The more I read of Heller the more I come to feel that the popular wisdom, which says that he only wrote one good book, Catch 22, is incorrect. Portrait is an excellent book with as chaotic a narrative as one might hope for from Heller. The story of an old author who desperately wants to write a book that will achieve real critical and popular success to match or top his first great book, is obviously based on Heller's real experience. Intensely personal in tone, the story is told through the old man's conversations with his friends and his wife, and through his attempts to start one new idea after another before giving up on each in disgust. The narrator provides yet another level for the book, occasionally discussing the characters with the reader, and demonstrating clearly his power over the characters, dismissing whole aspects of their lives and personalities, or explaining how they are like so, but if he chose they could become like something else.

I didn't particularly care for this book. The story is about an author, Eugene Pota, that is trying to write his last swan song book. The problem is that he doesn't want to write anything difficult and he gets frustrated by this fact.

The book is organized as a series of starts for stories that Pota begins but ultimately throws away. Each attempt is derived from a known story but told in a slightly different way because Pota doesn't really want to start a story from scratch. Interspersed between the attempts are parts that narrate what is actually going on in Pota's life as he struggles to write his last work.

One strong point about the book (for an engineer like me) is to see how much work goes into writing a fictional story. This book has given me a view of how hard it is to invent an idea and craft it into the finished product that we readers enjoy. In many ways, it is similar to the process that I use to create the electrical circuits that I work on or, I suppose, the process anyone that creates something finished from scratch uses.

The book ends by telling you that the story is really some elaborate joke, but unlike other Joseph Heller books, I didn't find it particularly funny. It was actually like a New Yorker comic, at best intellectually clever, but ultimately not funny. I suppose, if you like New Yorker comics, you might find this book funny, but I don't, so I didn't really like the book.

eh. clever but quite rambling

[Reviewed in 2000]

Joseph Heller reportedly finished writing Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man just before his death last December at the age of 76. The novel has been posthumously published with little fanfare. One can only surmise that Simon and Schuster knew the book wasn’t much of a capstone to Heller’s celebrated literary career. The stark black-and-white cover is so unappealing that it seems intended to dissuade readers from even bothering to look inside. Regrettably, there is ample cause to be forewarned. While there are passages as caustic and funny as anything Heller wrote in his lifetime, the narrative is disjointed and gives the unfortunate impression of being an incomplete draft rather than a polished work.

At first, this inchoate quality almost works to the book’s advantage, since it is literally the story of an aging author, Eugene Pota, who has run out of ideas for his next novel. We’re presented with Pota’s discarded plot outlines and excerpts from abandoned stories, along with his dyspeptic rants about writing, growing old, marriage, sex, and adultery. Heller fails in weaving these elements into a larger overarching coherence. Conversely, if his intent was to write a postmodern anti-novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man isn’t unconventional enough to warrant its ragged formlessness. There are listless stabs at a kind of metafictional playfulness and experimentation, but the results are unfocused. The curious revelation that “Pota” is an acronym (it’s no brain teaser) is more likely to be greeted with a baffled shrug than an appreciative smile.

The best satirical piece in the book is prime Heller: a mordant 20-page story titled “Tom Sawyer, Novelist.” The fictional Sawyer steps out from the pages of Mark Twain and declares that he, too, wishes to be a writer. But Sawyer’s creator is unable to offer advice or inspiration. Twain is deeply depressed over mounting debts, a failed publishing company, the death of a son and daughter, and a fickle public that isn’t much interested in his cynical late works like Pudd’nhead Wilson. Undaunted, Tom Sawyer sets off across America in search of a mentor. What he finds instead is a litany of awfulness: the alcoholic Jack London is dead at forty; Joseph Conrad is subject to nervous breakdowns; Herman Melville is toiling in obscurity; Stephen Crane succumbs to tuberculosis at twenty-eight. To Sawyer’s dismay, the American literary scene is nothing but a “mortuary of a museum.” At the end of his travels, his resolve is clear: “Tom Sawyer would no sooner think of a career writing fiction for a living than placing himself in front of an oncoming locomotive or diving headlong from the highest cliff he could find into the Mississippi River.”

Heller’s subjects have varied over the years, but his trademark blend of fatalism and absurdity has remained a constant since Catch-22, his seminal World War II satire published in 1961. His style proved remarkably adaptable, whether skewering middle-class marriage and the corporate workplace in Something Happened (1974), Washington politics in Good as Gold (1979), or the Old Testament in God Knows (1984). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, however, never locates much of a target for Heller’s gifts. Eugene Pota, like Heller, is a successful writer with a comfortable lifestyle. As we read his cornball sketches—slangy scatological updates of Greek myths, Biblical pastiches, a modern slapstick retelling of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—we’re left puzzled as to the point of it all. (It’s hard not to suspect that Heller pulled most of this hit-and-miss material from his own reject files.) Nothing appears to be at stake, either artistically or psychologically. The novel’s many self-referential asides are less ironic than merely banal: “This is a book about a well-known, aging author trying to close out his career with a crowning achievement, with a laudable bang that would embellish his reputation rather than with a fainthearted whimper that would bring him only condescension and insult.” In the case of Joseph Heller’s final work, the lion’s share of “condescension and insult” deserves to be directed at Simon and Schuster. It’s inconceivable that Heller meant the book to be published as it stands.

