Catch-22: an imprudent review

A very imprudent review, scandalous even

Dear L,

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is probably the most embarrassing book I’ve ever recommended. And it was embarrassing mainly because at the time I recommended it I’d never actually read it.

This is the problem with recommending books. If you’re 80 or 90% done with anything you have a pretty good idea what’s in it. The problem with Decline and Fall was that it was so funny I started recommending it at 30%. I’d already been talking books with a coworker, and I decided to tell her everything I knew about Waugh. There was only one problem, and it was that I didn't know anything about Waugh. And a hundred times worse than this, it was that one of my co-worker’s parents is African.

If you’ve read Decline and Fall, you know this is a big problem.

What I didn’t know 30% of the way through was that one of Waugh’s characters thinks black people are stupid ooga-boogas and jungle-bunnies. And when did I find this out? On a Saturday morning, right after making the recommendation to a black person on Friday. Thus the next two days were spent biting my nails — hoping, both awake and asleep, that my coworker didn’t give a shit about my opinion.

I was happy to find on Monday morning that my gushing appraisal was underwhelming. The book remained unpurchased and unread, at least long enough for me to tell her to skip it. She thanked me, I promised myself I'd never recommend anything I hadn’t finished yet, and I bring this up today to prove that I don’t always keep all my promises.

What I'm getting at is, I’m a hundred pages into Catch-22 and I’m giving it my full recommendation. Like Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the humor is sharp and ridiculous. Also like Waugh, the prose is so fresh that it doesn’t matter what Heller says so long as he keeps saying it.

Is the book uplifting? Is it wise? Is it inspiring? I’m sorry to say on all counts, absolutely not. It is a book of such incomparable horseshit — such random, half-baked, almost-incoherent absurdity, full of lechers and liars, psychos and racists, cowards and hypocrites, hypochondriacs and drunks — that I’m recommending it here against the plain dictates of experience and morality. For the first 50 pages I couldn’t even tell who was who, and what they were supposed to be doing, or if they were even doing anything at all. Once I got 70 pages in, I decided to re-read the whole thing, and was rewarded with exactly zero further understanding — just a roaring, soaring roller-coaster of scandal and idiocy.

Thus far there's no discernible plot, and it’s so good that I don’t even care. So if you’re reading this 50 years in the future, and you’re, say, 200 pages ahead of me, and Heller says something so rotten and tasteless that you’re wondering how could somebody like J do this to me, I remind you that I’m only a hundred pages in, and thus far it’s a winner.

What is Catch-22 about? So far, just some coward named Yossarian trying to not fly planes in World War 2, and the completely deranged cast of characters he runs into mostly while not flying. "Catch-22,” the catchphrase rule for which the book is named, is probably the least interesting joke of the book, and, thus far, the “plot” doesn't even revolve around it. I just keep going back for passages like this,

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

If this is your kind of thing, Catch-22 is full of it (and I mean that in both ways). Heller writes about a selfish sourpuss named Doc Deneeka,

[H]e was a very warm, compassionate man who never stopped feeling sorry for himself.

And of winning an award for marching drills,

[T]he idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

Probably too logical in the end, and missing the fact that mastering something and ranking yourself high are pleasures in themselves — no matter how “inconsequential.” But this is the thing about comedy. It’s the most fun when somebody takes themselves too seriously.

There are other passages less sharp than these: beautiful, flowing cascades of nouns and adjectives and verbs that you want to read over again just for the hell of it. Such as this passage about a hospital patient killing time,

Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice at night with the gun he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. His bait was a bar of candy and he would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting for the nibble with a finger of his other hand inside a loop of the line he had run from the frame of his mosquito net to the chain of the unfrosted light bulb overhead. The line was taut as a banjo string, and the merest tug would snap it on and blind the shivering quarry in a blaze of light. Havermeyer would chortle exultantly as he watched the tiny mammal freeze and roll its terrified eyes about in frantic search of the intruder. Havermeyer would wait until the eyes fell upon his own and then he laughed aloud and pulled the trigger at the same time, showering the rank, furry body all over the tent with a reverberating crash and dispatching its timid soul back to his or her Creator.

And this passage about a lecher:

Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man.

Something any healthy man can relate to. And in my favorite chapter so far, the one about Major Major, this long (but perfect) passage,

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his mother, his father and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda. It was not an easy task for him to go through life looking something like Henry Fonda, but he never once thought of quitting, having inherited his perseverance from his father, a lanky man with a good sense of humor.

Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.

And this psychologically true passage in the same chapter,

Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will.

I could add more passages, more quotes, and rant more about this filthy and ridiculous book — but what’s the point? Little I can say about it would be better than what Heller has already said. As such, at this point — I remind you, about one-hundred pages in — I give it my recommendation. At least before I run into something which totally ruins it, and have to apologize in a whole other essay.

Yours,

-J

March 2nd, 2026

P.S. The last “other favorite passage” of mine.

Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

The men had loved flying behind Yossarian, who used to come barreling in over the target from all directions and every height, climbing and diving and twisting and turning so steeply and sharply that it was all the pilots of the other five planes could do to stay in formation with him, leveling out only for the two or three seconds it took for the bombs to drop and then zooming off again with an aching howl of engines, and wrenching his flight through the air so violently as he wove his way through the filthy barrages of flak that the six planes were soon flung out all over the sky like prayers, each one a pushover for the German fighters, which was just fine with Yossarian, for there were no German fighters any more and he did not want any exploding planes near his when they exploded.

Only when all the Sturm und Drang had been left far behind would he tip his flak helmet back wearily on his sweating head and stop barking directions to McWatt at the controls, who had nothing better to wonder about at a time like that than where the bombs had fallen.

“Bomb bay clear,” Sergeant Knight in the back would announce.

“Did we hit the bridge?” McWatt would ask.

“I couldn’t see, sir, I kept getting bounced around back here pretty hard and I couldn’t see. Everything’s covered with smoke now and I can’t see.”

“Hey, Aarfy, did the bombs hit the target?”

“What target?” Captain Aardvaark, Yossarian’s plump, pipe-smoking navigator would say from the confusion of maps he had created at Yossarian’s side in the nose of the ship. “I don’t think we’re at the target yet. Are we?”

“Yossarian, did the bombs hit the target?”

“What bombs?” answered Yossarian, whose only concern had been the flak.