Nothing in Catch As Catch Can really lives up to Catch-22 in either brilliance or form. But, even though the name of the story compilation would have you compare the two, there's really no need for that. These stories were written over the course of decades. Heller's voice and ideas shifted now and again, but he always seemed to be a good writer.

Even from his earliest story about a husband and wife arguing, he has a clean pace and a clear idea. There are rarely any mind-blowing twists like you might find from Roald Dahl, but each story is clearly aimed and launched, never wasting your time.

There's one story about a young boy who is asked to sleep with a rich man's wife. And that's the story. It has tension, a little mystery, some slight commentary on the upper class, but it's really just an idea that was put to page with a professional hand. Some short stories are like that. In and out.

MacAdam's Log is one we read for a Short Story Club, and it's probably the one with the most experimental interpretation. The main character gets lost in his fantasies, somewhat like Walter Mitty, but it seems Heller is doing something deeper here. The things happening in his liffe outside of his fantasies perhaps indicate that he's actually getting high on opium, or perhaps just going senile. It's not clear, and that's what I liked about it.

I probably wouldn't recommend this whole collection, but you couldn't go wrong with it. The stories never outstay their welcome, and even if the subjects of the stories aren't always that exciting, it's very clearly how capable Heller was as a writer.

I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had read it closer to Catch 22 but I haven't read that for more than a decade so the tangential stories were a little difficult to follow. However, I really enjoyed the ones with original characters.

Catch-22 is one of my all time favourite novels and the ephemera relating to it in this collection, including two excised sections from the published novel, a play adaptation of Clevinger's trial and a few essays written in later years by Heller are really great. The two bits relating to Closing Time are good but less entertaining. The rest of it, which is mostly early published stories from the 1940s and 1950s and some unpublished stories from the same period is noticeably less good. That's really heartening for writers to see, that you can become great from very modest beginnings, but it's less entertaining for a reader.

Like any collection of short stories ranging an author's life, this was uneven. The bad stories certainly were no Catch-22, but they were never rancid either. And the good stories (some of which dealt with characters from Catch-22) were Heller at his best. The lesser stories don't put much of a damper on all of the good ones, so I'd highly recommend it. The last story "Coney Island: The Fun is Over" was a surprise, and quite good.

3.5 stars

Heller's not necessarily a favorite author, but he's certainly a favorite writer for study. It's always interesting watching a writer's style develop, and this is a particularly fascinating case study.

The finish date is a guess. There were definitely some fun ones in here. I especially liked the George Bush one. Read it a while ago so don't remember many details.