Catch-22 reminds me a lot of those comedy/tragedy masks—you know the ones that are supposed to represent like, fine theater or something? Not that I’m comparing Catch-22 to some great Italian opera. All I’m saying is that the book oscillates cleverly between the absurdly humorous and the grievingly tragic.

So it starts off on the hilarious side. Here’s a bit that had me giggling aloud (rather embarrassingly, I might add, as I was surrounded by other people at the time):

The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel.

Ha! That one still gets me. Unfortunately, the laugh-out-loudness has caused some people to think I’m crazy, but I suppose that’s the price one must pay for decent literature.

And then, like great Italian opera (really, I hadn’t meant to expound the parallel this far, but look—its happening!), you start itching for the intermission because your legs are falling asleep and you really need to take a leak. This is the point at which the humor starts to wear thin and seemingly unrelated events are haphazardly thrown around and you’re wondering if it’s going anywhere or if it’s just one absurd situation after another.

But finally, you settle in for Act III and discover that the seemingly unrelated events are actually part of an ingenious narrative structure that Heller has planned out from the beginning. Jokes that were set up earlier finally deliver their punch lines. Only it turns out the jokes aren’t funny anymore. In many ways, Heller’s writing is like that of Kurt Vonnegut, with similar subject matter wrapped up in threads of absurdity. But while Vonnegut speaks of the horrors of war, Heller’s issues are more with the horrors of the War Department: it is the red tape of bureaucracy that gets his goat. Well, and war, too, but mostly it’s the bureaucracy.

Anyway, this book is smart and well written. It would be difficult for me to come up with the name of another author who could write such perfectly contradictory sentences while still making so much sense.