Three and a half stars. Some parts were great, other parts not so great.

So the young man left home, became an artist [writer], wrote a bestseller which became a film, then grew old. In his old age, he tries to write another bestseller as a fitting encore to his career but couldn't seem to find the inspiration for it. That's Joseph Heller in this book. Like James Joyce's , this looks semi-autobiographical also, but with Heller's inimitable funny style.


There is the narrator [Heller] and the protagonist Eugene Pota [the modern, and aged, Stephen Dedalus]. Heller finished this book [his last] just before he died in 1999, aged 76. Several decades after his famous Catch-22 was published and which he was not able to match again with his subsequent works. Towards the end, you will learn where Heller got the name "Pota"--Portrait Of The Artist, POTA.

The narrator, however, tells the story not so much of Eugene Pota but really about Pota's various attempts to write one great novel again, in the twilight of his life, before he dies. So here we have titles to these imagined novels, tentative first chapters, revisions of the same, plots and its twists and turns, but Pota never got to finish any of them. So this novel really has its principal characters Pota's imagined and unfinished novels. A novel about novels.

Pota's attempts to write this one, last great novels were hilarious. He thought of writing one where Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer would be in a contemporary setting, one with a Harvard degree and wearing Armani suits, but later rejected it saying that this parody "was definitely not going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of the world, or his race, whichever." So what about the modern Tom Sawyer as a novelist? He had his Tom Sawyer travelling far and wide then to meet his literary heroes, to inspire him in his literary career, only to stumble into this "Literature of Despair", his heroes ending up poor, crazy, bankrupt, sick, lonely, alcoholic and killing themselves. The tragic ends of famous writers like Jack London [alcoholism, kidney disease, a rumored suicide, died poor], Stephen Crane [died heavily indebted at age 28], Joseph Conrad [severe nervous breakdown, mental collapse], Edith Wharton [married a drunkard/wastrel who plundered her inheritance], Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain [lonely, wife and three children died ahead of him], Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [moods of extreme melancholy after his wife's death], Emily Dickinson [a recluse who never married], Edgar Allan Poe [penniless, alcoholic, paranoid, perhaps drug addicted, fell into a drunken delirium in a street then died 3 days later in a hospital:], Herman Melville [died in poverty and obscurity, his own family thinking he had gone insane], William Faulkner [alcoholic, died from injuries after a drunken fall from a horse], Ernest Hemingway [blew his brains out], James Joyce [heavy drinker with a falling-down-drunk-in-the-street capacity], Tennessee Williams [pill-popping drunkard, choked to death on the cap of a bottle of pills he was trying to take], J.D. Salinger [a genuine and resolute recluse], Thomas Pynchon [recluse, never photographed or seen in public], Jerzy Kosinsky, Richard Brautigan, ross Lockridge, Thomas Heggen [all suicides], Mario Puzo [Prozac addict]. Pota then abandoned the Tom-Sawyer-as-a-Novelist novel. He likewise had ideas of novels about the Greek gods, human anatomy, the biblical Isaac, with his modern take on them. But still not enough inspiration or energy to go on and finish them. What about a sex book [at age 76]? His friends and publisher liked his title: A Sexual Biography of My Wife. But his current wife doesn't like it and he feels he does not know much about, nor does he have the resources to make a research on, sex from the woman's point of view. He did manage to write the first chapter, however, which started with the protagonist's statement: "Last night my Lord returned from the wars and pleasured me thrice with his boots on."--a take on a similar quote attributed to the Duchess of Marlborough except that the duchess claimed she was pleasured only twice, not thrice.

Oh, what a happy, happy read!

This book completes its purpose, presuming the purpose is to amuse with some degree of introspection and thoughtfulness. I enjoyed the cynical history lesson: writers are doomed! Don't become one! and the ongoing "A sexual biography of my wife" novel which is so promising yet empty of real plot points. However I did skip over the religious passages; the retelling of the Bible in that way was incredibly boring. To learn that this novel was published posthumously gives me a new perspective on it, especially considering it deals with thematic such as legacy and accepting decay.

This novel is about an older writer who is not feeling creative but encouraged to consider the lives of other novelists. Interesting bios of many famous writers. There are so many that were drinkers: Eugene O'Neil, Wm. Faulkner, G. Greene, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, E. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, James Joyce, John Steinback. Truman Capo a drinker plus selective medication. J.D. Salinger was a recluse. Virginia Woolfe and Sylvia Plythe were suicides.
Then there are those with depression: Art Buckwald, Kirk V.

I nice insight into a writer struggling against his own production and the little time he has left. Impact is something we all have coded into our genes, so it's nice to see someone established and famous work towards further cementing their own lasting legacy.

Then again, if you're over the whole struggling writer just trying to pop out that one last great masterpiece, this won't change your mind. But why so pessimistic?

Heller tries too hard to be funny, tries too hard to show how much smarter he is than everyone else

Great writing, average characters and pretty terrible story (an old author writing one last novel about an old author writing one last novel...there wasn't much potential to begin with, really).
I don't think I have it in me to review this one properly on my blog. Just disappointing, like most of Heller's work outside of Catch-22 (which is my favourite ever novel). Not awful, just not that good either. Only for die-hard fans of the author, I would say. And even then...consider it carefully.

It felt like I was reading a very meta memoir - very entertaining and enlightening for those of us who want to write for a living.

Heel leuk, typisch Heller boek. Het begin is wat traag en je denkt, waar gaat dit over? Maar al snel wordt het steeds grappiger.

This could've and should've been made into a real book. It has the kernels of some very good and funny ideas. As it is, it reads like the outline of a book. Oh, what this could've been!

A novel about a series of attempts at beating writer's block and crafting a final novel; also an old author's final novel. Heller winks at the reader a bunch of times and bemoans, via a transparent author surrogate, the creative decline of older writers. Many anecdotes of celebrated writers dying in penury, despair, and madness – very pointed references. He retreads old ground and acknowledges both the absurdity and futility of hoping for a genius coup at the late end of a career.

I think Heller would have appreciated a low score, so I'll do that for him; but it is at minimum a three-star novel.

This chap wrote a book that was so good that its title ended up in everyday English usage as a more polite term for a shit sandwich.
It was quite a book, probably one of the best books written in the 20th century. It was so good the Netflix series has George Clooney in it. It was also his first book but he wrote other books that were good but didn't sell as well.
I mean to say that if anyone else had written these books they would probably wouldn't do too badly from them, but they wouldn't have had the career the bloke who wrote Catch 22 had.

This was Joseph Heller's last book.
He asks, can a writer whose most famous work was his first achieve those heady heights with his last? What if he has a number of bloody good ideas but they're just false starts? Why did so many famous writers die in penury, in misery or by suicide? Is it related to why he can't he think of an idea for his last book that is just as good as his first? Why, fuck it, why?

This was an insight and anyone who has made a million false starts and filled their waste paper basket to overflowing can empathise. I, however, have no sympathy because I will never write anything as good as Catch 22. Probably 'nor will anyone else.
Suck it up you rich, successful, dead prick.