Word: goldings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Heller, who is neither a Gentile nor a card-carrying intellectual, goes directly for the exposed nerve. Invite a Jew to the White House (and You Make Him Your Slave) is the title of an article Gold planned to write before receiving his own invitation to Washington. Once there, he is constantly reminded of his background. Take this exchange with a Connally-type Texan: " 'Now, Gold. Everybody here is a somebody, and I don't know why you're being so captious about who it is you are. He is the Spade, she is the Widow...
Even Harris Rosenblatt, raised with Gold in Brooklyn and now a homogenized bureaucrat, gets in a lick. "I used to be Jewish, you know," says Rosenblatt. "I used to be a hunchback," says Gold. "Isn't it amazing," says Rosenblatt, "how we've both been able to change...
...Gold, in fact, does not change, despite Heller's facile attempt to conclude the novel with a hint of cultural reconciliation. Which is just as well. For Gold works best as a caricature in a burlesque about hypocrisy, jealousy and status lust...
...trouble with Good as Gold is that Heller is never content to stay with Washington as Kafka Komix. He insists on ventriloquizing bleak pronouncements on the state of the union: "Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there." Or, "No society worth its salt would watch itself perishing without some serious attempt to avert its own destruction. Therefore, Gold concluded, we are not a society. Or we are not worth our salt. Or both...
...unfortunate effect of such invective is to obscure Heller's strength as a connoisseur of absurdity. When his novel is as good as gold, it is a stinging satire etched in acid. The rest of the time, it is only a polemic finger-painted in bile...