Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961
Heller's circular, recursive logic captures exactly how institutions sustain themselves: by making sanity look like madness. The funniest serious novel in American literature, and the definitive anti-war novel. "Catch-22" entered the language as a concept. That is how you know a novel worked.
The case against
Heller has one joke, the self-sealing contradiction, and he tells it for four hundred fifty pages; the scrambled chronology means you meet the same anecdotes three times before they land. Women fare worse: nearly every one is a prostitute or a punchline, and the most important of them is named only as Nately's whore.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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