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GOOD AS GOLD

Name: GOOD AS GOLD
Author: Joseph Heller
ISBN: 0684839741

by Joseph Heller ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1979

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Critics rightly complained that Bob Slocum, the "hero" of Heller's last novel, Something Happened, was really Jewish beneath his WASP trappings. Well, now Heller atones for his ethnic coverup—with a vengeance. Bruce Gold is, there is no mistaking, a Jew. A college professor and bored writer of articles and books of "fiery caution and crusading inertia," he comes to the attention of the White House, through an old school chum on the staff there. The Washington idiots love Bruce's turns of phrase ("Nothing succeeds as planned," "boggle the mind"); the more imbecilic the prose, the more they adore it, and they offer him a position anywhere on the scale from "close Presidential source" to Secretary of State. (Bruce would love that, if only to crown his obsessive hatred of Henry Kissinger, whom he can't talk about without lapsing into a wicked, galled display of Yiddish.) The White House here plainly stands for archetypal Goyishe kup stupidity, the way the Army stood for confusion and lunacy in Catch-22, with about the same effect: a balloon-y, cartoon-y straw man of manic plenitude. But Heller's real talents come bursting out when he's dealing with Bruce among his own. Bruce's old friends from Coney Island all suddenly appear—successful publishers, doctors, editors of little magazines: "Invite a Jew to the White House—and you make him your slave." A shady garment manufacturer, Spotty Weinrock, and his practical-joke-playing doctor brother, Murshie, are hilarious, Mel-Brooksian portraits. And the book positively sings when Bruce is at table with his family. There's his octogenarian father, whom everyone wants to ship down to a Miami Beach condominium, but who refuses to leave—he couldn't bear to forgo the pleasure of noodging his grown children with 80 years' worth of stored-up contrariness and belittling. And there's older brother Sid, plus five sisters, who've been put on earth (as Bruce sees it) to make him feel like dreck, but in a "nice" way. If this nearly plotless book doesn't add up, all the big pieces provide a great, sloppy, assaulting, impolite comic energy. Heller's loose now, less focused and taking different sorts of risks; here he's flagrantly, Yiddishiy Jewish, taking us deep into familial dread and laughter.

Pub Date: March 1, 1979

ISBN: 0684839741

Page Count: 452

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1979

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CATCH AS CATCH CAN
by Joseph Heller & edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli & Park Bucker

- BOOK REVIEW
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST, AS AN OLD MAN
by Joseph Heller

- BOOK REVIEW
NOW AND THEN
by Joseph Heller

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.