Good as Gold:

...his wife...

...that suburban WASP Slocum-with his frustrated petty dreams (to give a threeGOOD A% COLD And is there anyone who has been in minute speech at his nameless corporaJoseph Heller the army or air force who is not somehow tion's convention), his adolescent sexual Simon & Schuster, $12.95, 447 pp...

...The Diagonal Dark Path" counter- These poems confirm that McCarthy is a It may be that Good as Gold, which points these poems by vividly recreating poet, free of his earlier Yeatsian and has had a mixed reception, has arrived the fears and temptations of childhood...

...by the media and absorbed by the public night of lies or booze or sex or just But the first two Heller novels have an mind...

...Joseph House, f11000MMON WEAL keep enrollment low, he skips office from September 1974 to May 1975...

...He has become a lazy writer and teacher...

...come too soon...

...I began to recognize my own afflic- Gift card It was now possible, in fact, thanks tion...

...to use ened classroom without being ex- ters with the wacky Establishment bigot women (the government secretaries are posed for even one moment to any power broker, Hugh Biddle Conover, named Dusty, Rusty, Misty and Christy other light but that of a movie pro- and his simultaneous love affairs with and the WASP White House aide, who jector...

...competitor with Sunday golf and whose fascist personalities in our culture who But Gold's real tension comes from Christ is merely an angry expletive, a would dominate the government after the fact that his own morality dangles book which sums up the spiritual empti- World War II, glare down from the Pen- barely a ledge above his enemy's...

...dangle major after spending all four years Presidential Commission on Higher before him the possibility of a govern- of academic study watching Education and its much-praised unreadment job (a "spokesman," a "senior of- foreign motion pictures in a dark- unwritten (by Gold) Report, his encounficial," Secretary of State...

...that his appointment is guaranteed although we can't promise A TEAR AT TIE CATHOLIC WORKER tions about our social system, about reanything...

...Andrea Biddle Conover and his daughhas recently been married to Sallie, Ellie, ter's school teacher are real events or, Kelly, Norah, etc advises Gold to In the end, of course, the government more likely, the dangerous warning-sign dump his wife and marry the daughter of post is as much an illusion as the images fantasies of a Jewish Slocum, the fate of a an insane Establishment anti-Semite be- flickering on the English department's would-be creative person in mid-life cut fore joining the team) as mere adjuncts of screen...

...for perhaps only fiction, closed doors...

...Paulist Press, $1.95 paper, 140 pp...

...that Gold should testify in Marc H. Ellis ligion and prosperity in a world of opCongress for higher education and just pressed people, with particular urgency...

...It is eva family rule that Golds-good Jews- erything a first-rate journal of opinion don't get divorced...

...Although the experience and Drugs in Sex and Religion in World brought no resolution to his personal di- Name and American Films and Literature" and lemma, it did bring, in Peter Maurin's "Monarchy and Monotheism in Litera- words, clarification of thought...

...It is a place where gaiety can be offensive He has already compromised a lot, and we think we know the answer when he ION OF A CATHOLIC WORKER "Commonweal is sharp, blunt, vigasks himself in the last pages how much Michael Garvey orously written, and full of resoundlower he must crawl to reach the top...

...Why Well, yes and no...

...Even at work, where Maybe because his paranoia has not at this stage, could capture that unfortuI am doing so well now, the sight of overwhelmed his last scrap of individual- nate blend of power-hunger, amorality, a closed door is sometimes enough ity...

...At the university he always does about the Bowery people he lived simply complete this coupon schedules a Friday afternoon class to with and cared for, at St...

...English professor and middlewhy...

...as much about himself, "born graduate keep clippings of all his articles but ap- and raised a Jew in the suburban city of parently have no idea what he is talking North Miami Beach, Florida," as he To subscribe or to send a gift about...

...petitive madness and chronic anxiety of doesn't someone as emotionally maimed Kissinger as a fictional character is an American life...

...before Something Happened has had time to sink in...

...liberated from the painful absurdity of fantasies, his continual marital infidelity, military memories because Heller has his meaningless well-paying job and his Raymond A. Schroth captured that absurdity, made us stare it disintegrating family-was the represenI T MAY SEEM ungrateful to suggest, in the face, and then mocked it in Catch- tative American of the 1970s...

...Thus Heller novels focus with unre- fore Something Happened has been fully 13 years after Catch 22 (1961) for Some- lenting concentration on the real terror, discussed, we must deal with Good as thing Happened (1974) to appear, that darkness, evil and absurdity of contem- Gold, another painful portrait of a bright Joseph Heller's very funny but slightly porary life and death, then pull us but almost empty man watching his soul different third novel, Good As Gold, has through the darkness to the brink of melt in his hands...

