Editor’s Note: Next month Judith Martin will return with her second Classic pick.

One of the two major anti-authority cult novels of the mid-20th century, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, was chosen by wOw readers as their favorite book on the entire Modern Library list of books that it considers classic. (That other book is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. However rebellious our demographic may be, its targets are presumably no longer its parents and what used to be called bourgeois society.)

Catch-22 is the name given to a nonexistent — but nevertheless effectively employed — military regulation specifying that one can request release from dangerous duty on the grounds of being crazy, but that anyone who acts to avoid danger has thereby proven himself sane.

War is with us again, and the machinations, blunders and traps of military command remain a staple of exasperated humor. Government in general is included in the term. As I write this, The Washington Post has a 36-point headline on the front page: “Businesses Cite a Catch-22 After Miss. Immigration Raid.” The reference is to “E-Verify,” a name Heller might have invented, but a real federal program which allows employers who enroll to check Social Security and immigration records to avoid hiring illegal immigrants. Being protected from government audits and raids was supposed to be the tradeoff for the expenses involved and the increased risk of labor disputes. But since the government-supplied information is rife with errors, a Mississippi plant was raided anyway, and held responsible for illegal employment that it followed government 
procedure to avoid.

Business has developed its own senseless ways of making petty frustration a part of everyday civilian life. Anyone who tries to address a consumer problem only to be caught in a loop of telephone recordings that go back to the starting point, or tries to comply with security regulations only to find that they have changed yet again and are being applied arbitrarily, relates to this book. Yossarian, the anti-hero who recognizes that the system is crazy, becomes the post-modern hero for using his ingenuity to avoid confronting it.

You can’t win, the book suggests, so you treat such situations with humor and walk away. And Heller’s humor, which consists of a relentless succession of smart-alecky paradoxes, assumes that life itself is full of senseless contradictions: One character “turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” Another is educated and therefore stupid. And so on, on every page.

But what if you can’t be a Yossarian, taking things philosophically, not fighting them but walking away?

Then you have to turn to more serious literature. You stop using the jaunty “Catch-22” and start referring darkly to things being Kafkaesque.