"Catch-22" is probably the finest novel published since World War II. "Catch-22" is the great representative document of our era, linking high and low culture, with its extraordinary double-helix form, its all-American G.I.-comedy characters, its echoes of Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Miller and Céline. Its only rival is Pynchon's gargantuan "Gravity's Rainbow"—much larger, more learned and intelligent, but top-heavy, and a colder, deadly work of art. (I should add that if "Catch-22" recalls Dickens in its comic fertility and complex form, then Heller's second novel, "Something Happened," seems an impressive if tortuous attempt to rewrite Henry James—to provide a counterpart to "The Portrait of a Lady," to chart the postwar civilian hell of narcissism.) (p. 37)
Richard Locke, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1977 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), May 15, 1977.
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