Gold medal
Paul Ableman
Good as Gold Joseph Heller (Cape £4.95) A few weeks ago, I was hailing John Updike's The Coup as a masterpiece. Clearly, a critic shouldn't pluck masterpieces out of publishers' lists the way, a conjurer plucks coins out of ears but Joseph Heller's new book is certainly a very fine novel. It is a farcical satire in the tradition of Don Quixote and Dead Souls and, if not quite as grand as the Spanish and Russian classics, is more consistent than they are.
In it, Heller comes clean and comes home — to Brooklyn. Yossarian, in Catch-22, although reeking of Jewish irony, is alleged to be an Assyrian. The hero of Something Happened is called Slocum. But there is no coy disguise about Bruce Gold. He issues, like his creator, from Cony Island's Jewish ghetto and, as if to celebrate the overdue admission, the text of Good as Gold crackles with Yiddish expressions, ultimately erupting into a veritable fireworks display of them.
Gold, the eponymous hero of the punning title, has achieved some celebrity as an author and socio-political analyst. He is also a university professor. His works have brought him to the attention of the White House and much of the plot concerns his lobbying for a government appointment.
The polarising tension of the book contrasts life in Brooklyn and life in Washington. In order to equip himself for high office, Gold plans to desert his family and espouse the gentile daughter of HughBiddle Conover, whose services to the nation include having lied 17 times under oath. Conover has also held many political top jobs and is an hereditary WASP aristocrat whose Virginia estate rivals Versailles.
Thus at one level, and in general the most successful, Good as Gold is the latest despatch from the battlefield of Brooklyn Jewish family life, fought out with the traditional weapons of cookery and guilt. In his home environment, Gold is regarded as a 'poor schmuck' who can't make real money. In spite of doting but obtuse spinster sisters, Gold's folks obstinately refuse to perceive what a fine figure he cuts in the outside world. Each of these characters, and especially the venemous patriarch whose annual despatch to Florida, and thus out of everyone's hair, is a cat that unites the whole family, is vivid and many are both touching and hilarious.
But the president's finger, according to Ralph, a gentile old school friend of Gold's, who has become a nebulous White House aide, is beckoning our hero to Washington where his every published word is regarded as holy writ. Would he care for an ambas sadorship? Perhaps he would prefer to be head of the CIA or even Secretary of State?. Anything is possible, according to Ralph, unless it should prove not to be. Ralph's speech is alleged by the blurb to be a tissue of oxymorons. This is not quite accurate. It is really a series of statements that are immediately contradicted. The trick becomes a little tedious, smacking of formula, and the Southern parts of the book are, in general, less imaginatively assimilated than the rest. They do, however, supply the work's crowning glory in the personality of Hugh Biddle Conover, a towering creation comparable in stature to any monster ever connured up by an American pen.
Conover's personality, imprisoned in his ailing body which is shunted about in an electric wheelchair, requires fuelling with incessant tumblers of whisky. 'Fill it up. up goddammit — its my whisky not yours. All that's better. Hey-hey. Ikey-kikey, where's your bikey?' In order to apprehend that personality's full demonic splendour the reader really needs exposure to at least one of the Southerner's vast and deranged monologues. Here is a sample: 'I pray you will not let being a !cede sheeny inhibit you, you kike. I hear they're giving mentions now to coons, Greeks. dagos, spics and women. Would you go in public like a beggar with your hat in your hand merely to appear to be under consideration for the Vice Presidential nomina' tion with a long line of other humble mend' icants . . . If you ever call me Dad or Father even once, Golddust, I warn you now — put a ball between your eyes.' Conover, as well as Ralph, who insists that anti-semitism is now unknown in Washington even though admitting he wouldn't allow Gold to cross his threshold, represent the, as it often seems to baffled American Jews, malignant gentile world that eternally refuses to acknowledge Jewish ethical superiority and glories in pleasures proscribed by the Law. It will toss a docile Jew the odd ambassadorship, or even nymphomaniacal daughter, but forever bar him from social equality. Logically. nf course, if a minority group is morallY superior it shouldn't care tuppence about admission to the persecutors' world. Bur, such is human nature, it does. These yearnings lead Gold to brood on Henry Kissinger. Since the little shuttler apparently achieved full acceptance, could he really have been a Jew? Gold decides he was probably a Pals" sian and a subordinate theme of the book IS Gold's assembly of a file for a prospective work exposing Nixon's Secretary of State. This is a large book and ancillary themes meander through it like rivers across a mall' These include satirical perspectives on current American sexual behaviour, New York literary life, Washington committee highjinks and the Brooklyn obsession with immigrants and their origins. Although slightly flawed by the clash of conflicting styles the book is nevertheless one of the funniest, fiercest and most illuminating WI come out of America for years. Lightly