Fiction Review: Catch-22

I have wanted to read the WWII classic Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for years, but the story of how I actually read it stretches across two summers! I began it last year for my annual Big Book Summer Challenge and struggled with it. I set it down after a couple of weeks, thinking I would pick it up again, and ... it sat on my bookcase for another year. This summer, I picked it up again for Big Book Summer and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it very much and finished it easily. Here's the scoop on what's it about, what I struggled with, and what I ended up liking.

Set on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea during WWII, Catch-22 is focused on a U.S. Army Air Squadron. John Yossarian is at the center of the novel, though most of the rest of the squadron have a voice and a story to tell as well. The central conflict in the novel is that one crazy colonel keeps raising the required number of missions for the men. Every time one of them gets close to meeting the requirements and going home, the colonel raises the number of required missions again. Yossarian tries to get sent home on the basis of being crazy, but Catch-22 states that any man who says he is crazy and doesn't want to fly any more missions is proving that he's sane because no sane man would want to fly more dangerous missions. (This novel invented the now well-known term catch-22.) Scenes move from the camp, with tents and officer's club (picture M*A*S*H), to being on leave in Rome to the hospital, where Yossarian spends quite a bit of time trying to get sent home, to some very tense and sobering bombing flights. Through it all, Yossarian is trying to get sent home (by the end of the novel, the required flights has gradually been raised from 40 to 80) and is overwhelmed by the absurdities and madness that surround him.

This is a comic-tragic novel that mixes humor with the horrors of war, sometimes on the same page. When I started reading the book last summer, that uneven tone threw me. I had heard it was funny--and it is--but was put off by the juxtaposition of horrifying war scenes and people dying with humor. When I picked it back up this summer, I was more prepared and had come to recognize that that is the novel's intention: to highlight the absurdities of war by combining the two very different tones: again, think M*A*S*H, which accomplished that same purpose very well. While reading the second half of the novel (with a list of characters by my side to help keep them straight) this summer, I was able to better appreciate how it met this goal. I could be laughing out loud at some farcical scene on one page and sobered by the death of a dozen men on the next. So, I get it now, and I could recognize the genius in that approach, which was revolutionary when the novel was first released in 1955. One other negative, though, remained; the novel is quite misogynistic. The only female characters are whores and nurses (who are sexualized). This is, perhaps, understandable for a WWII novel set during battletimes, perhaps a product of its time as well, and I suspect it was part of its unorthodox approach to try to shock readers, but it was still disturbing to me at times. Other than that, I ended up enjoying the novel, appreciating its groundbreaking approach, and am glad that I finally finished it. I also enjoyed reading some of the end matter, including letters and essays from Heller himself, which provided more insights into the novel's intent and how it came to be.

453 pages, Simon & Schuster

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the start of the novel in a funny scene where Yossarian is censoring letters home, and/or download it from Audible.

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