Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

In the second world war, Joseph Heller was an American airman based in Corsica. He flew 60 missions over Italy and the south of France. He was the guy who pressed the
button to release the bombs. Sometimes, he was terrified; at one point, he had a kind of existential crisis at the thought that the
Germans were trying to kill him. Many years later, he wrote Catch-22, a brilliant novel about Yossarian, a terrified American airman in the throes of an existential crisis. Catch-22 was published 50 years ago, and here are two books to commemorate the anniversary — a long one by a Texan biographer, and a short one by Heller’s 59-year-old daughter.

Both of these books are good. Tracy Daugherty is interested in amassing details about Heller’s life and work, and then looking for patterns; Erica Heller tells us first-hand stories about stuff like her parents’ horrible divorce, and their illnesses and deaths. The mental cruelty! She writes about it calmly and stoically. Daugherty’s book is about a novelist who had moments of greatness, and who also got divorced, became ill, and died. Erica Heller’s book is about a man whose life led up to a really, really painful divorce, who then became ill, and who, during this time, wrote some novels, one of which, Catch-22, was brilliant, although, as she points out, she hasn’t read it.

Particularly in Daugherty’s book, you get the sense that Heller’s life, as an author, had a funny shape. He grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, during the Depression. He went to war. He came back, safe and more or less sound, even though he was a bit neurotic. For 15 years, he processed his thoughts about the war into fiction.