Henry Kissinger ain’t no Jew
Good As Gold (1979) by Joseph Heller
Lieberman seized his arm. “Bruce, what’s it like in Washington?” Gold wrested his arm free and began rubbing at the grease stains and clumps of dust left on his sleeve by Lieberman’s fingers. “What do you do there?”
Gold gave it to him with both barrels. “I fuck girls, Lieberman,” he began explosively with a sadistic delight he could not bring himself to forgo. “Blond girls, Lieberman, blond, the blondest girls you ever saw. All of them beautiful. The daughters of millionaire oil barons and newspaper publishers. Lumber barons, potentates, steel tycoons. Magnates. You should see them, Lieberman, oh, you should see them. All are nineteen or twenty-three and will never grow older. They love Jews. Do you hear me, Lieberman? They love Jews. And they don’t have enough of us there to go around. We’re at a premium. They’re crazy about us, Lieberman. Are you listening? Do you hear? Wealthy widows. They think we’re brilliant and dynamic and creative, instead of just jumpy, nervous, and neurotic. They don’t know, Lieberman, they just don’t know. You should get them, Lieberman, by the armful, you should get them while you can.”
“Take me with you!” Lieberman blurted out tearfully, and raised his eyes to Gold’s face with an imploring look. “Get me a job!” (221)
Joseph Heller failed me. I can’t remember a book that pissed me off more than this one.
I started Good As Gold with high expectations. Back when I used to read Jewish Currents more regularly, Good As Gold popped up as a recommendation in one of their Shabbat Reading List newsletters. It was listed as one of the all-time greatest Jewish American novels. I haven’t read anything else by Joseph Heller, but I recognized him as being of Catch-22 fame, and I was excited to start. The hipster in me loves the thought of preferring the ‘lesser’ work to the famous classic. Additionally, I was looking forward to it as a Washington, D.C. book—I’ve lived in or around D.C. since 2016 (cursed year to move to D.C., I know) and I was hoping for some hyperlocal references to historic hangouts.
It started strong. Funny, it’s very fucking funny! I mean, yes, again with the cartoonish caricature of a Jewish family like Portnoy’s Complaint, but in a fun way. Bruce Gold, middle-aged professor of literature and semi-public pseudo-intellectual, is a terrible person in an entertaining way. He spends most of his time avoiding grading his students’ work, cheating on his saintly wife with a parade of much younger shiksas, allowing himself to be goaded into apoplectic rages by his family’s toxic antics, swindling his former Columbia classmates out of money for shoddy intellectually dishonest work, and obsessively parsing newspaper clippings to prove that Henry Kissinger was not a real Jew. Through one of those old friends whom Gold holds in contempt, Gold is invited to Washington D.C. to serve the White House in an unspecified capacity. Gold leaps into action— by which I mean he leaps into bed with a new WASP mistress while he tries to get the hang of a town in which everyone constantly contradicts themselves and doing nothing is celebrated.
Hilarity ensues for about 250 pages. At this point, I started to get bored. We get it. It was just the same handful of scenes, over and over again. Gold’s family dinners, with his domineering father, bullying brother, weepy sisters, and insane step mother. Gold trading barbs with his old friends, none of whom like each other. Gold desperately trying to get a straight answer about his political prospects out of a slippery politico. Gold trying to reign in his sexually liberated mistress.
On page 308, as I was starting to seriously consider putting the book down for good, Heller throws in a metafictional passage, breaking the fourth wall, and I perked up. Maybe this book would surprise me. Maybe it was changing into something delightfully strange, almost experimental in form. But after that one brief flash of hope, the book resumed its tedious cycle of scene after predictable scene for another 150 pages, with some lazy surrealist flourishes. There are many clever, well-composed passages that excavate the hypocrisies of Gold’s mind, but I don’t think they make up for the utter nothingburger of the second half. Heller clearly got bored of his manuscript midway through; why should we care about it, either?
This is not to say that the book was uniformly terrible. There is one recurring scene about Gold’s exercise regimen that I particularly enjoyed. As a vain 48 year old man, Gold forces himself to jog regularly at the YMCA. It is an excruciating form of torture for Gold, and I found the passage highly relatable as a cardio-hater. I also found it humbling that his regular pace (10 minutes/mile for 3 miles) is faster than my race-day time from the 5k I ran this past year at age 30 (32:13, and I almost threw up at the finish line).
The track was almost empty, which pleased him. It was there on the track while running his grueling three miles several days a week that many of Gold’s best thoughts came to him, and there also that he discharged, for a time, the stewing hostility and mordant self-pity that pooled like poison almost daily in his soul. Envy would dissolve with exertion into euphoria by the time he had showered and dressed and was limping away. There is no disappointment so numbing, he brooded as he entered the last lap of his first mile and felt the muscles of his calves cramp, as someone no better than you achieving more. Forty-eight laps to go. There would be no heartburn today. Soon the muscles of his calves would feel fine, as his kidneys now did, and the tendons of both ankles would whine with each footfall. He could look forward next to a strain in his left groin and then to a vertical shaft of pain on his right side that was rooted in his appendix and rose through his liver, chest, and shoulder blade to his collarbone and neck. Each wound in the sequence could register only singly. Another thought that returned often when he jogged was that it was a fucking boring way to spend time. Gold had discovered, since starting to exercise strenuously several years before, that he was able to make love with greater vitality, stamina, and self-control than formerly, and with much less pleasure. He also found he had less time for it and was often in too much physical torture and debilitation afterward to want to. He lusted more desirously for a nap. Gold no longer suffered from early-morning lower backache. Now he had it all day long. (64-65)
The inner flap claims that Good As Gold does for Washington D.C. what Catch-22 did for the military. But Heller shows no knowledge of D.C. to effectively skewer it. A contemporary review in Commentary claims that Heller never even went to D.C. before writing the book. I don’t doubt this; there is absolutely no sense of place in the parts of the book set in D.C. The richness of post-Watergate politics, the vast potential for biting satire, and this is the best Heller can do? A limp, superficially amusing jerk-off of a book that I was delighted to finally be done with.
Good As Gold (1979) by Joseph Heller: 3.2 / 10
Within the past year I went back to Something Happened thinking it might be of value to me. It wasn't. I found it boring, tedious and quite frankly, kind of stupid and poorly written. Like he couldn't be bothered to think. So I gave up. I guess that's my only point. Catch 22 was great fun but too much success can ruin some writers. No matter how famous you are, you still have to put in the work. And the work is quite formidable.
I've never read Good as Gold, but I remember reading some article about Heller years ago that said he was too angry to write that book properly. Does that make sense as you see it?
Catch-22 is wonderful. It manages to be comic and tragic more or less simultaneously for most of its length, and then toward the end the mood very suddenly shifts in a way that comes as a powerful shock. That's the only Heller I've read, though; somehow I've never felt inspired to try any of his other books.