Something Happened! But do I really care?

I don't usually give up on books, but I hereby publicly announce that I am giving up on Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

This is odd as a) Joseph Heller is a proper author who wrote at least one undeniable classic novel, Catch-22, and b) people sometimes say Something Happened is better.

It isn't.  It's very dull, with slab like pages of unparagraphed text dully reporting nothing happening.  It's about an advertising executive, right, and his troubled marriage and ... and I can tell you just had to stifle a yawn there.  Reading that sentence.  Now imagine the whole sense of "Who really cares about this?" stretched out over a 400+ page novel.

Though I am in no position to judge the novel fairly.  I didn't even make it to the halfway point.  Maybe the second half is astonishing.  Maybe the protagonist stops ruminating and gets a really big gun, a really hot and sexually voracious girlfriend, a fast car and zooms off to blow up Las Vegas.  Or maybe it builds to some astonishingly acute psychological or philosophical insight that would have forced me to re-evaluate every aspect of my own sad, petty life.

Or perhaps the dullness was the point, in which case, Joe, we didn't really need it spelled out for us at quite such length or in such banal detail.  Perhaps a short story would have done just as well.

Or maybe the whole thing was a joke and the point was that, in the whole novel, nothing happened.  In which case I hope Joe Heller was cremated as I may dig up his corpse just to punch it in the face.

Re-read Catch-22.  Don't bother with Something Happened.  Or, if you have read it, tell me when it gets good so I know what page to start from.

Because the first couple of hundred pages made me really, really wonder why I was living (not in a good way) and - more pertinently - why I ever bothered to learn to read.