Word: hellers
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...KNOWS by Joseph Heller; Knopf; 353 pages...
...cereally, folks. Author Joseph Heller's fourth novel does indeed feature the biblical King David as its hero and narrator. And it offers a host of other familiar names and time-tested stories. God Knows even looks exactly like a real book, with pages and print and dust jacket and everything. This disguise is extremely clever, considering the contents: the longest lounge act never performed in the history of the Catskills...
...Heller's David comes onstage in the same condition that afflicted the original at the beginning of I Kings: "Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat." This time around, the dying leader has more to worry about than just the squabbling between his sons Adonijah and Solomon over who will succeed him. There is his reputation to consider: "I don't like to boast-I know I boast a bit when I say I don't have to boast-but I honestly think...
Unfortunately, Heller uses this poetic license chiefly as an excuse to troll for gags. If a punch line requires omniscience, then David knows it all: "Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the P.L.O." So the old fellow is up on Yasser Arafat and the contemporary mess in the Middle East? Yes and no. When Heller wants to try for irony...
...central character? As this David likes to remark, "Fat chance." What holds God Knows together, barely, is the enduring vitality of the original material (see especially I and II Samuel), which is both a saga sacred to I millions and one of the glories of Western narrative art. Heller is I most successful when he simply allows his source to do most of the I work, either by lifting large swatches of language from the King James translation or by going against the scriptural grain...