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.
