Volume 26, Number 5 · April 5, 1979
On the Gold Standard
By Thomas R. Edwards
Good As Gold
by Joseph Heller
Simon and Schuster, 447 pp., $12.95
History outpaces the writer who works slowly, and the anachronistic quality in Joseph Heller's novels is understandable; but it does create some curious effects. Catch-22 became one of the sacred texts of the 1960s, when thousands of real American soldiers reenacted Yossarian's flight to Sweden and many more of their contemporaries and elders followed them in spirit. But the book is less a prediction of the 1960s and 1970s than a bleak summing up of the 1940s and 1950s. It took us a while to catch on after its publication in 1961, as if we were waiting for the Cuban missile crisis, the first Kennedy assassination, and the full horror of Southeast Asia to persuade us of its aptness as contemporary myth.
Review, 2147 words
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