[In the following review, McLaughlin considers Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man a bittersweet and satisfying final work.]

Joseph Heller's posthumous Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man is a more fitting and satisfying final work than either his ill-considered Catch-22 sequel, Closing Time, or his been-there-done-that memoir, Now and Then. Seemingly autobiographical, the novel focuses on Eugene Pota, an aging writer who has never been able to match the success of his first big novel and who is desperately trying to find an idea for a final masterpiece. This situation allows for meditations on the effects of old age, a dissection of writer's block, an examination of the despair that has historically beset writers near the ends of their lives, and the presentation of scraps of Pota's aborted attempts at that final novel, some of which are so funny, one wishes they went on longer. Heller, through Pota, wrestles here in a thought-provoking way with the challenges of creation: he can find nothing to write about in his own experiences that won't repeat his earlier books, yet he can't summon the energy to do the research necessary to write outside of his experiences; he is also paralyzed by the literature-of-exhaustionish discovery that everything he attempts has already been done by someone else. Thus his false starts are all self-conscious reworkings of other texts, from Classical mythology to the Bible to The Metamorphosis to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. If Heller didn't give us a final masterpiece, he has given us a smart, funny, bittersweet, personal novel about writing novels as a farewell gift.