As he chronicled many of the great convulsions and catastrophes of the last century, the novelist Joseph Heller came to understand better than most that as often as human beings behave irrationally, they just as often present their behavior as being perfectly logical. With his ruthlessly sculpted, precise prose, Heller also made clear that there is no better way to make a crazy idea appear sane than through language.

The most famous example came in his classic debut novel of the Second World War, Catch-22. Published in 1961, the book received mild acclaim from reviewers in its day but found deep and lasting popularity among a legion of independent-minded, eventually anti–Vietnam War young readers who were receptive to Heller’s slashing satire. In the most famous — and representative — exchange in the book, squadron physician Doc Daneeka asserts that military rules allow a pilot proven to be crazy to be grounded. But when our hero Captain Yossarian, seeking to avert what he assumes to be certain death if he continues his missions, insists that he is crazy, he is confronted with an explanation that has the patina of rationality — but only the patina. “You mean there’s a catch?” Yossarian asks, to which Doc Daneeka replies: “Sure there’s a catch. . . . Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”

Heller explains the military’s credible-sounding but actually senseless argument: A crazy person, otherwise eligible to be taken off missions, ceases to be crazy if he expresses a desire to save his hide. If he appealed to be grounded, he would be held to be sane and kept in the air, while a crazy person who expressed the wish to continue his missions would indeed be insane — but also kept in the air, because his insanity prevented him from doing what a sane person would: asking to opt out of his missions.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” Yossarian says to Doc Daneeka, tacitly accepting what Heller calls the “spinning reasonableness” of the Catch-22 formulation. “There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art.”

Heller, who was born in New York City in 1923 and died in 1999 at age 76, followed Catch-22 with six novels, several plays and screenplays, and a pair of autobiographical works. One hundred years after his birth, that first novel, with its enduringly anti-establishment tone, large intersecting web of characters, and biting perspective on the bureaucratic apparatus that manages fighting men, is still the only one of his works to have left a lasting impression on the popular imagination.

Even if Heller’s subsequent novels — including the Washington, D.C.–set Good as Gold (1979), the richly imagined historical comedy Picture This (1988), and Closing Time (1994), the semi-successful continuation of Catch-22 — largely failed to find a place in the canon, nearly all were distinguished by their author’s particular attention to language: “In all my novels,” he once said, “there’s concern with the way people use and misuse language to obscure and confuse and build barriers, the way that words are corrupted or the way words contradict themselves.”

In no Heller novel is this theme presented more artfully — or painfully — than in Something Happened, which was published in 1974 to even less immediate acclaim than Catch-22 but which can now be seen as arguably his greatest achievement. Here, Heller presents us with a character who, angrily and self-pityingly, goes over his life, times, and woes in the same clinical, clipped, efficient language as Catch-22. A middle-class, midlife-crisis-addled, fear-consumed husband and father of two boys and a girl, Bob Slocum describes his domestic existence and its attendant dissatisfactions, worries, and miseries as a scientist might talk about microbes: in excruciating detail and with a complete lack of empathy.

It is nothing for Slocum to say of his wife, “I want to get free of her before her health fails. I see an ailing wife in my future. There are eloquent forerunners now of chronic invalidism”; or of his youngest child, who is brain-damaged, “I no longer think of Derek as one of my children. Or even as mine. I try not to think of him at all”; or of a co-worker, “Kagle is a stocky man of less than middle height and was born with a malformation of the hip and leg (which also doesn’t help his image much).” Slocum says far worse but with no more fervor. The novel might be considered a study in the dangers of dispassion: to speak so callously about the people in one’s life reveals a profound alienation from them, and possibly from life itself.

In its subject matter, Something Happened might call to mind a work by Eugene O’Neill, but Heller writes it in the manner of a technical manual — a combination that makes the novel one of the bleakest imaginable. In a review in the New York Times Book Review, Kurt Vonnegut rightly called it “so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment.” Perceptively, he recognized its seemingly bland style as part and parcel of that pessimism: “Slocum’s sentences are so alike in shape and texture, from the beginning to the end of the book, that I imagined a man who was making an enormous statue out of sheet metal. He was shaping it with millions of identical tapes from a ball-peen hammer.”

Maybe that man was Heller himself, who, according to his biographer Tracy Daugherty, jotted down or typed countless Slocum-like thoughts, impressions, and lines over some 13 years — the heart of what became the novel. “Something Happened,” Daugherty writes in Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, “was a poetic meditation on the psyche of a disturbed middle-aged man, a series of excursions into waking dream states in which a lifetime of experiences, fears, and imaginative visions were distilled in fragments whose ultimate forms Joe could not predict, and did not try to force.”

For a flavor of what Vonnegut and Daugherty were talking about, consider these passages — pleasing in their symmetry, terrifying in their sentiments: “I know my daughter hates us because she makes a point of telling us so. She may hate us singly or she may hate us both together; she is versatile, my darling little girl, at least in this one respect, extremely gifted; without straining herself unduly, she can hate all three of us simultaneously, my son included, or she can begin hating him separately without apparent reason and be oblivious to us; or she can hate Derek, his nurse, our house, our community.” Or: “In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of the family is not afraid of any of the others, and that one is an idiot.” (Earlier, Slocum applies a similar formula to his office life, arriving at a sum of 145 people who, in addition to their fears of one another, are afraid of twelve men above them who run the company.)

Is Slocum merely a horrible man, or one whose horribleness is brought forth under certain cultural conditions? Interestingly, Something Happened avoids the trap of presenting Slocum as buckling under suburban conformity — a standard theme in novels of this ilk — by never testing his impressions of people against the people themselves. (As Vonnegut wrote, “Nobody else gets to talk, except as reported by Slocum.”) Heller is suggesting, therefore, that what ails Slocum is not so much the facts of his life, sad though some of they may be, but his attitude about them and obsessiveness over them. The title comes from Slocum’s conviction that his own nervous desperation springs from some vague wrong committed against him: “Something must have happened to me sometime.”

Slocum’s is the sort of unremitting navel-gazing and chronic sense of disappointment that would become characteristic of the Me Generation, a term coined around the time of the publication of the novel. Only the most self-absorbed of people would catalogue their frustrations, anxieties, and hatreds so completely. Slocum at various points worries over both trapping mice and finding live mice, the fact that his wife sleeps better than he does (“We hoard pillows”), and even the threat of government surveillance, the last expressed in his fear that “the CIA, FBI, or Internal Revenue Service has been investigating me surreptitiously for years and is about to close in and arrest me” — as though any such agency would care about him.

Yet, far from being a relic of the era that also brought us Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, the book has relevance for our own time of social isolation. We have the sense that Slocum spends as much time talking to himself as he does to anyone in real life, and if the novel had been written in our century, he would surely find himself at home in the depths of internet anonymity. He would air his grievances on social media, chat forums, or comment sections — another world of language that Heller, undoubtedly, would have made hay with.

Something Happened still startles us because Bob Slocum represents the worst in all of us: the inner voice that wants to snap at a spouse, berate a child, withdraw from responsibilities, express rage at the bad, bad world, and let oneself perpetually off the hook (as Slocum does in the tragic last act). Because Slocum is an educated and intelligent man, he can articulate these feelings calmly and coldly — as Doc Daneeka did in Catch-22 — which makes them sound perfectly reasonable to him. In his plodding way, Slocum has become inured to the horrifying nature of his thoughts, but Heller, in depositing us into his mind for more than 500 pages, makes sure that we never get used to them.