The truth of this last is attested to in perhaps a meretricious sort of way by the large diversity of responses Catch-22 received in the first year or two following its publication in 1961. They ranged from the idiotically uncomprehending at the lowest end of the evaluative scale to the prophetically perceptive at the highest, and in between there were the reservedly appreciative, the puzzled but enthusiastic, the ambivalent and annoyed, and more than a few that were rigid with moral outrage.
One of the best examples of the many mixed responses was Richard G. Stern’s brief but eloquent review that appeared in these pages on October 22, 1961. Mr. Stern saw the book as “a portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes” presented with “much passion, comic and fervent.” But “it gasps for want of craft and sensibility” and finally it is not a novel. “Joseph Heller is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.”
Way over at the other end of the critical combat zone were those who were extravagant in their praise of the book and entirely untroubled by its eccentricities of form. Most notable among these were Nelson Algren and Robert Brustein. Algren, writing in The Nation, called Catch-22 “not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel to come out of anywhere in years.” Mr. Brustein, in his New Republic review, was so superbly intelligent about the book that much of the later criticism has done little to improve his essential argument. He saw at once, for example, that the air force setting in World War II is only the ostensible subject of the book and that Mr. Heller’s achievement lies in his brilliant use of that setting as a metaphor or “a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies” afflicting the postwar era in general. Mr. Brustein was also able to foresee what later critics, after considerable equivocation, came to acknowledge: that the descent into phantasmagoric horror, which occurs in the concluding chapters of the book, is not a violation of the comic mode but a plausible vindication of it, since, as he put it, “the escape route of laughter [is] the only recourse from a malignant world.”
Finally, following the same pioneering logic, Mr. Brustein recognized that, given the premises Mr. Heller had established, Yossarian’s decision to desert, which has been much debated by critics, far from being a poorly justified conclusion for the novel, is in fact a meticulously prepared-for conclusion. It represents an act of “invested heroism,” “one of those sublime expressions of anarchic individualism without which all natural ideals are pretty hollow anyway,” if only because it is proof that Yossarian, alone of them all, has managed to remain morally alive and able to take responsibility for his life in a totally irresponsible world.
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If responses as appreciative as Mr. Brustein’s were a rarity in 1961, one reason may be that most reviewers were locked into a conventional and—as shortly became evident—an outmoded assumption about what war fiction should be. They had, after all, been conditioned by the important novels of World War I and reconditioned by the World War II novels of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Horne Burns, James Jones and others to expect that the authentic technique for treating war experience is harshly documentary realism. The exceptions, of course, were the sweetly hygienic productions of Marion Hargrove and Thomas Heggen, which were comic in an entirely innocuous way and depicted military life—mostly well behind the combat zone—as being carried on with all the prankish exuberance of a fraternity house beer party.
Coming into this context, Catch-22 clearly seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous. It was a work of consummate zaniness populated by squadrons of madly eccentric, cartoonographic characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction—or, for that matter, in any fiction. Yet the final effect of the book was neither exhilarating nor palliative. This was a new kind of comedy, one that disturbed and subverted before it delighted and was ultimately as deadly in earnest, as savagely bleak and ugly, as the most dissident war fiction of Erich Maria Remarque, Dos Passos or Mr. Mailer. In fact, many readers must have sensed that beneath the comic surfaces Mr. Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based. The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing mission but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of establishment power. It found expression in the most completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, self-serving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power.