Good as Gold

As I have already established on this blog, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is my favourite book of all time, and while I have read a lot of very good books since, nothing really comes close, for me, to its staggering complexity, profundity, humour and pathos. So it's only natural that I should eventually get round to reading some of Heller's other books, to see if he could do it again. Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, was a good attempt: almost on par in terms of its brilliant dialogue and lampooning of American politics, but let down by a lot of rather bland passages relating to the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island. Good as Gold is Heller's other well-known book, considered by many to be his second-best. It also focuses a lot on the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. It's no Catch-22 - what is? - but it also mostly avoids the mundanity of the least interesting parts of Closing Time. Good as Gold follows the misadventures of a man, Bruce Gold, trying to find his place in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, increasingly post-segregation America. He doesn't find it easy: working as an academic and occasionally publishing books and articles, he is shunned by his family who, while proud of his achievements, seem to think that he thinks that he's above them. But he's also shunned by members of the elite circle of society he has been forever trying to break into who, whether openly or not, always think of him as beneath them.

As the novel opens, Gold is stuck trying to get a book about "the Jewish experience in America" off the ground. The trouble is, despite having lived it, he can't seem to decide what that experience actually is, nor will anyone provide him with a clear answer. It is during this period of writer's block that he ends up churning out a shorter article of questionable merit and content, which of course ends up making him famous - not that anyone bothers to read it. It's here that Good as Gold really gets going, as Gold is invited to Washington where a high-ranking government position may be waiting for him. It turns out that the president is a big fan of a review Gold had written of the president's autobiography, and enjoys reading said review when people around him are talking about "agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest" - like in Closing Time, the satire here is just far too on the mark. Anyway, the scenes in Washington are as close as Good as Gold gets to Heller's truly best writing, introducing a succession of increasingly outlandish and memorable characters, all with some darkly comedic analogy to convey, and all of whom, directly or indirectly, want to remind Gold of his place as a Jew.

Because, no matter how much he may try to escape the fact, Gold's story always endeavours to remind him of his origins. A verbally abusive father, a mocking brother, five bickering sisters and their assorted partners, a stepmother who gets madder by the day and a wife who just doesn't seem to care any more are omnipresent throughout the book, whether in the foreground or in the back of Gold's anxious, overthinking mind. There are his childhood companions too, all of whom are less educated and talented than him, and all of whom have been a lot more successful in life. So while Gold does his best to break the cycle - attempting to elope with the daughter of a billionaire, penetrate the very highest level of government, and move in those elite circles that have never accepted him - he finds himself drawn back to his old Coney Island neighbourhood, and a succession of excruciating dinners and parties with his family, in rooms where everyone hates each other but is too proud to say so directly. I can't pretend to understand the American Jewish experience, but I suspect that this is what Heller is trying to convey with these plot lines, and he does it well.

Good as Gold isn't without its flaws: some of the prose drifts far enough into abstraction as to be unclear, Heller misses the chance to fully develop his satirisation of academia, and there's a whole section dedicated to how terrible Henry Kissinger was which, while it makes a lot of valid points, just feels out of place. But all in all there's a lot to like: the ludicrously eccentric billionaire Pugh Biddle Conover, who has forgotten everything but how to be racist but still comes through for Gold in the end, Gold's contact in Washington Ralph, who reels off one-liners with practically every line, the description of Gold's fitness regime that destroys his body but leaves him feeling in peak condition... and most of all the relentlessly brilliant dialogue, conversation after conversation of tragically funny misunderstanding between people that reflect the frustrations of life so well.

Good as Gold is a bloated, confusing mess - and that's what makes it so good.

5/5

There's a lot of discussion here about whether any Jews had truly been successful in America. The field of music is noticeably absent from that discussion.