Catch-22
*** by Joseph Heller.Yossarian is crazy. He thinks everyone wants to kill him. The problem is, it's World War II, he's on a small island off the coast of Italy, and he's an American soldier. So he's probably right.
Not that being crazy is an unusual condition for a character in this book. In fact, there probably isn't a single character that anyone would describe as sane. The most well-remembered are probably Yossarian, who is as close to a protagonist as we get; and Milo Minderbinder, the raging capitalist mess officer who is so driven by the dollar that he'll bomb his own men, try to feed his men chocolate-covered cotton, and has mayoral or other high government appointments in numerous European cities.
Catch-22 uses all its crazy characters in the service of satire. Everyone represents some aspect of war, bureaucracy, military protocol, capitalism, or human nature that Heller thinks is somehow strange, or just plain wrong. He doesn't really go overboard trying to show us exactly what all this craziness might mean in terms of real life, which seems a little problematic.
Many books with serious agendas will sometimes go on for a chapter or two in the middle of the plot on some major theme, frequently in the form of one character lecturing another, reading a book, or some other expository device. I usually find such things borderline annoying, but Catch-22 goes in the opposite direction, never really guiding the reader into any of his ideas other than "war is hell," which would be as hard to miss as an elephant hiding behind a telephone pole.
I liked this book quite a lot. The style is of the same school of directness and dark humor as Kurt Vonnegut, but is different in a good way (maybe I'll come back to this when I think of a better way of saying that). I wouldn't have minded a dash of the philosophizing that would really nail down some themes, but that's okay. As the guy at the Ottawa Jiffy Lube told me when he saw me reading this, "That's a weird book, a real weird book." He's right, but it's a good one.
Posted by Joe on April 19, 2003 12:36 AM