→ November 11, 2009
→ By

The Case of the Missing Books.

I’m back and online again. I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 3 pm EST (and maybe again later that half hour) to discuss the NL Gold Glove Award winners. There’s at least one awful oversight on par with Franklin Gutierrez from the AL awards. Klawchat is on for tomorrow at 1 pm EST.

Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books is the first in the “Mobile Library” series of pseudo-detective novels, but wasn’t good enough to get me to attack the second book (which one of you mentioned in the comments on the last post was unreadable anyway). The story revolves around sad-sack librarian Israel Armstrong, a Jewish vegetarian from London who takes a librarian job in a rural Irish town, sight unseen, only to find that the job has changed to one overseeing a mobile library, and that all fifteen thousand books have gone missing. This leads Israel to play detective – badly – to try to find them.

For the most part Sansom just borrows gags from other writers or, in the case of all the bathroom humor, from time immemorial. The vegetarian-served-a-meal-of-meat gag? (Saw that in Everything is Illuminated, and it wasn’t funny then, either.) The blue-collar guy with an unexpected interest in classic literature? The driver who can’t seem to keep his car on the road? Jokes about Israel’s name? There was very little original humor in the book, and with a pretty thin plot – halfway through the book, Israel is barely settled in the town of Tundrum, and I wouldn’t say he makes any progress in the case until the final 50-60 pages – there’s nothing left to sustain the book. It’s a quick read because of all the dialogue, and some of the dialogue is quick and snappy, but it raises the question of whether Sansom can write decent prose, and some of the dialogue brings an unnecessary level of detail around ordinary events in Israel’s day.

Next review will be much more positive, though – Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.

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→ September 23, 2009
→ By

The Risk Pool.

My column on the 18U Team USA trials went up the other day. You can hear my hit from Mike & Mike in the Morning today and from AllNight last night. Both were recorded on the same phone but I sound quite different in each hit. Go figure.

Richard Russo was already one of my favorite novelists after I’d read just two of his books, Empire Falls and Nobody’s Fool*, but The Risk Pool cemented my affinity for his writing. I’m not sure if there’s a contemporary American novelist out there who can match Russo for both creating flawed characters and showing a clear affection for them despite their flaws, written in clear, modern prose with plenty of humor.

*Apropos of nothing, I read Nobody’s Fool right before reading William Kennedy’s Legs, then read this book right after reading Kennedy’s Ironweed, with all four novels set in upstate New York. This wasn’t a plan to read novels in geographical order – it just sort of happened.

The Risk Pool is the story of the relationship between Ned Hall and his parents, the shiftless, irresponsible Sam Hall and the wife, Jenny, he abandoned – mostly – when Ned was born and Jenny’s father died. Ned spends his childhood shuffled from Jenny to Sam and back to Jenny again, through Jenny’s mental collapse (caused in no small way by Sam) and Sam’s movement in and out of jail, sobriety, and the town (Mohawk) where Ned grows up.

Although the story is told by Ned and populated by Russo’s regular crew of local wackos, the star of the show is Sam. The elder Hall comes back from World War II a changed man, living entirely in the present, abandoning his responsibilities toward his strait-laced wife and newborn son without actually skipping town or exiting their lives entirely. Russo could easily have made Sam a villain, or just written about him with derision or obvious distaste, but Russo always embraces his flawed characters, and you can see that he enjoyed crafting Sam and putting him into odd situations to see what he’d do.

Ned finds himself torn physically and emotionally between his two parents, feeling more affection toward his father than he does toward his fragile, smothering mother, while trying not to become too much like either parent. His success or failure in this endeavor isn’t revealed until the final few pages of the book, but that question – how will Ned turn out – has a strong narrative pull in a book that doesn’t offer many unresolved questions to drag you forward. The story is driven by the characters, and because the characters are interesting, that’s just about enough.

The two Russo novels I read both had plenty of humorous moments, but The Risk Pool was definitely the funniest, both in situational comedy but also in Russo’s prose. There’s an extended riff when Ned ends up with the prim wife and timid daughter of one of Mohawk’s wealthiest families where Russo’s prose style emulates Wodehouse’s for a half-dozen pages, mostly as Ned mentally mocks the older woman’s bizarre mannerisms:

She discovered the lights at the same instant the strangling Lincoln gave a violent lurch forward, coughed once, and died.
“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Ward, as if she could imagine no way out of this unforeseen circumstance and suspected that they would now have to purchase a new car.

