For Fans of Joseph Heller

Heller wrote Catch-22 for eight years, and every page shows it. The jokes are not ornaments on a serious war novel -- the jokes ARE the argument. The circular logic, the characters who repeat themselves like broken records, the bureaucratic insanity that makes death inevitable: all of it adds up to one of the most devastating moral statements in American literature. It is impossible to read without laughing, and impossible to laugh without feeling the chill underneath.

Readers who stop at Catch-22 miss Heller's real ambition. Something Happened (1974) is a six-hundred-page interior monologue from a successful man who is miserable for no articulable reason -- a horror novel about American domesticity and corporate life written without a single ghost. It is relentless, uncomfortable, and extraordinary. The comedy is still there, but it curdles faster.

The 2019 Hulu adaptation of Catch-22 (directed partly by George Clooney, who also acts in it) is a more straightforward adaptation than Mike Nichols' 1970 film, and in some ways truer to the novel's mixture of beauty and dread. The Italian locations are gorgeous, the performances strong, and the series takes its time with the horror beneath the farce. It is not a perfect replacement for the book, but it is the best screen version we have.

No game has ever come closer to Heller's spirit than Disco Elysium. The political satire, the institutional collapse, the protagonist trapped inside systems he cannot control and barely understands -- and, above all, the comedy that is also a lamentation. Like Catch-22, it makes you laugh at things you should weep at, and weep at things that should be funny. If Heller had played video games, this is what he would have made.