...In the Address ture from Medieval to Modern," which afflictions of the homeless, the alis really Gold's worn-out course on coholics, and the mentally ill, Ellis says, City, State, Zip 5/11/79 Shakespeare's history plays...

...light-to the edge of faith-with weak When Heller visited Fordham to talk to In one sense, we can never have and scarcely admirable protagonists students immediately after Something enough of Joseph Heller- we need him to (since Heller, the word hero applies less' Happened came out, his new book was articulate our common secret fears...

...Now, beafter we had waited so impatiently for 22...

...10016 is unprepared...

...Marc Ellis gift for the lives of his big bickering family who tells us...

...Few reviews at the time did justice to the horrifying possibility I wonder who's Kissinger now...

...a "satire" of the military, but a "black weight popular intellectual on-the-make, In the office in which I work humor" warning about a murderous obsessed with a righteous hatred of there are five people of whom I am streak in the American character, just as Kissinger-a hatred stoked by a DosPasafraid...

...lish articles and reviews that will flatter Commonweal: 284 the President who might invite him to dent to graduate as an English Washington, his one-day meeting of the dinner at the White House and...

...and, while the family dinner off from his roots, who has no social, the male ego...

...He has promised a quicky book ALTHOUGH BOTH of these books are to a publisher friend on the American based upon journals dealing with the Jewish experience-a sort of Jewish authors' years at Catholic Worker COMMORWell Roots-although he barely comprehends Houses of Hospitality, each book is dif- The ideal his own Coney Island boyhood or the real ferent in tone and emphasis...

...and, worst of all, to forsake sequences are almost brutally realistic, intellectual, or religious visions-only his heritage, to forget or deny he is a Jew.we are left wondering to what degree wild dreams, dreams of being a celebrity How much will Gold sell out once he Gold's zany phone conversations with when he has nothing more substantial to gets those calls from Washington telling the White House aide, his trips to celebrate than his own half-baked fame...

...to some degree his own share in the com- rity, self-respect, or genuine love...

...But he has thrived at the versity, he went to the Lower East Side ED One year special rate, $15 university as an academic huckster- out of some dissatisfaction with his own o 11-issue trial, $7.50 renaming basic English courses with ti- way of living and in search of guidance tles like "The Role of Women, Blacks, and rebirth...

...232 Madison Ave., hours and gives surprise exams when he After graduation from Florida State Uni- New York, N.Y...

...fronted with what the same amoral milit- specifically in Bruce Gold, a Hellerish My hands may perspire, and my ary mind was wreaking in Vietnam, we 48-year-old Jewish, CUNY Brooklyn voice come out strange...

...he said pened's opening pages and not recognize gle to hang onto some last scrap of integ- that rather it would be about Kissinger...

...Heller's stature...

...Lowellian influences...

...It is Thomas More Press, $6.95, 132 pp...

...Norman Mailer's The Naked and the sian clipping file that fleshes (or puffs) It is a book where God is a losing Dead was a warning about the totalitarian out a large section of the book...

...but Gold is deserting Michael True should be...

...And maybe because the experience academic "brilliance," petty vanity and to make me dread that something of caring for Derek, his "secret" re- criminality that the Kissinger career horrible is behind it, something tarded child, has taught him -though I personifies-to say nothing of the way that is going to affect me adversely...

...to read to the enterprise of Gold, for a stu- At the Worker, life poses basic ques11 May 1979: 285...

...as Bob Slocum kill himself?, we ask on appropriate challenge for a novelist of I get the willies when I see every page of Something Happened...

...from that challenge and taken a more most smell the disaster mounting It was not until the late 1960s that universal one: the germ of Kissingerism invisibly and flooding out toward Catch-22 really caught on-when, con- within each of us and in himself, and me through the frosted glass panes...

...ing, even clashing opinions...

...But Heller has backed off half-way plain nerves or insomnia, I can al- odd lifespan in the public consciousness...

...For and less to characters in American fic- already under way...

...tell the truth even if he has to lie...

...him, in language that echoes of Catch22, that the President wants to see him immediately although he'll never know if Years at the `Worker' he's not there...

...I wonder saw that, in spite of the laughs, it was not College...

...at the Democratic Convention in 1968...

...He ness of the 1970s so excruciatingly that it tagon windows on the Armies of the knows the corrupting tendency within .may be another decade before many cri- Night in October 1967 and order the himself, in every intellectual and jourtics adequately appreciate it and most Chicago police to club in the heads of nalist to be corrupted by the mere smell Americans can read it with sufficient de- what Tom Wicker called "our children" of power, to become a Kissinger, to pubtachment...

...I told him I hoped it who can read the paranoid utterances of tion), themselves on the brink of despair, Robert Slocum in Something Hap- who survive simply because they strug- would be about academic life...

...doubt he would pbt it this way-that our the Kissingerpersona has been presented if I am tired and dejected from a lives do belong to one another...