It is the rare biographer who can craft a cinematic narrative out of uncooperative real life without filling in the gaps with imagined details. Tracy Daugherty, author of the Donald Barthelme biography Hiding Man, proves again in Just One Catch that he is that rare biographer, one who possesses journalistic integrity and appeals to readers of fiction and nonfiction alike.
This biography of Joseph Heller, whose classic novel Catch-22 has informed critical discourse, transformed war literature and become a staple of college reading lists, is masterfully written and comprehensive. Every detail--the kooky Coney Island of Heller's childhood, flight training in Texas, the way a martini tasted before he was diagnosed with a paralyzing disease--is documented in Heller's writings, military records, magazine profiles, the census and numerous interviews, e-mails and letters. And while this book is packed with information, one feels immersed in the story rather than inundated with facts.
Daugherty thoughtfully probes Heller's work and interior, his relationships and reputations, the paradoxes in his life that allowed him to observe and realize "the possibility to be both humorous and mordantly serious," as Heller once wrote in a letter. But the author also swivels the camera past his subject at the world around him. What emerges is not simply a portrait of an artist, though it is a brilliant one, but also a literary history of post-World War II America and a deeper rumination on the state of literature and writing in an absurd world. --Claire Fuqua Anderson, fiction writer