For whatever reason, I start really slowly with lots of books. This is one I had started and set aside twice before this read. This time I stuck with it, and I am really glad. Early on, there is a kind of Holden Caulfield hipster insouciance that grated on me. But as the book proceeds, more dark and heavy stuff leavens all of that, and to my taste it gains a lot of power. I ended up really enjoying it.

First published in 1955, I guess, and I can see and sense all kinds of connection with work that preceded and followed it. There is plenty of Kafka, for example when the chaplain is interrogated in the cellar, but really through and through. I was sometimes reminded of some of Dylan's more orthogonal lyrical constructions. There's a little bit of beat sensibility, more frank "free love" kinds of banging around than I might have expected, a foreshadowing of a counterculture critique of conformity and war and embrace of individuals flying their freak flags. Very, very interesting ripple in amongst all of these and countless other currents. Good stuff.

Bread crumbs for myself:

- Loved the discussion of agricultural subsidies on pp. 93ff.

- "The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. it was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character" (p. 374).