After the first few hours of reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I wasn't sure I would make it all the way through to the end. In some ways, Heller puts his worst foot forwards. Most of the humor in the first part of the book is pretty jejune, thin stuff, the sort of thing you might see on a sitcom. As Heller tightens his focus, though, the humor becomes much more incisive and bleak. Milo Minderbinder best demonstrates the book's arc through his own character arc.
At first, he's a kind of goofy mess sergeant who buys eggs for 7 cents and sells them for 5 cents. However, as he grows into a wheeler-dealer, he develops a sleazy edge, removing the tubes that inflate the soldiers' life jackets so that he can use them to make something else that he can sell in the mess hall. Eventually, he mutates into a sort of one-man KBR, reminding everyone that "what's good for [his business] is good for the country." By the end of the novel, he'd rather spend time chasing after some profit in cigarettes than look for a missing 12-year-old girl.
In the same way, the novel moves from the goofy humor at the beginning, where Yossarian signs his name as "Washington Irving," triggering an investigation into whether Washington Irving is a code word, through the bleaker humor where the men in his squadron get shot down one at a time, culminating in the nightmare evening in Rome, which is not funny at all.
C. J. Box's Open Season is entertaining enough in its own way, but was too predictable for my tastes. In addition, Box can't leave well enough alone with his villains. Bad enough one is a murderer, but he's a child molestor and sadist (for no plot reason whatsoever). It's too bad -- I like Joe, the main character, but not enough to read any more of the series.
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