I re-read Catch-22 over what turned into a six-month period -- started in late November, left to one side for vast stretches of time, finally finished May 3rd -- in part because I read Slaughterhouse-Five last year and wanted to return to that well, that mid-century yawp against the barbarity of war and pointlessness of everything. And partly because I've been having trouble getting motivated to read, and finding time to read, and finding places to read, this past year or so. I always love strong writing voices, and sometime really great books jump-start my enthusiasm for reading and books.
Not this time, obviously.
No one is born knowing anything, and everyone is ignorant of millions of things. So I shouldn't assume all of you, or even any of you, know instinctively about Catch-22.
Joseph Heller was born in 1923, and went off to WW II in the Army Air Corps, where he flew 60 combat missions as the bombardier of a B-25 over Italy. He came back, went to college, got an MA in English from Columbia, went into advertising, wrote some stories. His first novel was Catch-22, in 1960, about the bombardier of a B-25 over Italy, in a group where the number of missions keeps going up.
He wrote other stuff later. Some of it is very good. None of it had the impact of Catch-22. Hardly anything has; it's generally considered one of the best books of the 20th Century, with various adjectives, depending on who's talking: American, by a man, about war, post-WW II, post-modern, etc.
Catch-22 is told in a nearly chaotic, circling fashion, with lots of chapters of varying length, which are not necessarily presented in chronological order. Yossarian, that bombardier, is at the center of the book, but he's surrounded by a large cast of oddballs, weirdos, and aggressive lunatics. It is amazingly funny on the surface and deeply heartbreaking when you stop to think for a second about any of it. More characters than you think will die horribly in the course of the book, and you may even laugh at the ways they die. It probably goes on a bit too long. It doesn't end as well as it could -- it has the kind of structure that's fiendishly hard to close out, and it takes a last-minute turn to break out of its core conceit to get to something that works as an ending and is not unhappy.
A novel is a long piece of writing with something wrong with it. A great novel is an electric long piece of writing with something wrong with it. Catch-22 throws off sparks almost continuously for nearly four hundred of its 450 pages, and has a Bruegelesque tour-de-force chapter of a chaotic, horrifying occupied Rome even after that point. So don't get the idea that I'm complaining.
If you know Catch-22, you know this next quote. If you don't, though, it explains everything.
There was only only catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and he could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.Not everything about Catch-22. Everything. The 20th century. Modernity. The state of mankind. Life, the universe, and everything. That kind of deal. There is only one catch, but it's the best there is.
Catch-22 is a book about being trapped in an insane, irrational world, with insane, irrational people, doing insane, irrational things. Our world. Yossarian may be the only sane man. He may instead be insane in a slightly different, more self-centered way. And what's the difference, anyway?
So Catch-22 is a great book that is paradoxically easy to put down. Each chapter is nearly a separate short story. It's filled with great moments and quotable lines and intense personalities and the urgency of potentially imminent death. And I did put it down, repeatedly, before I finally got to the end.
This edition is the 50th Anniversary paperback -- there may also be a simpler version for the new TV series, but I don't know about any of that. It has a fawning, windy introduction by Christopher Buckley, which just delays actually getting into the book. But it also has an extensive collection of backmatter (over 60 pages!), which is interesting to publishing-nerds like me, with a potted history of the writing and publishing of Catch-22, a preface by Heller from 1994, and nine other critical/historical/explanatory pieces by various folks from the past fifty years. You can probably find a used copy cheaper if you're not interested in all that bumf, and, for your first time reading Catch-22, you probably won't want any of it.
But Catch-22 is a book that you should think about reading at least once. It has its flaws -- I mentioned the ending, and it also has very few women, and those even more caricatured than the men -- but it's a major book about modern life that is as true today as it was in 1960 or in the 1940s it depicts. It is funny and true and shocking in almost equal measure, and there is very little else like it.
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