Book review: Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Joseph Heller, “Just One Catch,” and a memoir by his daughter, “Erica Heller.”

“Yossarian Slept Here” awkwardly attempts to intertwine Heller family history with that of the legendary Apthorp apartment building, erected by William Waldorf Astor on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1908. Heller’s parents first moved into a modest apartment there with newborn Erica in 1952, upgrading to much grander digs 10 years later, after the success of “Catch-22,” which bifurcated their life into B.C. (Before Catch) and A.C. After her parents’ divorce in 1984, Erica’s distressed mother downsized into a third Apthorp apartment. When Shirley died from lung cancer in 1995, Erica, who had moved back home to nurse her, stayed on, downsizing further still into the apartment she has occupied since 1997. The no longer majestic building was eulogized more memorably in former resident Nora Ephron’s 2006 New Yorker article, “Moving On: A Love Story.” Erica’s chapters on its troubled condominium conversion come as distractions from the Heller story.

The real focus of “Yossarian Slept Here” is neither literature nor real estate but dislocation: displacements caused by success and divorce. Caught between her parents during their rancorous split after nearly four decades of her father’s “dedicated philandering,” Erica finds comfort in recognizing how deeply tied her father remained to her mother despite his second marriage to the bubbly private nurse who tended him through his battle with Guillain-Barre syndrome. Erica writes, “Apart from writing, I believe that my father had two great and lasting loves in his life: my mother and Irving ‘Speed’ Vogel.” (Vogel was the buddy with whom Heller wrote “No Laughing Matter,” a nonfictional account of his illness).

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(Simon & Schuster) - ‘Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22’ by Erica Heller

(St. Martin's Press) - ‘Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller’ by Tracy Daugherty

Not surprisingly, given that Erica is one of Daugherty’s primary sources for family anecdotes, these two books overlap. Erica offers a more intimate portrait of her mother and her profligate grandmother, the aptly named Dottie Held, but leaves her brother, Ted — the author of two comic novels — essentially out of her story.

Daugherty’s more rigorous book is a Heller-worthy smorgasbord, encompassing the origin of Coney Island (from the Dutch Conyne for “rabbit”); Heller’s gastronomical extravaganzas in Chinatown with his pals from the Gourmet Club, who included Speed Vogel, Mel Brooks and Mario Puzo, among others; the sad trajectory of literary agent Candida Donadio, who helped launch not just Heller’s career, but that of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon; and the contested story of how the number 22 came to replace the original “Catch-18,” which was changed in deference to Leon Uris’s “Mila 18,” published the same year.

Daugherty also considers the writers in whom Heller steeped himself (Saroyan, Celine, Faulkner, Waugh, Fitzgerald); the long, slow gestation of each work from a single sentence and core idea; the extensive editing that slashed Heller’s bulging manuscripts from as many as 1,100 pages down to 600; and the critical reception of each book. (In a prepublication review for Britain’s Daily Mail, Kenneth Allsop called “Catch-22” “The Naked and the Dead scripted for the Marx Brothers, a kind of From Here to Insanity.” Joseph Epstein quipped in The Washington Post, “Nothing happens in Something Happened.”)

A portrait emerges from both these books of a hard-working, fast-talking, blunt, mischievous, “magnetic, charismatic” wisecracker — and a father who inscribed a copy of his first novel to his daughter, “With the hope that when you read this book in ten or fifteen years, you will love it at least a little — and that you will love me too. Daddy.” Fifty years later, Heller’s daughter loses me when she confesses — but not until we’ve read her whole book — that she still hasn’t read her father’s magnum opus.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR.org, San Francisco Chronicle and The Post.

YOSSARIAN SLEPT HERE

When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22

By Erica Heller

Simon & Schuster. 272 pp. $25

JUST ONE CATCH

A Biography of Joseph Heller

By Tracy Daugherty

St. Martin’s. 548 pp. $35