Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man - Softcover

Heller, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0606223355 ISBN 13: 9780606223355

Publisher: Demco Media

Synopsis

Imagine an author who has become a legend in his own lifetime - all because of the novel he wrote in the first flush of youth. Novelist Eugene Pota is a cultural icon of the twentieth century, struggling to write what will be the last novel of his career. But what to write about when, like so many noted authors before him, all of Pota's output since that first, landmark novel has been scrutinized and dissected - and found wanting? PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, AS AN OLD MAN follows Pota's efforts to settle on a subject for his final work. In his search, Heller - through Pota - pays homage to his favourite authors and discusses the problems that have plagued so many writers whose later works failed to live up to the successes of their first: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, to name but a few. It is a rare and enthralling look into the artist's search for creativity, a search that comes at a point in life when impotence - both sexual and spiritual - has become a frustrating fact. Joseph Heller must have known that this would be his final novel; it stands as a fitting testament to the life and works of a leading light in modern literature.

About this title

Review:

"This author was determined," says the apparently autobiographical narrator of Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. "He often appropriated as his own personal infirmity the concluding words of the unnameable voice in Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, 'I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.'" And on his last day on Earth, Joseph Heller was still polishing this, his last and strangest novel. It is essentially an essay about a writer who's exactly like him--old and stuck for an idea for his next book. Seeking inspiration, he chats with his wife, his editors, and his friends, and floats one high-concept scheme after another.

How about a novel about the gangsters who ran Coney Island, the enchanted land of his childhood? Nah, too much plot to concoct. Perhaps he could update a classic: Tom Sawyer as a Harvard MBA, or Kafka's The Metamorphosis transposed to Manhattan. When these don't pan out, Heller takes a stab at mythology, done in the manner of his old pal Mel Brooks. Here Zeus's wife complains about his flagging ardor:

I try to put myself in Leda's place. It could be kind of thrilling, I guess, being overpowered by a huge male swan, especially after realizing it was Zeus.... I'd like to see him take the trouble to surprise me like that, even once. But that doesn't happen. He won't waste tricks like that on me. He never does, he knows he doesn't have to. When he comes to me it's never with anything new, it's always just the same, always just the same old god.

Increasingly desperate, the author tries out titles on his friends, and A Sexual Biography of My Wife stirs some interest. Still, his tentative fictions don't grab you the way the novel's sad, searing reminiscences do. When Heller--I mean, the narrator--has a tearful reunion with his adulterous old flame (who's now stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease), or asks another female acquaintance whether she regrets turning down his long-ago offer of romance, we get a privileged glimpse into the private mind of a very public author. "I want to cap my career with a masterpiece of some kind," the narrator tells his editor. This poignantly discursive book is not a masterpiece, but Joseph Heller did go on trying to the end. --Tim Appelo

About the Author:

Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He began his career with short stories but won immediate acclaim with CATCH-22 in 1961. He went on to write SOMETHING HAPPENED, GOOD AS GOLD, GOD KNOWS, PICTURE THIS, CLOSING TIME (the sequel to CATCH-22) and PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS AN OLD MAN. Heller died in December 1999.

About this edition

• Publisher: Demco Media
• ISBN 10: 0606223355
• ISBN 13: 9780606223355
• Binding: Paperback