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Readers tend to remember Joseph Heller for the funny names in the 1961 "Catch-22" (Milo Minderbinder, Major Major Major Major) and the novel's title, now a what-the-hey catchphrase. Heller's humor, though, wasn't comic relief--it wasn't "relief" at all--but an obsessive reaction to the same dread of pointless extinction that led him to imagine the gruesome death of the airman Snowden. His crafty final novel, "Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man," completed before he died of a heart attack last December, is his slightest, but it may be his scariest: it amounts to a literary suicide note. An aged, blocked novelist named Eugene Pota (portrait of the artist) desultorily considers and disgustedly abandons bad ideas for a new book: parodies of "Tom Sawyer," retellings of the Trojan War. "I want to cap my career with a masterpiece of some kind," Pota tells his editor, "even a great very small one." When Pota's novel turns out to be the one we're reading, we're neither surprised nor delighted. Pota's not either.
After all, Pota knows novels about novelists are "passe"--like novels about unhappy marriages, dysfunctional families and war. He knows too much. (Anyway, he's done his war novel.) One idea needs "flashy plotting" that he "did not wish to think himself capable of executing." Another would take tedious character development, and younger writers "are better at it now and have the gusto and the time." Why does Pota, with money from his old best sellers, still bother? Because he has nothing else to do. (Heller himself said just that in a 1997 interview.) Since the unrelentingly grim masterwork "Something Happened" (1974), Heller's novels seemed increasingly willed and desperate: "God Knows," with King David as a sort of stand-up comic; "Picture This," with Rembrandt, Socrates and Plato. "Portrait of an Artist" takes this desperation to its logical end: self-referential paralysis. Did he ultimately pull it off, transmuting the death of creativity into a final "masterpiece"? Not even Pota seems to think so. And Heller must have known this book would chill every writer, and many readers, to the heart, while offering not a bit of comfort. For having that much nerve, you've got to admire him at last.
Portrait of an Artist, as an Old ManJoseph Heller
(Simon & Schuster)
233 pages. $23