Catch-22

Catch-22 was published in 1961 and was Joseph Heller's debut novel. He had begun writing it in 1953 while working in advertising, and the book appeared to mixed reviews before becoming one of the defining American novels of the century. Its structure is the thing readers take longest to get used to: the chapters are named for characters and the chronology loops, so that an event mentioned in passing early in the book turns out to be the thing that explains a later chapter.

The novel is a satire of military bureaucracy and of the language organisations use to describe their own decisions. The squadron's officers compete for promotions, the rules change to suit whoever is enforcing them, and the profits of the mess halls matter as much as the missions. The comedy is real, and so is the horror underneath it: the book's most famous sequences involve the death of a mechanic in the back of a bomber and a soldier who lives in a tree, and the tone slides from one to the other without warning.

The phrase the novel invented passed into general use almost immediately and is now applied to any rule that defeats its own purpose. Heller wrote several further novels, and he published a sequel, Closing Time, in 1994. Catch-22 was adapted into a film in 1970 and a television miniseries in 2019, and it is a standalone. The characters are given names that are jokes and fates that are not, and the final third replays the same events from other angles until the reader understands what the squadron has been doing all along.