reader rather than as a writer.
If I judged books on whether they were better than mine there'd be a whole different slant on the reviews.
not selling yourself enough there mind
Superb. 
So, I didn't get Brautigan's Willard and his Bowling Trophies (because I couldn't find a reasonably priced copy) and I didn't get The Fan Man because I happened to pick up a different Kotzwinkle in a Barney charity shop before we left, and didn't think much of it.
I did however get The Dead Father, as well as J.G. Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur, John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (fiver, World of Books) and I took up your recommendation of Something Happened.
In the order I read them:
J.G. Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur. I see there's a few positive reviews of this on here, so I won't labour the point. For me a brilliant fictionalised re-telling of the Siege of Lucknow in 1857. A great one to read in the searing heat of a holiday, as you let Farrell's easy prose drag you fully into the swelter of the Siege and the ever-declining fortunes of those barricaded inside. Just to think, even I could have prevented the Siege of Lucknow, because even I know you don't fuck with a hindoo's cow-thing. Superb.
John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor. I bought this because I recently read Barth's other gargantuan tome, Giles Goat-Boy, and absolutely loved it. The Sot-Weed Factor is like a cross between Tristram Shandy and Mason and Dixon, but with added debauchery. As I was reading it I started to google the place names, to see if they were real, and realised that the central character of the novel, Ebenezer Goode, actually existed in the 17th century and in fact wrote an epic poem called The Sot-Weed Factor (a tobacco plantation owner, essentially) in 1680-something. That poem (I read it too) was absolutely scabrous of life in colonial Maryland and Virginia, so Barth seems to have taken that as his starting point and has written a fictionalised account of Goode's travels where every character has at least three or four aliases, each double crossing, treble crossing or quadra crossing everyone else and their aliases (more crosses than a Vatican gift shop) in 800 nutty pages of much swiving (f***ing) and pox. Superb.
Donald Barthelme: The Dead Father. What the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck? In a good way like, the best what the fuck books can do things that could never be done in a film - this book just exists in a largely unexplained parallel universe. So there's this father right, and he's 2,200 cubits tall (about a mile, I looked it up), and he's dead, except he isn't because he talks and that, and he has a mechanical leg. For virtually the whole of the book he is being dragged by cables by 40 or so of his "children" (it's never made clear whether they are equivalently sized - suspect not). From time to time he does stuff like transform himself into a toupe so that he can sit on the head of one of his offspring and observe him getting a shag. The denoument is the dead father's final destination. I've started reading it again, I've got a feeling that Barthelme and I are going to be good friends. Double superb. There's an argument that the dead father is the embodiment of fatherhood itself, to whit...
Joseph Heller: Something Happened. Completely get it and completely agree with your appraisal. I tried to guess what the "something" was going to be, and I nearly got it right (wrong sibling). He's a really off character isn't he, and the way that Heller gets you to inhabit his head is amazing - at times I had to sense check that some of the things he was saying were appalling, so in-his-head was I that at times I suspected he was making me think that way
Been a cracking holiday
Home tomorrow (got another one in 7 weeks, so chin up eh?)
His novels are a hit or miss for me. I either really enjoy them or I absolutely hate them. I will have to check out Zero K.
"A mouse took a stroll through the deep, dark wood ......."
