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Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the first novel by this 39-year-old escapee from McCall's promotion department, is powerful, clumsy, angry and comical, somewhat in the manner one would expect of a half-grown rhinoceros. The author seems only occasionally and precariously in control of this jabberwock of a book, but since Catch-22 is a wild war satire, it does not much matter that the book tramples what scenery it does not chew. The novel's hero is Yossarian, an Air Force captain whose maladjustment is that he is sane. He is stationed in Italy and has flown 40 or 50 missions, and he tries to explain to a friend what troubles him about this: "They're trying to kill me." No one is trying to kill you, the friend says. "Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asks. The friend explains that it is all right; they are shooting at everyone. The tone of Heller's brilliantly apocalyptic burlesque can be guessed from the fact that a character named Major Major Major Major is almost unnoticed in the confusion. The book's chief fault is that the author does not know how to end it. After running well for almost 500 pages, it merely runs down. Next project for the satirist: another novel, called Something Happened, due next year.
Richard Condon is also technically a comic novelist (although purists fond of wedging hyphens between split hairs might call him a serio-comic or even a calamito-comic novelist). He is the author of The Manchurian Candidate, a comic eruption that simply as comedy ranks with the best funny novels done recently in the U.S.—that is, with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Richard Bissell's 7½ Cents and Peter De Vries's Comfort Me with Apples. But Condon is something more. He is a comedian who throws his custard pies in black anger, with intent to maim. His novels resemble (more accurately, are resembled by) Heller's Catch-22; the difference being that Condon's work is wildly plotted and Heller's is wildly plotless. The reaction of Condon's readers is usually either disgust and incredulity or fanatical admiration and incredulity. True believers will be pleased to learn that the first draft of An Infinity of Mirrors, a novel on Paris during World War II, is cooling off in Condon's trunk. And Condon is nothing if not prolific: he has plotted in his head three other novels which may or may not see the light of print.
John Knowles is a precisionist and a sharp contrast to the ebullient undiscipline of Condon and Heller. His first novel, A Separate Peace, is brief and limited in the breadth if not the depth of the experience it describes. Its author is always in perfect control of style and structure. Its theme is the death of innocence; a prep-school boy moves to the disillusion of adulthood by causing, in a half-willed way, the death of his best friend. It is a book that rings in the mind long after the reader has finished it, whose reverberations fill a shape far larger than the one set down on paper. Knowles's second book, Morning in Antibes, did not ring in the mind. His third novel will be published in the fall.