3 out of 5

I read this at the right time. I see so much of my own writing style, and sense of humor, in the book – as well as, during this reread, experiencing twinges of memories at lines and statements that so greatly impacted me, causing many scribblings of quotes in highschool notebook margins – that I truly cannot say what I would be like without Catch-22. And yet, I don’t think it’s a great book, and is rather ineffective in what I would now interpret as its ‘point;’ I’ve experienced better takedowns of life’s loopy logics in other media, and Heller himself would deliver smoother elucidations on this theme, even as soon as his following book, Something Happened. I can now see, from those quotable quotes, that I was more affected by standoffish sentiment – very appealing to a “everything makes sense but nothing makes sense!” pre-teenager – than any deeper meaning.

But damn, I can’t undervalue the eye-opening shock this book offered to my brain, nor can I say that I’ve ever again read something so truly and deeply invested in its own nonsense, that still remains rooted and grounded by it-makes-sense-in-context threads (essentially the Catch-22 concept and term that the book would create); I started down this path with Kurt Vonnegut, and gobbled up his books, but eventually began to feel that his writing followed a more lucid, beat styling than something that paid off in line-by-line analysis. He broke the rules of writing that I “knew,” but it was Heller who taught me that you could accomplish insanely great things by then reforming those rules to meet your own needs. Surely, that led to a lot of bullshit poetry and prose (and stories) from early me, just as I think huge chunks of Catch-22 are actually kinda bullshit, but then again, I was a kid; Heller was, what, 30 or something at time of publishing? And while that could be seen as a detraction, it sort of makes the accomplishment more impressive: think of how much deprogramming he had to do to get his fingers and brain working in this fashion.

Modern Me nonetheless spies some excess in Catch-22. I’ve checked out deeper breakdowns of the book’s structure, which starts with scene-change-every-other-line stream of linking thoughts – one sentence leads from one character and moment to the next – to a more ‘settled’, vaudevillian beat-by-beat mid-section, which spreads its effects over a wide cast of characters and slowly becomes a bit less chiding and a bit more questioning, until near the very end, when there’s a huge 4-page, unbroken wall of text before the book’s darkest moments; there are justifications for spending hundreds of pages repeating the gag of paradoxical language (“To live forever or die trying” was my standout quote, but conceptually extend that style to every conversation characters have) but I’m not convinced its needed, or even purposeful. I sometimes feel like Heller was just playing around until the thing came together, jerking Yossarian back and forth ‘tween idiotic generals and majors and continually increased mission count requirements, with some connecting elements possibly retroactively stuffed in so we can justify their impact later on. When Heller settles on scenes, the emotional (or comedic) impact is ratcheted up significantly; otherwise, the constant tête-à-tête dialogue is of the ‘a little goes a long way’ style. But again, I sort of get it: I used to reread the book constantly after I discovered it (via my older brother) in either late Middle School or Freshman year, and while my reading efforts back then were kinda just zooming through (and not necessarily absorbing) big ass books that I thought made me sexy, I know I vibed off of the anarchic energy of the book’s 300 page Marx Brothers yuks, and I can imagine a similar energy happening while it was being written, taking each character thread as far as it could go.

Which is perhaps another ‘problem’: Heller’s usage of ‘character’ is selective. Yossarian, mostly our POV, constantly caught in antics as a Captain during WW II, fretting over how everyone – on his side and the other – is trying to kill him, directly or indirectly, picks and chooses when he’s willing to go all-in on the Catch-22 roundabout logic, or when he wants to rant about its sins against mankind. Similarly, most characters are just proxies for specific forms of nonsense (the tough-talking general; the naive Chaplain), but then, randomly, Heller will have them aware of their own mortality. It’s whatever the mood of the scene is, and not necessarily anything that follows a linear trend per character; so Yossarian is only our lead because his name pops up more often, until the final pages of the book when everything culminates in a quite brilliant descent and ascent of emotion and events. These pages are what I latch on to now, and hope that memory serves that I’ll see more of them when I revisit Heller’s following books.

I don’t want to imagine my life without Catch-22. But I think I’m lucky I read it when I did, because if someone handed it to me now, it’s very possible I would roll my eyes at its incredible indulgences, and what I see as kind of amateurish padding and forced plotting in its first half or so. It was Heller’s first book, though; it’s rare that we give Firsts the majority of the acclaim, and indeed, my favorite authors would generally hit a sweet spot in the middle of, or later in their careers, Heller included. It’s hard for me to admit that Catch-22 doesn’t work so well for me now, but that regret is possibly due to its notoriety and my nostalgia for it; I do think there’s enough here – stuff I still laughed out loud at, or was struck by its simple, straight-forward and sudden sense – that I would probably give another Joe Heller book a shot, had this been my first. And then, perhaps, it would follow the trend mentioned above: I could rightfully say Something Happened or Picture This are the best reads, and Catch-22 is interesting in the way it got things going, but flawed.

Maybe that will end up being the case. But yeah, I’m goddamned lucky I read it when I did.