Joseph Heller's final novel was certainly an anachronism in comparison with his other six. It was very short (230 pages instead of 400-600), very lacking in structure or plot, and very autobiographical and nonfictional. It was very much an afterthought, in fact. After completing Closing Time, his self-described "summing up," Heller apparently got bored and decided to write another book; had he not died of a heart attack at 76 in 1999, I'm sure he would have written yet another. The protagonist of this career epilogue is a writer who has always struggled with being able to write a novel that could live up to the precedent set by his very first novel. Sound familiar? Heller doesn't even pretend that said "fictional" writer isn't himself - not that there's anything wrong with that. What follows is a series of "false starts," if you will; not-Heller begins to write a story and gets anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages into it before giving up in despair. It isn't really writer's block. It's more of a sensation that everything he's writing has either been written before (by him or someone else) or isn't good enough to build a story out of. And I see where he's coming from. One of not-Heller's rough drafts is the story of Abraham and Isaac (the one in which God demands that Abraham kill his only son, but then let's him live after Abraham is ready to go through with it - you know, another feel-good Old Testament tale) retold from Isaac's point of view. I'll admit, it had a lot of potential, but then, the opening pages of a book often do; how to stretch and expand good ideas into entire novels is the real issue. Anyway, as I read not-Heller's draft of the Isaac story, I remembered Heller's God Knows, a re-telling in contemporary language of many biblical stories from King David's point of view. But before long, not-Heller snapped out of the draft and thought, "this is way too similar to that book I wrote about David." (Again, there is never once a pretense that not-Heller isn't Heller.) I actually wondered to what extent, if any, Portrait of an Artist was a work of fiction. Were these not-Heller originals just actual failed Heller projects through the years? It seems probable, right? Other ideas that get toyed with and tweaked are a re-telling of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("There's nothing to expand upon here," realizes not-Heller), a human-history-arching story told by an immobile but omnipresent gene in every cell of every human being (scrapped for a number of reasons including its lack of a compelling narrator), a book in which Tom Sawyer encounters Mark Twain (way too much meta-fiction for not-Heller to handle - irony intentional?), and a book about all the Greek gods getting jealous and angry at one another (which was abandoned simply for lack of direction). At their best, these stories were cocktease-esque sneak peaks at Heller projects that never came to fruition. At their worst, they wasted ten uninteresting pages of Heller's final novel. The book ends abruptly (for no reason, given the short length and given that Heller's death shortly after its completion was due to a heart attack rather than any illness he could have foreseen ending his life) with not-Heller deciding that his next book will simply be a book about all of his failed attempts at writing another great book - this very book you've just read, in fact! Blech. I wasn't wholly satisfied with this final offering from the author of my favorite book ever, but then, neither was he, if not-Heller's thoughts on his struggles are any indication. But then, at least Portrait of an Artist was short and simple. It can't be my least favorite Heller book because I never expected much, good or bad, from it in the first place. Again, it always felt like a simple tacking-on to me. Like Griffey's short-lived 2010 season, or Season 9 of Scrubs. (By the way, least favorite Heller book? God Knows. But this is starting to turn into a post best suited for another blog...) I'd be remiss to end this post without some kind of tribute to Heller; I've now posted six of his books on this blog (tops for any author) and now I'll never get to post about him again, except if I'm drawing a comparison or unless I someday read his memoirs or his collection of short stories - both distinct possibilities! But for now, the backlog is Heller free for the first time since I finished Catch-22. Oh, fuck it. I'll leave you with this:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.
No comments:
Post a Comment