Good as Gold (1979), Heller’s third novel, caused a stir initially because of its controversial treatment of what the book calls “the Jewish Experience in America,” a topic familiar to the Jewish Heller; again, the work grew in its reputation—as an outrageously comic novel. Jack Beatty found it “exuberantly funny” and recognized the central character, Bruce Gold, as an individual rather than a representative of all American Jews (New Republic, March 10, 1979). Gold exploits his Jewishness at the same time that he betrays it. He seeks fame, power, and wealth in Washington, where he hopes to be the first Jewish secretary of state, having dismissed Henry Kissinger as not really Jewish because he supported the Vietnam War and prayed with Richard Nixon. Initially condemned as anti-Semitic, the novel was soon recognized as a brilliant satire.
God Knows (1984) was less popular but has received increasing critical acclaim. An ambitious novel that many appreciate for its wildly comic premise, its narrator is the Old Testament David (of Goliath fame) whose tone has been compared to that of a stand-up comic as he rants about his idiotic son, the biblically wise Solomon. Stuart Evans of the London Times called it “a very funny, very serious, very good novel.” Picture This (1987), an ambitious novel concerning Rembrandt’s Holland and Aristotle’s Athens, received less critical acclaim.
Closing Time (1994) is sometimes called the sequel to Catch-22, but it’s really more of a novel about confused realities in which a few of the same characters appear in different contexts. Milo Minderbinder, for example, has become a billionaire international arms dealer. Sammy Singer, the fainting unnamed gunner in Catch-22, is here one of the narrators. Considering the risk of bringing back characters from a classic, the book received favorable reception.
In 1998, Heller published an anecdotal memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, casually covering his life to that point. His final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, was published posthumously in the spring of 2000 but was not well received. It is the story of an elderly writer, Eugene Pota (acronym for Portrait of the Artist), struggling to cap his career with one last triumph. He offers several false starts, such as a book portraying Tom Sawyer as a would-be novelist; another with Tom Sawyer as a yuppie lawyer from Yale; and a third that is a rewrite of The Iliad from the Trojans’ point of view. Perhaps too true to his topic—perhaps just old and tired—Heller produced a work that critics found dreary and anticlimactic. At the end of his career, it could be said that, without Catch-22, Heller was still a noteworthy novelist. With it, he created one of the classics of the twentieth century.
