Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Paperback – April 5, 2011

That was fifty years ago. I was ten or eleven, Catch 22 was a year old or maybe two. My brother, in college, recommended this book. I liked it so much I read it beginning on New Year every year until I went to college. I just reread it for the first time in forty some years. It’s still brilliant. It’s still startlingly funny and it still hurts down deep.
It rose above the realistic novels written immediately after the Second World War. It rose above Mailer and Jones and Shaw. When asked why he’d never written another book like Catch 22, Heller’s answer was “Who has?” Of course he was right. A couple of the great wave of novels that followed the Second World War stand shoulder to shoulder with the catch; Slaughter House Five and Gunter Grass’s Dog Years come to my mind. Lots of very good novels came out of the war, first novels from writers like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw and James Jones, Thomas Heggens, who won a Tony for the stage version of his novel, Mr. Roberts, James Gould Cozzens, who won a Pulitzer for Guard of Honor. None of those good books compare. Catch 22 entered the language. For a few years the blue paperback with the dancing soldier puppet was everywhere.
Yossarian, the novel’s hero, spends the novel trying not to die in the war. A difficult job, since his colonel raises the number of missions he must fly from twenty-five to seventy, in an attempt to impress the Saturday Evening Post. Since I last read this I served in the army, where sooner or later everybody winds up working for Colonel Cathcart. I’m thinking that besides its anarchic appeal for youth, there were at that time millions of Veterans many of whom shared it’s cynicism about the organizations they worked for.
If you’ve never read it, you’ve missed a great read. If you read it a long time ago It might be time to enjoy it again. I suspect you’ll still laugh whenever Heller tells you to. And like love at first sight it will probably still break your heart.

Read this book in high school an wanted to read it again so I decided to buy it. Super excited to have it and I also purchased the squeal, which I haven't had the time to read yet but is on the list for this summer while I'm not taking classes. This book is a satire making fun of the Vietnam war, if you are looking for a dark sense of humor this book is it, but if you don't understand that type of humor I would not recommend it. Joseph Heller does a great job at giving you a mental image of everything that is going on. It is one of those books that you can place yourself in like you are sitting right next to the character telling the story.

I understand why this novel is considered a classic. I also understand why literary critics are divided when it comes to this work. Heller's novel is witty and a clear statement about authority from a generation that often felt betrayed. The character development is excellent and the humor will make you laugh out loud from time to time. However, I felt like Heller made his point within the first hundred pages and that the last two, three, or four hundred were somewhat unnecessary. While brilliantly thought out, the writing style, which does match the overarching tone of the novel, is like someone shouting at you. This is a long book, so if you decide to be ambitious, be prepared.

.This book is a replacement for a lost one. I've read it many times. Though Catch - 22 was written 65 years ago, I find it relates to current leadership in our country. Rereading it brings me an odd sense of peace every time national and state politics get really crazy.

P.S. I thought the movie base on this book was mediocre.

I waited too long to read this novel. I wanted to like it more than I did. I'm in my early 50's. I think if I'd read it in my early 20's, or really late teens, without much life experience at all--and during the 1970s--I would have thought much better of it (probably not; I was old at 15). As it is, I come to this novel now with my own books and poetry published and much of life lived already, and here nearly halfway into the 2010s--and enough experiences to fill two lives or more. Experience colors perspective. Of course.

I won't get into plot details here. What little there are. I'm just providing some feedback after reading the book, and my take on things based on my perspective.

I've not a veteran; my experience comes from sitting down and talking in-depth with many veterans (special operators among them) about their service and combat experiences, from WW2 to Iraq (and several other locales in between). My father served 2 and a half years in the Pacific Theater during WW2 and was awarded four bronze service stars. I've talked with and listened to men relate their experiences of losing limbs and watching men die in combat alongside them. I know much more than the average non-military person about the meaning of the words loyalty, duty, respect, service, honor, discipline, and personal courage. These are traits mocked and denigrated in this novel, and these are traits that are mocked and denigrated in our popular culture today.

