Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man

Zusatztext Chicago Sun-Times Warmly engrossing. Informationen zum Autor Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. In 1961, he published Catch-22 , which became a bestseller and, in 1970, a film. He went on to write such novels as Good as Gold, God Knows, Picture This, Closing Time , and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man . Heller died in 1999. Klappentext An aging writer attempts to pen one last great American novel to be remembered by--but what should he write? This book follows the journey that Eugene Pota undertakes as he sifts through the detritus of his life in an effort to settle on the subject of his final work. Chapter One: Tom "Tom." No answer. "Tom." Still no answer. "Oh, shit," said Aunt Polly. "Where in the world can that boy be this time, I wonder?" That boy, Tom Sawyer, was lounging in an armchair up front in the parlor in his new Armani cashmere sport jacket, complacently calculating the overnight appreciation of his stock and bond holdings as he waited for four of his friends to come by in the leased stretch limousine with insolent smoked windows to take them all to the luxury box in the stadium for the big game -- football or basketball, he had forgotten which, perhaps a prizefight. It did not matter to him. What mattered was that he be there. He had bedecked himself in a Turnbull & Asser shirt of aubergine vertical stripes with a gleaming white collar, unbuttoned at the neck. His suspenders were wide and of a red-and-black polka dot. Proudly and deceptively, he had already devised a tricky new riddle to entrap his gullible pals once more into bets of $300 each they were sure they´d win and were certain to lose. He would entice them at the start with an idle observation, as though thinking out loud, the vague surmise "You know, it really is hard for me to accept the fact that -- " Oh, shit, sighed the elderly author with great regret, and decided to give up on this book too. Listlessly, he rolled the ballpoint pen away. The last thing he wanted to do now, he told himself, was tax his brain to devise a convincing crafty riddle for the expectations raised in the text in order to move it along; the one he´d had in mind for a start he´d already used before as a bit in an earlier novel, that Reno, Nevada, and Spokane, Washington, were both farther west than Los Angeles. No one might catch the repetition. But he would know, and that single cheat could be enough to engender self-contempt, and then induce him to loaf along in other areas too. It was not worth the effort, he sensed already. This book-length parody of the quintessential American pop novel Tom Sawyer, with a contemporary Tom Sawyer and a law degree from Yale or a master´s degree in business administration from Harvard, was definitely not going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of the world, or his race, whichever. Not now, he reflected with a rueful smile, certainly not this one in what he had already begun thinking of privately, with dismaying irony, as this last portrait in literary form by the artist as an old man. Although that, as always, was never for a minute what he seriously had in mind. And not even James Joyce had succeeded in making that long stretch to metaphysical perfection in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But this latest gambit, he now judged, was simple, hackneyed satire, affording no space for expanded aesthetic experimentation or for ambivalent domestic conflicts or wrenching tragedies, and of a kind that swarms of gifted newspaper and magazine writers could do in half a day with eight hundred words, while he would need three or four years for his novel and fill four hundred pages. A lifetime of experience had trained him never to toss away a page he had written, no matter how clumsy, until he had gone over it again for improvement, or had at l...

Product details

• Authors: Heller, Joseph Heller, Joseph L. Heller
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.07.2001
• EAN: 9780743202015
• ISBN: 978-0-7432-0201-5
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 215 mm x 15 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature