Joseph Heller turns from the bureaucratic war-machine of Catch-22 to the long, ridiculous, bloody comedy of Western civilisation.

Picture This begins with Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer and spirals outward into Athens, capitalism, art, war, empire, commerce, philosophy, museums, patronage, and the many ways culture congratulates itself while standing on a pile of bodies and invoices.

It’s a strange, essayistic, satirical novel: part historical riff, part art-world send-up, part political comedy, part Heller doing Heller in a more digressive and intellectual register. The book moves between Rembrandt, Aristotle, Socrates, Dutch capitalism, Athenian democracy, and modern American absurdity, making a case that history is less a noble sequence of eras than a recurring argument between money, violence, vanity, and art. For readers of Catch-22, literary satire, art history as social diagnosis, and novels that treat civilisation as one elaborate accounting error.

UK first edition hardback, published by Macmillan London, 1988. First published in the United States by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Good second-hand condition from photos, with light shelfwear/handling to jacket and edges.