Recommendations
Books Like Catch-22
What to read after Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is the great American satirical war novel — Yossarian in the logical trap, the military bureaucracy as black comedy, and then the sudden, devastating pivot to horror in the final section. If you loved its furious wit and its understanding that the system always wins, these novels will find you in the same place.
- 1Buy
Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time, surviving the Allied firebombing of Dresden — Vonnegut and Heller are the two great satirical anti-war novelists of the postwar American generation; where Catch-22 is relentlessly comic until it isn't, Slaughterhouse-Five begins in tragedy and uses comedy as the coping mechanism
- 2Buy
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
Paul Bäumer on the German Western Front in World War One — not satirical like Catch-22, but reaching the same conclusion by different means: war is not what they told you it was, and the people who sent you here will not be joining you in the trenches
- 3Buy
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
A Vietnam veteran's account of what his unit carried through the war — O'Brien's question is the same as Heller's (what can fiction do with horror that journalism cannot?) and he answers it differently, with a metafictional honesty about the act of making up stories in order to tell the truth
- 4Buy
Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius J. Reilly, a monstrous medievalist in 1960s New Orleans who is forced by his mother to get a job — the only American comic novel of comparable ambition and scale to Catch-22; Ignatius and Yossarian are the two great comic monsters of postwar American fiction
- 5Buy
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, and the Airborne Toxic Event — DeLillo is doing something related to Heller: using dark comedy to reveal the logic of institutions (the university, the family, consumer capitalism) that operate on death-anxiety while pretending they don't
- 6Buy
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil in 1930s Soviet Moscow — the same strategy as Catch-22: use absurdist comedy to expose the actual logic of an authoritarian system, which is more frightening than any explicit critique, and which can only be survived by a kind of furious wit
- 7Buy
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Frederic Henry in World War One Italy — the anti-Catch-22: stripped, tragic, and completely earnest where Heller is satirical, but reaching the same conclusion about what war costs the people who fight it; the two novels are the opposite poles of American war fiction
- 8Buy
Joseph Andrews
by Henry Fielding
The foundational English comic novel — Joseph Andrews is the ancestor of every comic novel of institutional absurdity in the English language; Heller knew his Fielding, and reading Catch-22 alongside Fielding reveals what tradition it belongs to and what it did to that tradition
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