If The Risk Pool has a flaw, it’s Russo’s excessive use of disposable characters. In his later books, Russo uses slightly fewer side characters and integrates them more fully into the main plot, whereas The Risk Pool has more characters that Russo shunts aside when he’s done with them. I also found the relationship between Sam Hall and his on/off girlfriend Eileen – and Eileen’s son, Drew – a little unclear in the end, particularly where Sam and Eileen had stood before Sam married Jenny and went off to war. Whether this was a deliberate omission on Russo’s part or a minor plot hole he didn’t close isn’t clear (and I can’t say more without spoiling one of the book’s few mysteries).

Next up: Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Edge of Sadness. Also, for those of you who were interested in a “book club” of sorts, how about Don Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread? (Granted, I might have made that subtitle up.) It’s coming up in my queue, and it’s on the short side so it should be accessible to everyone. If I have a handful of takers, I’ll fix a discussion date about two weeks ahead of us.

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→ September 13, 2009
→ By

The City of Dreaming Books.

I had two articles posted on Friday, one on the Brewers’ immediate future another on Mat Gamel, Alcides Escobar, and Colby Rasmus. I have also filed a blog entry on Wade Davis that isn’t up yet.

Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear was one of my favorite books of 2008 (books I read last year, that is, not books published last year), and his follow-up, The City of Dreaming Books, looked like it was more of the same, with a setting of particular interest to me, literature.

It is, like Bluebear, wildly imaginative, full of wordplay (including fictional author names like Asdrel Chickens) and incredibly sharp characters and settings. Moers has a gift for making the insane seem normal and for precise descriptions of places that evoke clear images in the reader’s mind, and, as in Bluebear, Moers has his main character, Optimus Yarnspinner, go through a series of vaguely ridiculous character-building adventures, although Yarnspinner does less to help his own cause than Bluebear did.

The problem with City is that the action plot isn’t well connected to the character-development plot. Yarnspinner spends 2/3 of the book in the catacombs under Bookholm and, while there’s plenty of action down there, the emphasis is on his development as a storyteller – both the effects his experiences have on his thinking and his ability to actually craft a story. There’s an obvious revenge plot at work, with Yarnspinner and one other prisoner looking for escape and vengeance on their captors, that portion of the plot is set aside for hundreds of pages. Moers brings it back when Yarnspinner and his comrade make their final escape attempt at the end of the book, and the resolution was quick, obvious, and cursory. I’m not arguing with the general plot, but with the lack of integration between that thread and Yarnspinner’s time in the catacombs. City is still a great read, but more for its cleverness and humor than for the action-oriented portion of the plot, and Bluebear was more imaginative and funnier.

Next up: The reissue of Leo Durocher’s classic memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, due out on Tuesday.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 25, 2009
→ By

The Hunter and Heavy Weather.

Cape Cod League top 30 prospects: 30-16 and 15-1. I’ll be on ESPN 1000 Chicago’s 9-11 pm program, but we’re taping it beforehand so I don’t know exactly when I’ll be on.

—

Richard Stark’s The Hunter is a different sort of hard-boiled novel from the ones I usually read. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about good guy private eyes who were tough and comfortable with moral ambiguity but rarely strayed into darker territory. The Hunter revolves around a thief named Parker who is hellbent on revenge against the girl and guy who betrayed him during a big score, shooting him and leaving him for dead.

The story starts with Parker catching up with the woman, then jumps back to tell us about the score gone wrong, then shifts focus to Parker’s other prey, the onetime partner who masterminded the betrayal but realizes that Parker isn’t dead. Where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe would knock a guy cold, Parker kills him – he kills for revenge, he kills for leverage, he kills to send messages. He shows remorse for one death he didn’t plan, but otherwise reasons away every kill (when he reasons them at all) as justified. Stark’s style is dry and efficient, short sentences, minimal details. It moves, and I found myself pulling for Parker despite the fact that he’s a nasty piece of work.