But even if this is the book he wanted us to see, it clearly hasn’t received the attention of a copy editor. There’s a clever moment when we’re told that one of the characters is facing a Catch-22, but when the identical thing is said about another character ten pages later it’s a pretty good bet that Heller—or a decent editor—would have preferred to excise one or the other of these in-joke references. The first one makes us laugh, and the second one makes us sorry we laughed the first time. There are inexcusable typos, such as the misspelling of writer Jerzy Kosinski’s name. Several of the later chapters seem inexplicably underwritten and dashed-off, suggesting Heller didn’t have the opportunity to sharpen or rewrite portions of the book before he died. In his best work, Heller’s punch lines are like vaudeville spotlights illuminating our crushing fears and petty behaviors. If not in the same league as Samuel Beckett, he certainly shares a similar banana-peel nihilism. At one point, Eugene Pota quotes the famous line “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Although Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man has the jokes and the despair, they seem to cancel one another out instead of combusting into a sublime portrait of human futility. The multiple story lines immerse us in wretchedness without exploring its heartbreak, and the one-liners dissipate our empathy.

There are a few brief moments in which we glimpse the plaintive eloquence that too often eludes Heller throughout the novel. Pota visits two of his former lovers, both of whom suffer from crippling ailments, one woman has severe burns from a boating accident, and the other has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. Amid jokes about blow jobs and the fervent sexuality of years long gone, Pota’s sorrow finds its core of emotional truth. Adele, the ex-lover with ALS, asks Pota to sit beside her:

He rose stiffly and crossed the room to join her on the sofa. She extended an outstretched arm to steady him as he turned to seat himself, and he came to rest with his hand inside her thigh. He squeezed gently, rubbing a bit, and left it there. She stared down at his hand for a moment. Then, turning in toward him, she reached her arms around his shoulders, and as they settled together against the backrest, she began weeping noiselessly, making not one sound, spilling tears against his neck that felt ice cold.

“It’s just what I would have done,” Pota tells her, “if you hadn’t done it first.” He’s not the only one. Disheartened readers of Joseph Heller’s sad final literary gasp may feel like shedding a few tears, too.

Eugene Pota is a novelist in his mid-seventies whose commercial and critical success has never managed to reach the heights of his first novel, which made his name and is considered an all-time classic (I can't possibly think where Heller got the idea for that character). He's aware that he's probably only got one more book in him and he wants it to be his masterpiece, damnit!

This novel tells the story of his struggle to write that one last book and features the opening pages of several abortive attempts to forge his final masterpiece.

As I hinted above, this novel is, while not quite autobiographical, very much drawn from Heller's own frustrations and, as such, has a distinctly bittersweet flavour to it. This being Heller, of course, it's also very funny. This one was tugging my emotions in all sorts of different directions, often simultaneously.

If, like me, you've only ever read Catch-22, you could do worse than to check this one out.

What a way to send off your own career: a book joking about your own career. Heller, I owe a lot to you. I wish you were still around for me to tell you how much your books meant to me and my undergraduate career, moving me forward into my graduate career. I can't thank you at all, but if I could, I wouldn't be able to thank you enough. It's been a pleasure reading all of your work.

A good "book-lovers" book.

This book is just perfect! Heller's writing is so awesome and spot on all through the book. He has this special way of describing his characters, just already showing you not to take them too serious because they do have some flaws, despite what he sais.
Also I really enjoyed when he made you aware of the fact, that you're reading a book and that he is the master of the things happening in it.
His main character is an elderly writer who wants to finish his career and life with one big masterpiece.
So you follow his ideas, outlines and first drafts until he gives up on them. It is just so enlightening to see the workings of the writer and find your own struggles (as a writer) in there.
I just loved this book!

Worst book I ever read!

This book acts as Heller's confessional, and the truth coming off the pages is what makes it compelling. The story is about an older writer, one who has already secured his place in literary history, but knows he has another good book waiting to come out. It is ineresting to see an author's thought process as he tries to overcome writer's block. It is an easy read and very well done.

This is right down there with William Gaddis' later stuff as "old man mimics his earlier style, yet is completely devoid of any vitality."

Derailing the road to brilliance for Joseph Heller’s subtly aestheticist Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man

http://ivanlabayne.wordpress.com/2012...

