I don't know if I can do justice to how terrific this book is... so here's my pitch for why you should read it if you haven't already, because maybe you made the same mistake I did.
This is the 50th anniversary year of the publication of CATCH-22 and I can't speak to whether the military is more absurd than it was 50 years ago, but I'm comfortable with the grand assertion that modern life is more absurd than it was 50 years ago.
I knew CATCH-22 was about World War II; I knew it was funny but dark, somewhere along the lines of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (I can address the accuracy of that in a bit); and I knew what a Catch-22 was, as one of those cultural gems one picks up. I assumed that based on those facts, I pretty much knew what this book was going to be "about"...
...omitting of course that the absurdity of Catch-22, as revealed in perhaps the first 50 pages of this book, is deepened and multiplied throughout the book, to the extent that you realize that you also are living under the obscure military rule that gives the book its name (trivia alert! It was originally Catch-18) and that it's not just "oh, how funny, what is one to do!" but that it can make you crazy... just not crazy enough for you to exempt yourself from it.
And the only way to express that there are stakes to that is to set that story of contradiction against a literally life-or-death backdrop, where Yossarian may actually have to die in order to get out of combat missions (and even that's not enough, given that he still lives with a dead man! Or does he.)
This past weekend I was reading a review of Nathaniel Philbrick's new book WHY READ MOBY DICK?, making the case for Melville's book as the ur-text of American literature. I can't lie, my first reaction to this wave of press was "But I diiiiiiid." Is Melville that unknown to people in America as a whole? Did this book really need a champion? (All this I say without actually having read Philbrick's book, which I might yet do anyway.) From there I jumped to which book I would choose, cycling through old favorites like THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and THE GREAT GATSBY and at-first-overlooked novels like THE SUN ALSO RISES and OUR TOWN. And out of all of those, I realized that the one I would pick would be CATCH-22, in spite of its baggy middle and the mild injury that there isn't more Major Major in it (wordplay!)
This book ought to be to young-ish adults what ON THE ROAD is to teenagers. The fact that Heller wrote a particular sort of book better than I ever will is somehow not dampening to the spirit. This is a book to be celebrated. Why read CATCH-22? Because you're already in it -- that's why.
"Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?" --Joseph Heller
Ellen vs. ML: 56 read, 44 unread
Next up: I skipped FROM HERE TO ETERNITY for this, so probably that?
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