Catch-23

By Paul Gray

The news that Joseph Heller was writing a sequel to Catch-22, some 33 years after the fiction, prompted two reactions. One can be summarized, roughly, as Oh, goody. The other takes a bit longer. How desperate for inspiration and sales must Heller be to hitch a ride on a tour de force postwar American novel, even if he did write the original himself?

$ As it turns out, Closing Time (Simon & Schuster; 464 pages; $24) will disappoint both camps. It is neither a triumphant replay nor a crass commercial scam but rather an alternately appealing and annoying bag of mostly old tricks.

John Yossarian, the reluctant bombardier and principled antihero of Catch- 22, is back, older -- he is 68 -- and still trying to convince doctors -- this time at a posh Manhattan hospital rather than at a military clinic on the Italian island of Pianosa -- that he is sick. Yossarian remains wary and weary of a world that holds out the prospect of his own death: "I wish the daily newspapers were smaller and came out weekly." After successful careers in advertising and on Wall Street, he does consulting work for Catch-22's amoral entrepreneur, Milo Minderbinder. Milo, no surprise, now owns a conglomerate that is trying to sell a "Sub-Supersonic Invisible and Noiseless Defensive Second-Strike Offensive Attack Bomber," code-name Shhhhh!, to the U.S. government. That entity has been left, thanks to the President's resignation, in the hands of a dim Vice President from Indiana who wants to be sworn in by the Chief Justice of the U.S., but this cannot be done because the Chief Justice has also resigned and a new one cannot be sworn in until there is a sworn-in President to do it. After this has been explained to him many times, the Veep brightens: "Then it's just like Catch-22, isn't it?"

Yes, although not quite as fresh and sassy as the first time around. Thanks in no small part to Heller's first novel, portraying those in authority as mendacious poltroons now seems unnecessary, since they are so prone to do so in their own words and deeds. But wrapped around the Yossarian/Milo plots are some moving stories of other World War II veterans approaching death and looking back on a vanishing American landscape of hope. When Closing Time is not trying to be funny, it is genuinely serious.