Books like Portrait Of An Artist, As An Old Man

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.