Not at all profound but quite pleasant...the interesting new biography is sending me back to Heller...to re-read the post-"Catch-22" works that I held lightly decades ago...and to read this for the first time...an unsentimental reflection...the mordant coda to a literary career...

Interesting book (as always by Joseph Heller) but definitely not a great one. The story is about an aging author named Pota who had written one critically acclaimed book and has been trying to follow that up ever since. Obviously somewhat autobiographical but the wit of the plotline never really caught hold. Pota tells his story as an aging author while also giving the reader the beginnings of the books he is considering writing. A lot of them are in mythology or reckoning with God but the "stories" I liked best were his ones where he tells of other writers who have faced the same demons as they try to write. that part was actually very interesting as he tells of Mark Twain and Fitzgerald and Bret Harte and many, many others and the bad ends they came to (poverty, illness, depression, suicide) as they also couldn't finish out their writing lives as they wished. There are lighthearted moments but the story gets a little too far afield and I never really liked Pota all that much. The ending did make me laugh and almost got another star from me. Very different book and might appeal on a sarcastic level.

Not the greatest book in the world or by Heller, but I still read it twice. Maybe because they stock it at my local library. A good way to read an artist's biography, a genre I usually never touch.

Joseph Heller's The Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man (Scribner, 2000; 233) has been described as a semi-autobiographical story of the author. In this story, Eugene Pota an author in the twilight of his career and of his life, is struggling to write a story that will make him popular and be better than his first book. He is struggling with subjects to write about and the writing style to adopt as almost every theme or subject has already been covered by another writer or by the writer himself. But Eugene is not willing to give up; after all, writing is the only thing he knows how to do. He discusses his works with his agents who are all his age-groups and therefore are in the same 'dying-out' boat as he is. One of the working titles of Pota was The Sexual Biography of My Wife.

Read the rest here http://freduagyeman.blogspot.com/2012...

If you ever wanted to know what Joseph Heller's life was like, read the story of Eugene Pota, an ageing novelist whose first novel made him famous, and the success of which he's never quote been able to duplicate.

It's no Catch-22, but I'm a Heller fan. This is a much more interesting book if you know some background about Heller. He spent years writing Catch-22, achieved huge acclaim, and then spent the rest of his career bothered when other books failed to receive the same acclaim. Heller had a great quote about this. An interviewer told that he hadn't written anything else as good as Catch-22, and Heller's response was "who has?"

This was his last book, and you see how Heller struggled with his legacy. It isn't so much of a story as a long essay about the struggles of being a writer with some pretty funny abandoned starts to novels along the way.

I really enjoyed this. Sharp, witty, and self-aware. I loved the insights into the thought processes an author goes through in trying to bring ideas to the page. The book-within-a-book approach allows us to read each of then main character’s failed attempts to write one last commercial bestseller while we separately follow his everyday life.

Heller makes me smile. Love his wit. But Knowing this is semi-autobiographical, and that it is Heller’s final novel, makes this somewhat bittersweet.

A raw, vulnerable and painful journey into the author's mind. Incredibly sincere and sometimes not very good.

Just like us, perhaps.

Hard to resist that breaking of the fourth wall. Very endearing. Lots of short ideas framed as a novel within a novel. Perfect end to Heller’s legacy.

I got this book as Catch 22 was already checked out and I'm too lazy to figure out how to check out books on my nook at this time. So far I keep thinking of the saying about how often books tell you more about the lives of the authors rather than their characters. If so, how did this guy stay married? He's talking about, "You know, I should just go have a couple of affairs and look up so chicks I used to bang on the side." If I were in a relationship with him I wouldn't believe a second of, "Oh it's just the character talking." Yeah. The book is about an old author who can't think of what to write about. My god man! How uncouth!

Cleverly written book of an older writer's attempt to recreate his early success. Humorous although bit mythological bits were tedious.

Hmm. Okay, Joseph, you no doubt earned the privilege to write such an odd book. Any other hack worth less than the pages they regurgitate their banal thoughts on would have never in a million years been fortunate enough to see such an unconventional novel be published, especially in today's literary landscape. And perhaps that is the role of writers who hold such a lofty position in literature, and maybe what had Joseph so paralyzed with fear, because when you have garnered such high expectations, you can't just write some dumb story where something happens. (Ha-ha.) Not my favorite of your works, but I liked what you were trying to do and trying to tell us.

All in all, good Heller here. Touching at parts, laugh out loud funny, and through it all, a bit depressing, because you are with him every step of the way as he struggles to write his last book. But you turned out okay, Heller. No alcoholism, didn't suicide, no sudden tragic death, no crippling depression (perhaps?), and you ended up fairly wealthy in the end, though you never did manage to top that damn WWII book, but people have suffered worse fates than early unmatchable worldwide success.