I told you that as preface to telling you this: Catch-22 is a funny (satirical and absurdist) novel in some little bits, but it's also a tedious and repetitive novel. I agree with Norman Mailer's assessment in an essay in my copy of the 50th anniversary edition that you could remove 100 pages from the middle of Catch-22 and you wouldn't notice as a reader; and, jokingly Mailer writes, neither would Heller: "not even the author could be certain they were gone."

By the time I'd read to page 125 I'd read all of what Heller had to give stylistically, primarily (more later). That is: each of the chapters from that point on presents essentially the same thing: a character, a little plot detail (what little narrative arc there is) to link to the greater "plot," then a self-contained "story" (really just a slice of life experience of that chapter's sort-of main character). In other words, as Mailer points out: Cut 100 pages in the middle and you've lost nothing of the experience of the novel.

As the novel progresses it becomes bitter and even mean-spirited. Heller lets loose in certain parts of the novel, showing his absurd anti-war sentiments. (Similar to John Lennon's dangerously childish and naive Utopian cult hit "Imagine.") You'll also get this from the extra material in the back of the 50th anniversary edition. Heller absolutely hated war. At all costs. His fictionalized account of American fighter planes strafing Americans is not funny, it's twisted. Read Heller's essay "Reeling in Catch-22" to see what the man really thought. How there was in the 1960s a "change in spirit, a new spirit of healthy irreverence." He goes on to call "Americanism....horsesh**." How it doesn't work. How it's not true. I wanted to say, Really, Mr. Heller? Well, I have a friend who served 2 years in a Chinese re-education camp who came to the U.S. who thinks, pretty much, exactly the opposite as you do. Or read Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Heller's attitude gels with Utopian peaceniks of the 1960s. It doesn't work so well in the modern realities of Russian gulags and Chinese re-education camps. And the post-modern world of new Islamic jihadist caliphates.

So, for me, where this novel fails miserably is when Heller is tearing down the appropriateness and necessity of war, and when he treads into bitter, completely absurd territory. In some spots I actually was pissed off at how the character Yossarian places other men in danger because of his actions, because he doesn't want to do his duty. That's beyond cowardly; it's not at all funny; it's inhuman.

Having said all that I will say this: I did enjoy portions of the book. Heller's take on the absurdities of the military bureaucracy are funny. There are laugh-out-loud moments, mostly early on, but as the novel goes on the humor lessens and the dreariness and repetitiveness and absurdity settles in and all around. Commanding officers up and down the chain are idiots and worthy of contempt. It wears thin after a while.

Back to my "more later" comment above: Curiously, the final 50 pages of the book are written in a serious (not completely absurdist-satirist) tone. Then the last 5 pages returns to Yossarian's nuttiness. The end.

During the Vietnam War this novel may have served its purpose to give some Americans what they thought they needed: an alternative "narrative" to what they thought America represented. At least what it represented to them living in their cocooned lives out in suburbia. Here we stand at the end of American empire in the first decade of the 21st century, and the novel reads to me like a child stomping its feet in front of its parents about how unfair the world is and how mummy and daddy don't know nothing about nothing and about how everything would be alright if only we could all play nice.

Here's a news flash, Mr. Heller: Life's not fair. The world doesn't care about you. Life doesn't owe you anything. Very often you are asked to look outside yourself and give yourself to something society deems the greater good; this is called real life. There is evil in this world. That's why there's no playing nice. And sociopaths (and a**holes) are at the top because their personalities give them the skills to stomp on good and just people's heads to get there, and stay there. That's the way it is.

If there's an analogy to be made in the movie world, it may be this: Catch-22 is to "war" what Office Space is to "the job". Both poke fun at the "insanity" of their environments by using exaggeration, but we all know that's not how it really is. At least, we should know.

It's OK:
3/5 on Amazon
2/5 on Goodreads