The title of Joseph Heller’s first novel has become—aptly enough—a catchphrase, common parlance for the kind of double bind that bureaucracies breed with astonishing fecundity. Captain John Yossarian, the protagonist of Heller’s pioneering and influential satire, is “moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity” of the “spinning reasonableness” that Catch-22 expressed: “There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art.” From those parts Heller spins a novel of mordant originality, exposing the obscenity of war via a blackly comic machinery that is fueled by Yossarian’s attempts to escape its horror.
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