When Catch-22 first appeared in print, its critical reception was quite mixed. Its style was described as dizzying, in an uncomplimentary sense, because of its abundance of characters. It was also descried as relying too heavily on anecdotes and as being repetitive and monotonous. The author's sense of humor and sanity were even questioned. Yet, at the same time, Heller's sense of humor was called outrageously funny and perceptive and his novel hailed as being the best American novel to come out in years. In other words, American critics as a whole were not quite sure what to make of Catch-22 in the beginning. John W. Aldridge sums up the reviews as such:

They ranged from the idiotically uncomprehending at the lowest end of the evaluative scale to the prophetically perceptive at the highest, and in between there were the reservedly appreciative, the puzzled but enthusiastic, the ambivalent and annoyed, and more than a few that were rigid with moral outrage.⁶⁸

In England, on the other hand, the book received enthusiastic reviews and immediately became a bestseller. Nearly 40 years after its publication, however, the verdict is virtually unanimous worldwide: the novel is a brilliant piece of work.

CRITICAL REVIEWS

The following reviews show the critical reception of Catch-22 in the United States and England after the novel was published in 1961.

From “Medals for Madness,” Saturday Review 1961:

“Heller's satire cuts a wide swath. He takes after a variety of bureaucrats, makes fun of security checks, ridicules psychiatrists and army doctors in general. Sometimes he shoots way over the mark, but often his aim is good. There are several extremely funny passages, the humor usually rising out of the kind of mad logic that seems to Heller the essence of modern warfare. … This is amusing and pointed, and so is much else, but the book as a whole is less effective than it might be. Heller has introduced so many characters, tried to deliver so many knockout blows, and written in such a variety of styles that the reader becomes a little dizzy.”⁶⁹

From “Bombers Away,” The New York Times Book Review 1961:

“Catch-22 has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel. One can say that it is much too long, because its material—the cavortings and miseries of an American bomber squadron stationed in late World War II Italy—is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of it[s] many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest. Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.”⁷⁰

From “The Catch,” Nation 1961:

“Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II. The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity are lost within it. That the horror and the hypocrisy, the greed and the complacency, the endless cunning and the endless stupidity which now go to constitute what we term Christianity are dealt with here in absolutes, does not lessen the truth of its repudiation. Those happy few who hit upon Terry Southern's The Magic Christian will find that, what Southern said with some self-doubt, Heller says with no doubt whatsoever. To compare Catch-22 favorably with The Good Soldier Schweik would be an injustice, because this novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.⁷¹

From “The Logic of Survival in a Lunatic World,” The New Republic 1961:

“I believe that Joseph Heller is one of the most extraordinary talents now among us. He has Mailer's combustible radicalism without his passion for violence and self-glorification; he has Bellow's gusto with his compulsion to affirm the unaffirmable; and he has Salinger's wit without his coquettish self-consciousness. Finding his absolutes in the freedom to be, in a world dominated by cruelty, carnage, inhumanity, and a rage to destroy itself, Heller has come upon a new morality based on an old ideal, the morality of refusal. Perhaps—now that Catch-22 has found its most deadly nuclear form—we have reached the point where even the logic of survival is unworkable. But at least we can still contemplates the influence of its liberating honesty on a free, rebellious spirit in this explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant book.”⁷²

From The New Yorker 1961:

“Unfortunately, Catch-22, which deals with an American bomber squadron stationed on an island off Italy, is not really a book. It doesn't even seem to have been written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper. Its techniques are borrowed from everywhere—the cartoon, the cinema, Kafka, Alice in Wonderland, Edward Lear, the Surrealist painters—and they are piled on one another in an swollen, nightmarish collage. Heller uses nonsense, satire, non sequiturs, slap-stick, and farce. He wallows in his own laughter, and finally drowns in it. What remains is a debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic looniness, and the sort of antic behavior the children fall into when they know they are losing our attention.”⁷³

From “Under Mad Gods,” the Spectator (London) 1962:

“Epic in form, the book is episodic in structure. Each chapter carries a single character a step nearer madness or death or both, and a step, to, into legend. The action takes place well above the level of reality. On leave or in action the characters behave with a fine disregard for the laws or results. Within its own terms the book is wholly consistent, creating legend out of the wildest farce and the most painful realism, constructing its own system of probability. Its characters are as boldly unlikely as its events, but when they dies, they dies with as much pain as any ‘real’ men, and when they are dead, they are wept for with real tears. There is a scene in which Yossarian bandages the wounded leg of one of his crew only to find that inside the man's flak-suit his vital organs have mortally spilled, a scene which is repeated again and again, each time with more detail and more dread. It acts as a reminder that Catch-22, for all its zany appearance, is an extremely serious novel. Against Catch-22 the man who does not wish to die has only his wits: war is not civilized, and to be caught up in it is to be reduced to a state of nature far worse than that visualized by Hobbes. Catch-22 is a book of enormous richness and art, of deep thought and brilliant writing.”⁷⁴

From “Here's Greatness—in Satire,” the Observer (London) 1962:

“But it is death itself which is the principal target of this book, the principal object of Mr. Heller's horrified resentment. Unlike that old philistine Carlyle, he does not find it necessary to accept the universe. …

Yet it can hardly be too much insisted that Catch-22 is a very, very funny book and by no means a depressing one. To counter his horror of death Mr. Heller celebrates sexuality in a richly comic tone which is blessedly un-Lawrentian. What is so remarkable, and perhaps unique, is that Mr. Heller can move us from farce into tragedy within a page or two, and that we accept the transition without demur.”⁷⁵

From “Review,” Daedalus 1963:

“Nothing is easier than to blast a book, especially a sitting turkey, and ordinarily, nothing more gratuitous. There will always be vulgar and non-authors vulgarly and noisily praised, and ill-written, uncreative, and tedious books for which the proprietors can drum up a claque. What gives the present enterprise its special significance is the peculiar kind of pretentiousness involved, and the dislocation in literary and moral standards encouraging this kind of pretentiousness. The appalling fact is that author, publisher, and reviewers seem unaware that the book is destructive and immoral, and are able to add to their economic and other delights in gratifying sensations of righteousness. There is the real “catch” of Catch-22.⁷⁶

SUMMING UP

Aldridge sums up the critical reception of Catch-22 quite neatly and perceptively:

Catch-22 clearly seemed anomalous and more than a trifle ominous. It was a work of consummate zaniness populated by squadrons of madly eccentric, cartoonographic characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction—or, for that matter, in any fiction. Yet the final effect of the book was neither exhilarating nor palliative. This was a new kind of comedy, one that disturbed and subverted before it delighted and was ultimately as deadly in earnest, as savagely bleak and ugly, as the most dissident war fiction of Erich Maria Remarque, Dos Passos or Mr. Mailer. In fact, many readers must have sensed that beneath the comic surfaces Mr. Heller was saying something outrageous, unforgivably outrageous, not just about the idiocy of war but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it is based. The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing mission but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of establishment power. It found expression in the most completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, self-serving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power.⁷⁷

The range of appreciation or disapprobation was broad in the initial critical response toward the novel, but history has had a more even assessment. Catch-22 has come to be seen for the well-crafted, complex novel that it is, a novel that both anticipated the future in terms of its style and structure, and reflected the times in terms of its theme.