The Hunter was a ripping read until the last five pages, when Stark (actually a pseudonym for the prolific Donald Westlake) has Parker, normally a meticulous planner, make an uncharacteristically sloppy mistake, perhaps just for the purpose of sending him on one last major score in the final few paragraphs of the book. It seemed out of character and forced for a story that was an effortless work up until that point. It’s absolutely worth the read, but I found that ending to be a letdown after 98% of the book was so strong.

—

I don’t devote much time to P.G. Wodehouse books for two reasons. One, I’ve flogged his stuff relentlessly enough that if you were ever going to try him, you probably already have. Two, his books more or less share the same plot but with different gags and twists to get to the same ending. Heavy Weather, part of the Blandings Castle series and a direct sequel to Summer Lightning, gets a mention here for the wrong reason: It was dull and not that funny. It has to be the first Wodehouse novel I didn’t enjoy, and I kept waiting for the comedy to kick in; it’s just a continuation of the plot of Summer Lightning, picking up just a day or two after the previous novel ends, and it lacked both Wodehouse’s typical silly situations and wisecracks and his trick of weaving multiple seemingly unconnected plots into one pat solution.

—

I’m writing this on a plane and they’re showing the chick-flick “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I looked up to see Matthew McConaghey destroy a wedding cake because he pushed the cork out of a champagne bottle instead of holding it and twisting the bottle. Really? Does anyone actually open a bottle of champagne by letting the cork go flying? I will say this, though: Whoever the casting director was, he clearly had a good time with this film. That’s a lot of good-looking women in one movie. Otherwise it looks like the kind of flick my wife would watch when I’m traveling.

—

Next up: William Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 16, 2009
→ By

Living & Party Going.

Henry Green’s Loving appears to only be in print in the U.S. in a volume containing two of his other novels, Living and Party Going, and since I enjoyed the first novel I decided to try the other two. (Incidentally, these latter two novels don’t appear to be copyrighted in the U.S., at least not according to the cover page that indicates that Loving is copyrighted in this country.)

Living was Green’s first novel, and was the worst of the three in this volume by a fair margin. The story is, as is typical for Green, thin, revolving around workers in a Birmingham foundry that is poorly managed by its declining owner and that faces upheaval when he dies. The prose, however, is excruciating, because Green chose to omit most definite and indefinite articles, so even strong phrasings become painful to read:

Were tins of pineapple in that shop window and she wondered and languor fell on her like in a mist as when the warm air comes down in cold earth; in images she saw in her heart sun countries, sun, and the infinite ease of warmth.

The closest thing to a central storyline is the secret romance between Lily and Bert, a factory worker who sees no future for himself in Birmingham and decides to elope with Lily and move to Canada. The unraveling of that romance is one of the most absurd ends to a plot that I have ever seen, rivaling Tony Last’s fate in A Handful of Dust.

Party Going, on the other hand, is more conventionally written and, while not classically plotted, at least follows a more defined pattern by showing us a specific block of time for a specific set of characters. Those characters, a group of friends plotting a getaway to the south of France, end up stuck in a railway station and then in its associated hotel when the trains are all delayed indefinitely by fog. Their reactions to various inconveniences (mostly minor) and to the sudden, unexplained illness of the aunt of one member of the party make up the bulk of the action of the novel, although there’s a bit more drama when the crazy girlfriend of one of the characters shows up unannounced as if she was supposed to be on the trip all along.

As bad as Green’s prose was in Living from a readability standpoint, the prose in Party Going is the novel’s greatest strength:

Memory is a winding lane and as she went up it, waving them to follow, the first bend in it hid her from them and she was left to pick her flowers alone. Memory is a winding lane with high banks on which flowers grow and here she wandered in a nostalgic summer evening in deep soundlessness.

Even when he lapses into the modernist style of Woolf or James, he can still craft an image compelling enough to pull the reader through the awkward syntax:

Night was coming up and it came out of the sea. Over harbours, up the river, by factories, bringing lights in windows and lamps on the streets until it met this fog where it lay and poured more darkness in.
Fog burdened with night began to roll into this station striking cold through thin leather up into their feet where in thousands they stood and waited. Coils of it reached down like women’s long hair reached down and caught their throats and veiled here and there what they could see, like lovers’ glances.

