I suppose that this reflects the particular circles in which I move, but certain books and authors come up in conversation over and over - The Outsider, The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Wuthering Heights, White Teeth, Foucault's Pendulum, Austen, Plath, Dostoevsky, Rushdie, Pynchon (admittedly in part because I always talk about him...), DeLillo, Eggers, Kundera, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Peter Carey, Tim Winton...some of these were on vce syllabi and others are basically unavoidable for anyone majoring in lit (at least at Melb Uni), but still they must have something in order to stand out from the many others of which or whom the same could be said.
Catch-22 is one such - a lot of people have read this book, and many of them have loved it (I'm not sure if I've remembered this right, but I think that it was Ben S's favourite book, at least as of a few years ago). So I'd always kind of intended to read it but never had any particular impetus to do so; having finally read the thing over the last few days, I've been wondering why no one ever told me how ridiculously funny the book is...I haven't laughed so much while reading a novel in ages, in cafes and on public transport as much as at home by myself.
'Ridiculously' is right, for the humour is deliberately absurdist. Much of it's slapstick - one passage which sticks in my mind is that in which Yossarian and Dunbar pull rank by telling a series of other patients (including one A. Fortiori) to 'Screw', culminating in Yossarian's run-in with Nurse Cramer - but there's a deeper purpose to the pratfalls and general grotesquerie, for it all highlights the pointlessness of war and bureaucracy (witness the inescapable influence of Wintergreen's low level malevolence, say).
There are quite a lot of loose ends - to name just a few, Doc Daneeka is left to languish as a dead man without there being any particular resolution of his fate, General Dreedle just disappears from the scene once he's replaced by General Peckem, nothing ever really happens in relation to Major --- de Coverley (though that last may be apt in terms of the figure's general inscrutability), and does Chief White Halfoat end up dying or not? - but perhaps that's apt...the narrative cycles and repeats itself, but this endless circularity ('Catch-22'!) needn't - and, in Heller's universe, doesn't - imply resolution or completion. Events are oriented around the logic of the titular 'Catch-22', which encapsulates the absurdity of it all, appearing and ramifying in guises and situations which are ever-changing but somehow always the same.
It's striking, too, that in some ways the novel evinces quite a conventional progression - the characters are introduced, we begin to sympathise with them (with figures like Yossarian and the Chaplain in particular, who eventually prove to be the (anti-)heroes of the book), and then, in order to make the author's point, they begin dying (Cathcart, Korn, Milo, and others of their ilk are, of course, insulated from any such risk, but the McWatts and Natelys begin falling with an indecent haste in the final sections of the book). They're not really grotesque characters, but they find themselves in grotesque situations (eg, war) - that reminds me of Pynchon's aphorism about paranoids (in Gravity's Rainbow?) which, paraphrased, goes something like 'paranoids are paranoids not because they're paranoid, but because they, fucking idiots, keep putting themselves in paranoid situations', but then one never really sympathises with Pynchon's characters, only identifies with the pathos of their Situations.
Catch-22 does remind me of Pynchon, and also of Dr Strangelove - these are easy comparisons, but none the less revealing for that ease, I don't think. But to me it seems to have more of a centre - a core - than Pynchon's work (not least in the forms of subjectivity and thematic development it evinces, and in its close, specific targeting of the effects of war) and more of a wildness, an unhingedness which is perhaps the prerogative of literature (as opposed to film), than Strangelove. Easy to read, but there's plenty going on.
