Title: Catch-22
Rating: 4 Stars
This is kind of a strange book to review. After all, people who don’t know that the novel even exists know the phrase Catch-22, so even if you haven’t read it, you might think that you have some idea of what it’s about. Guess what? You’re kind of right.
The essence of a Catch-22 situation is that you’re in a paradox. To accomplish something, you must be able to do something else. However, to do this something else keeps you from ever being able to accomplish the thing that you originally wanted to do.
Yossarian’s paradox is that, after having flown several dangerous missions where he’s faced near death, he no longer wants to fly. In fact, the theater that he’s flying in is so dangerous that you have to be crazy to want to fly in it. If a doctor diagnoses you as crazy, then you no longer have to fly. However, if you ask a doctor to diagnose you as crazy to make your flight status inactive, the very fact that you ask to stop doing something that everyone knows is crazy means that, paradoxically, you are sane and therefore must stay on active flight status. Yossarian has no choice but to continue to risk his life flying missions.
Paradoxes are just one example of the absurdities that run throughout the novel. Doctor Daneeka, the medical doctor of the flight squad, is terrified of flying. As a requirement, he must fly a minimal number of hours per month. He gets around this by having pilots falsely list him as a passenger on their flights. This works until the plane that he was supposed to be on crashes. Even though he’s standing right there, the fact that he’s on the manifest list means that he’s declared dead. Despite all of his efforts, he cannot reverse the declaration. By the end, he’s deprived of food and shelter and is living like a ghost.
Although this is clearly an anti-military novel, many of the situations described wouldn’t be out of place in any large bureaucracy.
Having spent decades working for a large corporation, many of the absurdities described in the novel didn’t faze me. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to do something and was told that I couldn’t because what I was doing was nonstandard. When I tried to determine what the standard was, I was told that it didn’t exist. I’ve been on many teams that has had budget to hire personnel but couldn’t get authorization to increase the team’s headcount. Of course, at the end of year, the team gets penalized for not spending to the budget.
As described in Catch-22, I knew many managers that were significantly more invested in personally looking good than in growing the company. Just like Lieutenant (later General) Scheisskopf and his obsession with parades, they were just interested in having all of their stop sign metrics the proper color.
Yet still, through it all, the Allies are winning the war. Reading the novel, this success seems mysterious. I felt the same working at a large corporation. I personally have not only seen made up numbers but have basically made up numbers myself out of something approaching thin air. I’ve seen this essentially everywhere I go and at every level that I have worked at. Yet, somehow, year after year, the corporation somehow managed to make more money than it spent. It never ceased not to baffle me.
Heller takes aim not just at the military. With Milo Minderbinder, you see capitalism out of control. He makes deals so crazy, byzantine, and shady that no one can figure out how he makes a profit. As long as his bottom line is profit, there are no rules. He hires American pilots to strafe American camps. He hires Nazi air defense to defend against American attacks. Whenever anyone questions him, he just gives assurances that everyone has a share. This shared responsibility somehow absolves all.
If you look at 2008 and the housing crisis, with its plethora of financial devices such as CDOs and CDSs, you see the exact same deadly combination of amorality and complexity for the sake of complexity. The insanity from that period isn’t that far off from Minderbinder’s excesses.
In terms of blemishes, it was a novel that Heller started working on in the very early 1950s. Therefore, not surprisingly, the relatively few women characters are caricatures at best. His treatment of prostitutes is especially problematic. He does beat the paradox idea pretty much to death. Also, it’s a sprawling novel containing many characters. As such, it can be a bit messy to read.
Even so, it is a classic comic read that leaves a bittersweet taste but ultimately does end on a message of hope that Yossarian will ultimately find a way out of his own personal Catch-22.
dorkenstein 