Now here's Nora Roberts in
Sunday's NYT Book Review saying that she'd like to have President Obama and
every other world leader read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 because it's "a brilliant, funny, crazed story that
perfectly depicts the utter absurdity of war."
I have little energy left to beat
on Catch-22 (three blog posts, two
articles, and a dozen or more dinner-table rants will really take it out of
you) so I will simply say one thing: that I have yet to find, among all the people
I have questioned, one person willing to say that fighting the Nazis was
"'wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate" — that
is, absurd.
A lot of people are willing to
say, "Men who gave orders in World War II were often wildly unreasonable or
illogical etc," and a lot more are willing to say, "War is bloody and
cruel and terrible," and the latter is probably what Roberts means, but
there's this word "absurd," and she, and (my guess) all the professors
who voted Catch-22 the seventh best
novel of the twentieth century, can't resist it. It's so existential-philosophical. What else could elevate a shallow book for 1960s
juveniles, a book full of frat-boy sexism, vaudeville logic, ponderous
whimsicality, and specious humanity, to such heights? And keep it there after all these years of education and
sophistication? (See Posts
7, 54, 125, 129, 224.)
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