disguised as Johnny Blaydon (or Perhaps it's his real name, as he writes ander a nom-de-plume that declares his descent from Henry) Gabriel Fielding recounts his childhood and youth in the Twenties and Thirties with unsentimental haPPiness. The blurb tells us that at least three characters in the book are portraits of real People _ his ailing vicar father, his mother, who reads the boy slices of her memoirs, and himself. Also real are the locations of the book's three phases; a seaside town in Sussex, a slum town in Yorkshire and the cottage in Anglesey Where the family moves when his father Prematurely retires. The family is enorm°Its, including not only brothers and sisters hut also great-aunt, grandmother, grand,father, uncle, nanny, servants and other fiangers-on. The two main characters, his mother Kathy and his nanny Nanki-Poo, take over large parts of the book and deserve their prominence. Kathy is adama,fitlY religious, persuading both her hus'and and her father to become vicars, and cl°1fig numerous good works for the church; but she artlessly also keeps an ex-lover, Fred Glover, on a string, arranging for him Olive up the hill in Anglesey so he is within reach of her saving powers. Nanki serves the family for years but then deserts to cohabit with grandfather in Rhyl. The houses, the countryside, the people ,a.re. minutely described first through the 'armed but piercing vision of the child, then t.rough the eyes of a callow young man. ' he author's attitude to life is that any exPerience can be right and satisfying, even eLrYlog into one's beer after the death of a 'rother. He maintains the illusionistic merging of the two personae — thinking and sPeaking both as a grown man and as a child and adolescent — without overdoing the assumption of youth. Sometimes his comPlacent childish judgements are left unedited: 'I came to understand that slums are not altogether unhappy provided some°fie who cares is there near them and unafraid to be in them.' Was the vicar's family at important? But often a gentle irony is lowed through; he is merciless in portray111)1g his first love affairs, where he dabbles In tries languidly to avoid entanglement, cable to apply his perception of his bad 'ehaviour in any way to ease it. _The Eider, published in America as King uf the Jews, is an extraordinary book which Zlold only have been written by a Jew. The der (or king of the Jews) is I. C. Trum,Pe. 'Man, a contradictory figure, both Mes'Iah and devil, who rises to rule the ghetto in a Polish town under the Nazis, helping to implement their policy of extermination partly for his own purposes and partly because it seems the only way to save Jews allowed to remain. Of course in the end none are allowed to remain, and he knows long before he admits it that those who go are going not to farms or a Madagascan paradise but to be asphyxiated or shot.
There are strikes and other protests against his rule, but children see most clearly what is happening. Among other things he is head of the Hatter's Asylum, an orphanage, and some of the orphans form an underground army to oppose him, to smuggle goods and to collaborate with the Russians.
The book is full of magnificent mythical scenes held down by an appalled humour, such as the children's subversive performance of Macbeth, or the scene in which the entire Jewish council decides to commit suicide rather than draw up their first list of victims. The pills they take turn out to be not cyanide but sleeping pills. Trumpelman wakes them, in fact he engineered the whole scene; they make the list, and the event fuels the legend that he can raise the dead. In spite of the starvation and misery, the unburied corpses in the streets, the tone of the book is curiously like that of a very good fairy story — dramatic, brutal yet spellbinding, and nearer reality the more magical it becomes. Perhaps this is the only way to treat the horrific trap in which the Judenrat and the Elder himself are caught.
Some Irish writers have the ability to verbalise brilliantly about nothing in particular. David Hanly, in spite of grappling with a weighty subject —modern Ireland, its attempts to escape from its history and from the mystique of Irish writing — cannot bring it to life. A small symptom is the way he often has to repeat the full names of his characters, to remind us who they are; too often we have forgotten. A collection of Americans moves about Ireland making a documentary, accompanied by several representative Irishmen. One of the Americans is a stunning black girl and Hanly tries to make political points through her; the odious clever Irish civil servant (with whom the author seems to identify) eventually goes to bed with her, but she remains a crude puppet-like figure.
Perhaps humourlessness is the fatal flaw. Sue Krisman is much less ambitious, but she brings to her tale of a drop-out couple a certain slangy vitality and wit. It is told by the husband, Guy Thursby, who decides to leave lecturing and try home baking in Cornwall. His wife Ros, initially coping, shoplifts because she can't bear to tell him she's pregnant again; money is tight, he feels imprisoned and sleeps with the infertile wife of their best friend. He impregnates her, which is what she wanted. Ros recovers, business at the bakery picks up, and everybody is as happy as they will ever be. The depths of unhappiness are not great, but they and the comforts of married life and children are solidly created.
Emma Fisher
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