Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)

Joseph Heller's first novel, Catch-22, met with mixed reviews on its publication in 1961. Critics at the New York Times were unsure it was a novel at all, applauding its energy and originality but frowning at its "lack of design" (Stern 1961) and "array of devious figures" (Prescott 1961). To endorse Catch-22 wholly jeopardized one's patriotism, for the antihero at the center of the action, the reluctant bombardier Yossarian, heralded an inversion of national values that turned cowardice into sanity and desertion into compassion. What looked from a conventional standpoint like vulgarity or "want of craft and sensibility" (Stern 1961) would be earmarked decades later as the ingredients of a new narrative art that mixed high and low culture, hitching T.S. Eliot to the Marx Brothers in a skeptical or postmodern vision of the emerging technocratic world order. In the same year that Philip Roth lamented the inadequacy of the writer's imagination to a fast-changing reality, Heller's blend of low comedy and moral drama indicated how to catch up with it, replacing the orderly development of plot and character with repetition, travesty, and comic inversion in a postheroic quest for sanity in a mad, immoral world.