Picture This: A Novel [Paperback]

Finally, an author who seriously suggests that some of the dutch provinces are perhaps not even known to many INSIDE the Netherlands (hey Joe: this isn't the US you're writing about) doesn' instill too much confidence about getting his other facts right.

One of the few books in my life I didn't finish (maybe the second half is a LOT better).

Heller portrays life in mid-17th century Amsterdam and in the 3rd century before Christ, commenting on similarities to modern living, jumping back and forth between the ages, and tracing the 300-year history of the portrait. It's quite a mix, and that's where the book fails. He just doesn't pull it off.

The book reminds me of a game of checkers played without rules. It's an uncoordinated hopscotch through centuries, filled with distractions, tangents and irrelevant side trips. It's as though he tried to combine several books into one and missed.

Heller's books (CATCH-22, GOD KNOWS, etc.) are unique. Maybe he just tried too hard to be different. The text lacks discipline, organization and the feel for language we expect from master writers. Paragraphs are disjointed, sentences are clumsy and overburdened. Too often they just plain don't make any sense.

"The great seaport city of Amsterdam was then the richest and busiest shipping center in the world. The great seaport city of Amsterdam was not a seaport but is situated a good seventy miles from the closest deepwater shipping facilities in the North Sea." That's amateurish and sloppy. And typical.

Heller's mediocre, journalistic style (reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's) is inadequate for the job he has cut out for himself. The superb, sensitive and imaginative scholarship displayed in PICTURE THIS deserves organized, disciplined, and equally sensitive writing. It didn't get it.

The book is vaguely centered around a piece of artwork that a Sicilian nobleman named Don Antonio Ruffo paid five hundred guilders for Rembrandt to produce. The painting is that of the Greek philosopher Aristotle contemplating a bust of the Greek poet and storyteller Homer. Using this foundation as a springboard, Joseph Heller jumps back and forth in time giving different perceptions on a number of different concepts. Money, power and art are just a few of the topics that Heller touches on and for the most part, as the expression goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. There are some memorable insights into the role that war, commerce, etc. have played in society.

On the other hand, PICTURE THIS does tend to get weighed down underneath its grandiose pretensions. While much of the book discusses the relation that history has to the concepts it contains, there are far too many passages that are just dry rehashes of historical documents. This is most apparent in the sections concerning the Greek philosophers where, at worst, the book spends several pages just rephrasing the events and philosophies that Plato described in APOLOGY, CRITO and THE REPUBLIC. Although these sections can be interesting (probably even more so to any readers who aren't already familiar with them) they are not always related to the rest of the story. For some of these sections, one would be better off reading the actual texts rather than just the summary of them included here.

The main sections of the book are split between long discussions about the wars of the ancient Greek world and numerous lectures upon the role of money/commerce in the Dutch society of Rembrandt's era. Some of it is extremely interesting. Some of it is stunningly dull. There are some very clever themes that run throughout the book such as the portrait of Aristotle being sentient and able to give a commentary on how different and similar life is in Rembrandt's time to that of his own. As readers in the beginning of the 21st Century, we can are also able reflect upon how their life is similar to ours. Heller is aware of this and lets the narrative play around with this idea, and while it isn't totally successful in every case, it's effective enough to be very powerful.

This book definitely has some gems contained within it. Just be warned that there is a lot of padding in between. While it's ultimately a rewarding experience, there are portions of it that are just tedious to read.