Good, but simply not amazing. Heller's wit shines through in this work, and in this aspect it is virtually on par with Catch-22. However, the plotline is often incoherent, bouncing from idea to idea. I also personally didn't like Pota very much, as a character. A short read, I didn't feel like this was a waste of time, and there were some parts that I honestly enjoyed (many of the quips between Hera and Aphrodite, for instance.) As an artist myself (musical, primarily, rather than writing) I can sympathize with the frustration that arises from a lack of ideas. But Heller doesn't convert the scattered ideas that he has into something overly memorable.

This was rather enjoyable! Part novel/part memoir... it offered a unique insight into the mind of an aging Heller, hell bent of replicating the success that Catch-22 brought him. A futile effort, as nothing is as good as Catch-22 (a reread will be forthcoming!). I enjoyed many of the upstart novels Pota put forth, with my favorite being the bit with Tom Sawyer travelling the country in search of a successful novelist who was actually wealthy and happy. This section definitely illuminated the fact that so many of the most talented artists we have known shined for a brief period and disappeared all too soon.

That questionable comma aside, Heller’s last and posthumous novel is a winner—a bitterly candid portrait of an over-the-hill, clapped-out and confused senior novelist struggling to settle on one idea for his farewell feature. Heller’s Pota is a cranky soul who swoops down on various ideas, most of them retreads of Greek myths, biblical stories, Mark Twain homages, and Kafka reworkings, and wrestles with his dwindling powers. His intention of writing ‘A Sexual Biography of My Wife’ creates marital conflict, and the novel’s finest sections are when Pota is ruminating on his relationship (not in most uxorious terms), and sparring with his unimpressed editor. It is safe to assume that Heller had started the various snippets we read throughout the novel, and devised a clever way of stringing them together by including snarky commentary on them. The result is a fairly fragmentary, unapologetically chatty, and extremely amusing novel where Heller truly has the last laugh at his own expense.

Heller's last novel is as much memoir as anything. Consider this: it's main character is an author who has never been able to live up to the promise of his much praised first novel. Now, approaching death, all he wants to do is write a novel he can sell to the movies. Sad, yes. Laugh-out-loud funny? Absolutely.