Party Going also offers more small humor along the lines of Loving, including some witty dialogue between the characters and other lines demonstrating their lack of self-awareness when trying to treat station workers like servants, while Living was nearly devoid of humor save that of the old-guard managers at the foundry who attempt to stymie the young boss trying to coax changes in the plant’s operations. Green also shifts back and forth deftly between the primary focus on the fatuous upper-class twits at the novel’s center and their beleaguered servants who, by the way, have to wait out the fog in the station while their masters relax in comfort in the hotel.

EDIT: Almost forgot – one thing I did wonder about Party Going, which Green wrote in the late 1930s, was whether the fog represented Nazi Germany, creeping up on an England too wrapped up in itself to notice the impending danger. The fog lifts at the novel’s end, which probably disproves the theory, although I could craft an argument that Green was commenting on the English aristocracy’s reliance on luck, fate, God, or simply on other parties to get it out of trouble.

Next up: The Grapes of Wrath. No, I’ve never read it before.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ July 8, 2009
→ By

Loving.

Henry Green was an unusual man who wrote unusual books, nearly all with one-word titles ending in “-ing.” One of his best-regarded novels, Loving, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.

The plot is paper thin; it would be more accurate to say it comprises several subplots, including a lost or stolen sapphire ring, the romance between Raunce and Edith, and stories like the daughter-in-law’s affair that are almost background noise behind the nonstop dialogue among the servants. Green’s writing style is peculiar, with abrupt transitions from subject to subject and speaker to speaker and a cavalier attitude towards punctuation:

‘Now me lad she wants that glove and don’t forget.’
‘What glove?’
‘The old gardening glove Edith went birds’-nesting with,’ Raunce replied. ‘Holy Moses look at the clock,’ he went on, ‘ten to three and me not on me bed. Come on look slippy.’ He whipped out the decanter while Bert provided those tumblers that had not yet been dried. ‘God rest his soul,’ Raunce added in a different tone of voice then carried on,
‘Wet glasses? Where was you brought up?’

And the setting and subtle humor are reminiscent of Waugh and Wodehouse, two of my favorite authors, although I found Green’s prose a bit offputting until I got used to it.

Next in my queue is Green’s first novel, Living. For more on Green, this review of a biography of Green offers quite a bit of detail on his life and writing career.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 2, 2009
→ By

First Among Sequels.

I’ve said many times that i’m a huge Jasper Fforde fan, but I tend to save his books for long flights because they make the time pass so much more quickly. I’d been saving the fifth Thursday Next novel (technically the sixth, but The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is no longer available) First Among Sequels for over a year and finally tackled it this week, knocking it off in about four hours of active reading time. Fforde, after saying he was done with Thursday Next and banging out a Nursery Crimes novel, is back in top form.

First is, as the title implies, the beginning of a second tetralogy involving Thursday Next, the literary detective who has the ability to jump from our world to BookWorld, the parallel universe of books – all books, in fact, organized in clusters like galaxies in our universe. Fforde has expanded the range of subjects he’s either satirizing or borrowing, including international politics, global warming (England has a “stupidity surplus,” and one proposal is to buy offsets in particularly stupidly-run countries), reality television, tax policy, and astrophysics. At the same time, he continues to show and even improve on the breadth of books folded into his novel, with a meeting in a tea room from Summer Lightning, an escape through the core containment center (that’ll make sense when you read it) of Cold Comfort Farm, a potentially fatal change to an Agatha Christie novel, and conversation with two crickets (one the main cricket, the other his stunt double) from Pinocchio. Thursday takes on a trainee Jurisfiction agent and has to deal with corruption (as usual) in both BookWorld and in England. And there’s some carpeting to be done as well.

There is, however, a more serious streak to First than there was in any of his six prior books in this and the Nursery Crimes series. Fforde’s alternate-history timeline starts to mirror ours in an uncomfortable way, with declining book readership caused by shrinking reader attention spans and the concomitant rise of increasingly inane reality television shows. (The always popular Name That Fruit looks intellectual by comparison.) He also uses the emotional connections we develop with books and with characters to underpin a key plot twist, thus advancing an argument that books provide us with an experience that is hard, if not impossible, to achieve through other means.

