Just Think of It as the Sequel to His Entire Career : Books: ‘Closing Time,’ mixing real and fictional friends, is Joseph Heller’s follow-up to ‘Catch-22.’ But not everyone thought it was necessary--or a good idea.

Autumn is not expected to be this pleasant--neither the autumn of the year, nor the autumn of life.

But here is Joseph Heller, legendarily cranky novelist, basking at 71 in autumn sun on the patio of his summery home outside East Hampton, the tony Long Island beach town. His thick froth of white hair shines. His tan skin glows. He is just back from Europe and a happy welcome for the book some thought he should not write.

Called “Closing Time” (Simon & Schuster, 1994), it is subtitled “The Sequel to ‘Catch-22.’ ” In Germany and England, he says with a chuckle, “They think it’s a masterpiece.

“I’m gonna give you things that might make headlines,” Heller says. “A woman came here to interview me--she’s well-known in England, she writes for the Guardian magazine. She begins the interview by saying, ‘How does it feel to have written three of the great novels of the century?’ ”

He explains: The interviewer meant “Catch-22,” the classic set during World War II; “Something Happened,” a dark dissection of life in the corporate middle class, and “Closing Time.”

The new novel finds Yossarian, the embattled hero of “Catch-22,” at the end of his life, looking back. He is joined by Air Force buddies including Milo Minderbinder and Chaplain Tappmann, by a retired magazine executive named Sammy Singer (another “Catch-22” vet, it seems, but nameless in that book), and by ghosts such as Snowden, the radio-gunner whose cold death dapples the first book and the memories of those who have read it.

Beyond “Catch-22” and its aging cast, “Closing Time” refers to a postwar, anti-war pantheon including Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and Thomas Mann’s “Doktor Faustus.” The story juggles elegy and comedy, cancer and comic apocalypse. It descends from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to the sub-basements of the White House and the circles of hell.

“Closing Time” recalls the suffocating offices of “Something Happened,” the Jewish identity crises that permeate Heller’s “Good as Gold” and “God Knows,” the musings on art and economics in his “Picture This,” and even “No Laughing Matter,” his nonfiction chronicle of recovery from Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease.

It is the sequel to Heller’s entire career.

Over the years, asked why he never wrote another book as big as “Catch-22,” Heller has riposted, “Who else has?” That bravado had to wither a bit in the late 1980s, when he agreed to write a “Catch-22” sequel. It would be book two in a two-book, $4-million deal with G.P. Putnam’s Sons. The deal resulted in “Picture This” (1988), a critical and commercial disappointment, then, the next year, in cancellation.

Heller had started his sequel by then, but no publisher would pick it up. He says: “It was hard only because an agent and I had grandiose ideas of how much money it should and could command.” He found a new agent, the well-connected Amanda (Binky) Urban; Urban found the sequel a home at Simon & Schuster, original publisher of “Catch-22.” Heller calls the advance payment “relatively small” but fair, something under $375,000.

Things slid further downhill once the “Closing Time” manuscript was submitted last February. Word-of-mouth was downright hostile. Few magazines sought advance profiles of Heller. Rumor had it that no one wanted periodical rights. (In the end, Playboy and the Forward, the small Jewish weekly, ran excerpts.)

A preview feature in New York magazine called the book overambitious, offering quotes--some anonymous, some attributed--that questioned even Heller’s right to write. Reviewers took up the gauntlet of comparison under such headlines as “Catch-00,” “Kvetch 22,” “Catch-22 2” and, more than once, “Catch-23.” Many cited a passage where Heller skewers the cliched use of the phrase “Catch-22”; most missed the punch line, reading Heller himself as stale. (In the Los Angeles Times, William Broyles Jr. concluded: “He fails. But not from lack of trying.”)

“I didn’t realize until I read the reviews of this book--especially those that were unfavorable--in what high esteem ‘Catch-22’ is held by nearly everybody,” Heller says. “I didn’t know the intensity or the extent of the admiration they had for the book, and, from the book, for the author.”

