SOURCE: Glass, Charles. “Shy Raconteur.” New Statesman (20 March 1998): 54.

In the following review, Glass finds Now and Then lacking as autobiography.

Now and Then is a detailed guide to subway travel and cheap food in 1930s Coney Island, New York. It begins in Coney Island, lingers in Coney Island and, somehow, ends in Coney Island. Its title could have been No Escape from Coney Island or—because the author also wrote Catch-22—Catch a Life in Here if You Can. Or, as writer of that other masterpiece, Something Happened, Joseph Heller might have called this Nothing Happened. Nothing much does.

You can almost hear the rocking chair creaking on the front porch as Old Joe Heller recalls, to anyone who will listen, the childhood of Little Joey Heller. He grew up with his widowed mother, his half-brother and half-sister in “four rooms, looking out on West 31st Street near...