I must agree with Lester Hunt that Catch-22 — one of the few books I’ve started and could not finish — is The Most Overrated Novel of the Twentieth Century. I think his fourth point really hits home:
There is less than meets the eye. Some works of literature present themselves to you as pure entertainment and, once you are pulled into them, expand your mind with interesting and challenging ideas. There is more in them than initially meets the eye. Catch-22 proceeds in the opposite direction. It presents itself as dealing with great issues – and has nothing interesting to say about them.Take the title for instance. Bomber pilots have a a good reason to not want to fly any more missions – after all, the people you are trying to kill are shooting at you! And you don’t have to fly any more missions if it so happens that the pressures of combat have destroyed your sanity. However, if you ask to be excused from flying more missions on the grounds that you are insane, this exception does not apply to you, because not wanting to fly more missions is evidence of sanity.
That’s the “catch.” Pretty clever, huh? Really tells you something about the twisted workings of the military mind, doesn’t it? Well, no, it doesn’t. All it means is that the judgement of whether you are sane is not left up to you. Isn’t that obvious in the first place? After all, these people are forcing you to do something that no one wants to do. If they let you decide whether you are fit to do it, you just won’t do it. So the decision of whether you are sane or not has to be up to your superior officers.
But Heller doesn’t pursue this matter even the this pitifully low level of abstraction. He leaves it at the pretty clever, huh? level, leaving careless readers with an impression that there is something clever and deep here, whereas in fact there isn’t.
His list of reasons:
- It is a one-trick pony.
- It’s a bad argument.
- The tone is wrong.
- There is less than meets the eye.
- It is ignoble.