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By October, the official month of publication, the tide turned. “Closing Time,” Heller says, “got better reviews from what I would call ‘prestige’ publications than any of my other novels: the Sunday New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune.”

With some reservations, “prestige” reviewers praised the project: a reflection on the world Heller has known and, to some extent, on the way the world knows him. Long lyrical passages, told in first person by Sammy Singer and his old friend Lew Rabinowitz, evoke Depression-era Brooklyn and a World War II shatteringly different from that in “Catch-22.”

“The war experiences were war experiences,” Heller explains. “They were not pure figments of my imagination organized to produce the effect of ‘Catch-22.’ The war itself was not particularly funny.”

On a separate, intersecting story plane, Heller splashes the new Yossarian tale, a broad farce of America in the ‘90s. Friends of the author, such as writers Mario Puzo and Kurt Vonnegut, drop in. Heller sprinkles his own thoughts and experience among Sammy, Lew and Yossarian. When Yossarian falls in love with a nurse, for example, she is described as old enough to remember “Pearl Bailey but not Pearl Harbor”; Heller used that line in “No Laughing Matter” to describe his own nurse, now his wife, Valerie. Sammy Singer even mentions a boyhood pal named Joey Heller, an aspiring writer.

“Closing Time” is no autobiography, but real people stand behind many of its characters, and Heller readily distributes their phone numbers. Marvin Winkler, for instance, a fictional crony of Sammy and business associate of Milo Minderbinder, is also an old friend of Heller. He calls the book’s version of their youth “totally accurate.”

“Joe is accurate all the time,” says Winkler, who lives in Santa Monica. “I never had a problem with Joe being accurate. I had a problem with him being nasty, but now he isn’t nasty anymore. He’s nice.”

Heller reworks fictional friends too. Yossarian’s escape at the end of “Catch-22” might have inspired a generation, but the author is unsentimental: “He would have had to’ve been compromised. He would’ve had to make the same adjustments to the social realities that I made and that everybody in my generation made, and that Sam Singer made.”

Yossarian, it turns out, was caught shortly after Nately’s whore brought her knife down on the last page of “Catch-22.” “It’s hard not to be disappointed,” Heller admits. “You do have that romantic ending in ‘Catch-22.’ Everybody’s on Yossarian’s side, and they’re rooting for him, and he’s become a spirit.”

Mike Nichols’ movie version of the ending was more romantic still. In “Closing Time,” Yossarian tweaks the idea of escaping in a little yellow raft on open seas. But Heller says his own view of World War II was never Yossarian’s.

“It was mainly an adventurous and delightful experience, extremely satisfying, extremely romantic,” he says. A picture of a teen-age Joe Heller, smiling, Air Force flier’s cap at a jaunty tilt, hangs in his study among bestseller memorabilia.

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Sales of “Closing Time” have already covered the advance payment. That means royalties will soon start to mount, Heller notes, “so go out and buy some books.” Simon & Schuster has reissued “Catch-22,” like the new book, in both standard hardcover and a $125 boxed edition.

Heller has heard, though it surprises him, that some in Hollywood believe “Closing Time” is filmable. A TV producer is flying a World War II B-25 bomber to East Hampton, reuniting Heller with his (and Yossarian’s) old plane for a Learning Channel documentary. He is ready to write again, waiting for the right idea; he’s already rejected two or three. Guillain-Barre has left his muscles weak, and he gets hoarse quickly, but mostly, he feels just fine: “My digestion, thank God, is very good. So is my appetite.”

The sun is high at closing time. Joseph Heller says he is “extremely pleased with myself at this point in my life. I’m a successful novelist. I’m held in very high esteem by many of the people in this country and other countries. I’m 71 years old. My health is very good. I look good; I know this because people tell me. My wife says I have amazing skin. I know I have my hair. I have very few causes to be displeased.”

And what did he say when that Englishwoman asked how it felt to have written three of the great novels of the century?

Joseph Heller, on the bright line between braggadocio and self-mockery, says: “My answer was, ‘I’m embarrassed, that’s how it feels. If you make it the last half of the century, I might be able to discuss it with you.’ ”