Happy 50th Birthday, Catch-22

by Brendan Kiley - The Stranger, Seattle.

by Joseph Heller

There's no such thing as the Great American Novel, of course. That's just a useful fiction, a framing device for thinking about which novels matter to you and which don't. But if there were a Great American Novel, my contenders would include Huckleberry Finn, Native Son, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Catch-22. I'd put all of them in a boxing ring and then bribe the referee to give Catch-22 the benefit of the doubt. (I know, I know—no ladies in the ring, which seems chauvinistic. But if there were a generalized Great American Writer fight—short stories, etc.—I'd put my money on Dorothy Parker and Flannery O'Connor.)
Catch-22 isn't the biggest or prettiest novel in the bunch. But it may be the toughest—its cruel and ingenious internal logic allows it to drop lines like "He wandered back in a heartbroken daze, his sensitive face eloquent with grief" and "Few people died unnecessarily" as punch lines. Catch-22 is a series of jokes so thoroughly wounding and true, you'll want to cry. And it's 50 years old this month.

• The novel was published in 1961 (though its author, Joseph Heller, started writing it in 1953) and concentrates on a bunch of American bombardiers stationed on an island off the west coast of Italy during WWII. But saying Catch-22 is a novel about bunch of WWII bombardiers is like saying Huckleberry Finn is a story about two guys on a rafting trip. Catch-22 is about everything. It's about selfishness and sanctimony, the perverse logic of capitalism, nurses and chaplains, parades and murder, heroism and cowardice, love and lust—all the stuff that matters. It's a 450-page masterpiece of episodic curlicues that vacillate through time, each chapter between 5 and 15 pages long.
• Full piece here.