Catch-22 (1961)

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Joseph Heller

Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type.
--definition provided by website, Level22.

"Catch-22" is a funny and eye-opening satire about a US Army Air Corps Captain, John Yossarian , who wants to stop flying combat missions over Italy and France in World War II, and go home.

The "catch" for Captain is that in order to get the orders sending him home he has to prove himself crazy. But , Catch-22 anticipates this argument. The desire on his part to stop flying dangerous combat missions proves he is sane. And, therefore, he is still sane enough to fly missions as a bombardier over German positions in occupied France and Italy.

"That's some catch that Catch-22", Captain Yossarian says to his fellow officer, Doc Daneeka.
"It's the best there is," the good doctor replies.

Yossarian is not a coward and he's not a pacifist--he just feels like he's done his bit and wants to go home. It's the pedestrian humanity of this main character that makes this book so appealing. He cares about his friends and has the American capacity to protest unfairness--it's just that this is the military and there's a war on and those two facts can cover a world of injustice.

I first read this at fifteen and felt that it must have been written during the Vietnam War. A quick glance told me otherwise--it had been written in the 1950's and published in 1961. I found out later that the author himself had a background much like his main character, a bombardier in World War II who flew sixty combat missions, guiding pilots to enemy bombing targets. Heller's later memoir "There and Back" (1997) does the work of decoding the differences between the author and his character. Heller flew his missions, got his release, then went back to Brooklyn/Coney Island where he grew up. (He later moved from his boyhood home to the suburbs, as did many of his fellow vets.)
He wrote one chapter of the book in the middle Fifties and kept at it for several years while working in the advertising department at Time Magazine and similar positions. "Catch-22" is a monument--and an antidote--to the notion that there is or ever such a thing as a "good war" or that war novels should succumb to sentimental bouts of jingoism. Heller will have none of it.


Yossarian has flown dozens of dangerous missions and those desk-jockey turf warriors, Generals Peckem and Dreedle, et al, just keep rising the number of missions he has to fly on. Fifty missions becomes sixty. Sixty becomes seventy. Seventy missions threatens to become eighty. They keep moving up the standards you need to get a release back stateside. (I imagine a lot of oft-redeployed soldiers/marines and officers stationed in Iraq in today's American Armed forces could relate to this situation in spades.) Yossarian knows there are bombing crews waiting in North Africa to take the place of himself and his colleagues. But the generals in charge want to keep the bombing crews flying more and more missions so they can create their own publicity fodder and outdo the other American generals they are on "campaign" to belittle for selfish ends.



Part of the "fun" of this novel is how Heller creates outrageous characters and still they have the ring of truth. Yossarian is the foremost example--after one of his friends is killed in action, he takes off his uniform and sits naked in a tree waiting for a general to bestow a medal for bravery on him.

There is Major Major, who is only willing to see someone in his office if he is out of said office; Captain McWatt, a pilot who takes so many unnecessary risks in combat missions that Yossarian feels the need to leave his post to nearly-strangle him during one engagement (he later apologizes) ; Colonel Scheisskoff, whose sole enthusiasm is to get officers, enlisted men and cadets to march on Sundays (even in war zones); Colonel Corn, who is disappointed that the bombing run over Bologna has to be cancelled just because the Allies have captured the city, and the Chaplain, who has to explain to a senior officer that "the enlisted men worship the same God as the officers".

"Is that a fact?" General Pekam replies. "Well, I'll be damned."

And, in a great vignette, there's flight surgeon Doc Deeneka's wife, who takes her husband's generous private and public life insurance after he dies on a combat mission--and then ignores her husband's letters telling her there's been a mistake and he's still alive!

Heller had the gift that Swift and Dickens had--of making exaggerated characters come closer to the truth of the matter than a "realistic" novel. The best example of this to me is the incredibly immoral Milo Minderbinder, the personification of a certain breed of "entrepreneur" who pop up in the back-story of every war. Milo--who makes Graham Greene's Harry Lime look like a Red Cross nurse--believes war is too important to be left to the hands of the public sector. The fact that he winds up becoming a renegade dictator bombing his own country's air base and later helping the Germans defend a bridge is covered, Milo believes, by the fact that he offers stock shares to all his brother officers.
"Everybody gets a share," Milo replies when his self-interest is challenged as less than patriotic. He may be exaggerated in some respects, but it gets at the core truth of all war--it's often a rich man's game and a poorer man's fight. And, if that is too economic for you, that those in harm's way have more enemies in war than the people pointing guns at them.