The artist in Joseph Heller’s final book, “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” is the artist who pursues his own craft even at the twilight of his career primarily for himself and not for any bigger social or noble cause. Hence, the anxieties that were made obvious, and at times verged on surfeit in the novel, were harbored for one’s self who more and more feared effacement and irrelevance after once enjoying a flattering peak in the course of one’s career.

At the onset, I proffered tinctures of commiseration to Eugene Pota, Heller’s surrogate in his own novel. Aging and on the decline in terms of written productivity, Pota struggled to produce a novel that could fittingly cap his illustrious career after a consistent slump after his first breakthrough work. The entire novel was in fact dedicated to this entire hardship that otherwise could have gone tasteless if not for the inclusion of interesting drafts from Pota’s attempts at a final novel. Pota likened his dilemma to the classic voice in Beckett’s The Unnamable who typified the intensity of volition coupled with the vitality of action in the statement “I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.” Standing at stark contrast is Franz Kafka who discourages going on through his police character in one parable who, when met by someone whose map failed to coordinate with the place he is going around alone, asked the police and notoriously responded, Do not go on.

On the one hand, Pota’s resolute drive and his efforts to materialize it is somewhat admirable, if not amusing at times. From the Sexual Autobiography of his wife to the rewriting of Greek mythology and turning parts of the body into a novel, Pota did not have a scarcity of sound ideas to start with and develop. In the end, as we can correctly expect, Pota was not shown to have finished a novel and Heller need not to do that in his “own” novel. The point about the rigor and the difficulty not just of novel writing but of being a writer in general has been fairly shown. In an identified postmodern manner also, we can say that Heller used Pota to show how the book we were reading was actually made, how this book about the difficulty of writing a book and being a writer has been produced. For purposes of padding a review or notes on this book by Heller, I can still languish on commenting about its satiating self-referentiality. That I would refrain to do however since I believe a more significant point -- a point on Heller’s conception of the “artist” in this novel – needs to be made.

The “artist” in Heller’s novel

Apparently, Heller’s “artist” in the novel, as embodied by Eugene Pota, is one who is most concerned about his craft and how this can propel him to a self-satisfying stature. Having lost the youth and its concomitant prolific power and also the recognition and validation that resulted from those, Pota was pressed to regain a semblance of that production and reception, if not an emulation of it, as he treads the final laps of his career.
As always, one cannot and must not overlook the economic factor that impinges on every decision and action of the author and his characters. Pota was trying to do a “novel that motion picture industry might want,” and here, with the thought of selling the rights to some movie company, we can surmise that Pota also considers the economic assurance a last, successful book can provide for the rest of his life.

Several pages have been allotted to the character “Tom Sawyer” finding first his creator Samuel Jenkins, the real name of Mark Twain, before knowing the dreary process he went through before finally dying in debt and despair. Disappointed, Tom sought to learn the tricks of successful writing career from some of the other renowned authors of the past, among them Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway, only to find out the dampening similarity of their fates and was likewise somewhat discouraged to ever covet such brilliant career in the letters as those writers had.

Pota, and hence in extension, Heller, seemed to be finding ways to preclude such dismal thing from happening to him and this gave him the itch to produce that one last, sealing novel. Here, we can see that the literary artist for Heller is one who develops massive doubts and insecurities in the end as brought by his selfish perseverance to recoup recognition, if not mere economic stability.

In the novel, we can notice also Pota’s insistence on elaborating a new plot, something that no one has even done yet. A very familiar sentiment among writers but perhaps among cultural practitioners in general as well, this provides one crucial hint to the framework Pota is following as he embarked on producing a new novel. This emphasis on a neoteric plot implies a treatment of art as something that must be judged based from its own elements and components. This view disregards altogether the important external factors such as the conditions of production and consumption or reception and the larger social and historical conditions where the artwork, its creator and its readers/audience are all situated, that need to be looked into as we regard what is art and how it becomes valuable.
In other words, the novelty in content which Pota deems necessary for his work to be voted as art and have a chance to be received with affirmation, if not with exaltation, is prepared by an almost hermetic conception of art loosely made famous and recalled in Oscar Wilde and the Aestheticists. This is one key manifestation of the novel which I openly avert for my views of art are diametrically opposed to what the novel carries through its implications.

Ultimately, I believe that art must be valued based both on content and form and one that accentuates novelty of content in itself too much seems oblivious, if not plainly ignorant of existing social conditions that have hardly changed in the recent decades. Or else, one who puts too much premium on his newness of content seems to rely too much on the powers of imagination and not on the credibility of observation and astute analysis of concrete conditions in producing a masterful work.

Apart from its predictable and unchallenging self-referentiality, it is most importantly the
aesthetic principles it subtly forwards that Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man passes me as not just nothing extraordinary but more aptly, a stunted artistic exercise.