I’m listening to the audiobook version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. This is my book. It is, in my opinion, the finest American novel. It’s funny and insightful and disturbing and bizarre and mesmerizing and sorrowful, and while other novels can be those things too, no other has all of them at once, in such great profusion, coming at you in wave after wave. Reading the book is a brilliant and draining experience.
Things in the book happen fairly randomly. I mean, I say that and I know it’s not true…it took Heller 20 years to write it, and I’m sure quite a few of those years were spent organizing the incidents into their present order, which must have been a massive job. But they can sure seem random. For those who haven’t read the book, it jumps around crazily and apparently haphazardly between events, reporting them out of order, separated by arguments between the characters and flashbacks to events that happened, sometimes, decades before.
Also, things happen repeatedly. Incidents are introduced early in the book in brief outline form, then a few chapters later the book goes back to them with a little more detail, and then a few chapters later it does it again, and finally at the end of the book everything gets explained in full detail (the death of Snowden is the principal event that’s treated this way). I’m convinced that Quentin Tarantino based his editing of Pulp Fiction on the patterns in this book. I’ve read it easily a hundred times, and although I have a general sense of what came before what, I don’t believe I could sit down and write you a timeline showing the events of the book in chronological order. I’m not sure that Heller himself could do that.
So I report without shame that I listened to my new audiobook version of Catch-22 today for more than an hour before I realized that my iPod was set on random, and was playing the chapters out of order.
Things in the book happen fairly randomly. I mean, I say that and I know it’s not true…it took Heller 20 years to write it, and I’m sure quite a few of those years were spent organizing the incidents into their present order, which must have been a massive job. But they can sure seem random. For those who haven’t read the book, it jumps around crazily and apparently haphazardly between events, reporting them out of order, separated by arguments between the characters and flashbacks to events that happened, sometimes, decades before.
Also, things happen repeatedly. Incidents are introduced early in the book in brief outline form, then a few chapters later the book goes back to them with a little more detail, and then a few chapters later it does it again, and finally at the end of the book everything gets explained in full detail (the death of Snowden is the principal event that’s treated this way). I’m convinced that Quentin Tarantino based his editing of Pulp Fiction on the patterns in this book. I’ve read it easily a hundred times, and although I have a general sense of what came before what, I don’t believe I could sit down and write you a timeline showing the events of the book in chronological order. I’m not sure that Heller himself could do that.
So I report without shame that I listened to my new audiobook version of Catch-22 today for more than an hour before I realized that my iPod was set on random, and was playing the chapters out of order.
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