Oh, and various entities try to kill Thursday throughout the book, and one of those plot lines isn’t resolved and (I imagine) will roll through the next three books in the series.

First is a glorious jumble of plot lines and twists with the usual mixture of literary rumor, bad puns (such as the researcher Anne Wirthlass), and snark (Harry Potter’s name comes up in one of the better gags). If you haven’t read any of the series before, go back to The Eyre Affair to start – and really, before you do that, you should probably take a spin through Jane Eyre (or, at worst, just rent one of the many film adaptations), since knowing that plot will make the key twist in Fforde’s book about eight times funnier.

Next up: I’m reading a collection of Chekhov’s short stories while also listening to an audio version of The Reader.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 25, 2009
→ By

The City and the Mountains.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós is, according to several sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica and novelist Jose Saramago), considered Portugal’s greatest novelist, yet his works are apparently just now becoming available in English. He introduced realism to Portuguese literature and idolized Flaubert and Balzac while earning comparisons to Zola.

His novel The City and the Mountains, published in Portugal a year after his death and recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a fable wrapped in a paean to natural and rural living. The story revolves around the narrator’s lifelong friend, Jacinto, who lives in luxury in Paris surrounded by high society and machines designed to make his life easier, yet who is miserable and dying of ennui until a chance occurrence recalls him to his ancestral home in the fictional countryside town of Tormes, Portugal.

The novel begins in in Paris (the City) and ends in Tormes (the Mountains), moving from a satire of the decadent and spiritually bankrupt Paris of the late 1800s to the pure, honest, yet feudal society of the still-agrarian Portuguese country. Jacinto’s life in Paris is one of misadventure more than adventure, especially as his machines malfunction, leading him to try to acquire bigger and more complex machines to replace them. Eça de Quierós lampoons the opulence and conspicuous consumption of Parisian society with depictions of over-the-top parties and empty-headed aristocrats as Jacinto drifts unwittingly into soul-crushing despair. Even the religion of the wealthy city-dwellers is perfunctory and perhaps faithless, more concerned with status and the religious hierarchy than questions of piety and charity.

Yet a chance event in Tormes beckons him home, a trip for which he tries to pack as many of his earthly possessions, fearing (ironically) boredom in the isolated hillside town where his family estate lies. After the comic misadventures of the multi-day train trip with the narrator, Zé Fernandes, they arrive in Tormes and Jacinto gradually rediscovers himself, according to Zé:

I forthrightly compared him to an etiolated plant that had been shriveling up in the darkness, among rugs and silks, but which, once placed outside in the wind and the sun and watered profusely, grows green again, bursts into flower and does honor to Mother Nature! … In the City, his eyes had grown crepuscular, as if averted from the World; now, though, there danced in them a noon-tide light, resolute and generous, content to drink in the beauty of things. Even his moustache had grown curly.

Yet Tormes isn’t quite the paradise Jacinto first believes it to be, as the income disparity that was hidden from view in Paris is out in the open on his family’s vast estate. Jacinto himself decides to take on the role of social reformer in the face of opposition from the caretakers, standing in as symbols of the old way of life. It is, in many ways, a call to action to readers who have lost their spirits in the great cities of the time: return to the country, to nature, to your faith, and to your humanity. Even if the setting is dated, the disconnect with nature and the emotional desolation of city life is more than ever a part of our society (and I say that as an unabashed fan in many ways of great cities).

Eça de Queirós litters the book with direct and indirect allusions to literary works, particularly Don Quixote (also a tale of two friends on a quest) and Homer’s The Odyssey (also a quest, one where the main character, like Jacinto, returns at the end to the place of his birth). The two main characters read and re-read these works, and Zé does comment on the parallels between their quest and those of the stories they read, but Eça de Queirós imbues his characters’ quest with a more urgent meaning while still bringing much of the comic brilliance of Cervantes, perhaps even more impressively since he doesn’t get to use the obvious dim-bulb jokes on which Cervantes could rely.

I was talking to We’ve Got Heart’s Kristen H. about the book, and she brought up The Alchemist. I found The City and the Mountains to be a better book overall, with a stronger plot and much better prose, while also offering a powerful message, one with both mundane and spiritual elements.

Next up: Our friend Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 20, 2009
→ By

Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

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