Jewish Jokesters
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers & Writing JEWISH JOKESTERS BY DAPHNE MERKIN ood as Gold (Simon & Schuster, 447 pp., $12.95) is a novel in which the milk of human kindness has permanently soured and all one can hope for...
...Behind its attacks on establishments large (the State Department) and small (Commentary) one can discern some surprisingly traditional allegiances...
...You are not,' they lulla-bied, 'even a Jew.'" Joseph Heller is a very clever fellow...
...He finds himself baffled by Washington's nonsensical doings, increasingly dismayed at the prospect of marriage to Andrea, who can neither cook nor think straight, and ever more distrustful of Ralph's Uteral-minded readings of his most fatuous comments...
...Don't shit me,' said Dina...
...He is also, as Gold is to discover, a foaming-mouthed anti-Semite...
...So eat a lot of veal...
...all these old pals fear and loathe each other), the double-talking, bed hopping Ralph Newsome, who reports that the "inner circle" has been especially pleased with Gold's "gift for punchy phrasing": "You're really boggling my mind the way you're boggling everyone's mind with those phrases of yours...
...His White House contact is another old pal from graduate school days (don't kid yourself...
...Andrea's father, Pugh, is the bankroll behind innumerable political campaigns and can call the tune in Washington...
...He chooses an appropriately blond, long-legged and well-connected shik-sa, Andrea Biddle Conover, as Belle's successor...
...Even that bastard Roosevelt____A cripple he was...
...Writers & Writing JEWISH JOKESTERS BY DAPHNE MERKIN ood as Gold (Simon & Schuster, 447 pp., $12.95) is a novel in which the milk of human kindness has permanently soured and all one can hope for are trigger-like reflexes to best the other guy...
...1) His wife, Belle: a superb home-maker and an inordinately compliant wife—his better half in every respect—but hardly the companion Gold has in mind for lolling on his arm at state dinners...
...But he runs, even though it kills him, and Friedman has included running as one of the paramount symptoms: "Running is basically a Lonely Guy activity...
...I say a rare form because, strictly speaking, Lonely Guys aren't married and Gold is...
...Beuce Gold's problems might never have landed him in the heartland of machinations had he realized earlier on that he was suffering from a rare form of Lonely Guy-itis, an insufficiently documented disease that has finally received the coverage it deserves in Bruce Jay Friedman's lambently witty guide for the perplexed, The Lonely Guy's Book of Life (McGraw-Hill, 206 pp., $8.95...
...With a limp he walked and didn't want we should know, that liar.' "Gold is also burdened with five hysterical or depressive sisters and a brother, Sid, who drives him crazy by misstating facts and mangling quotes...
...Horses are Lonely Guys, unless they are the spoiled favorites of girls named Wendy in Darien...
...It is a brilliantly hating, scabrously comic book—a tour de farce...
...No one will wave back...
...If you doubt it, go out and run and start waving to people running toward you and see what happens...
...But then Joseph Heller is somewhat like the little boy who smashes his favorite toys because his mother forgets to kiss him goodnight: the wreckage conceals untold disapointment and, above all, an abiding sense of nostalgia for that sojourn in the womb before the world could inflict harm and one had need of canny defenses...
...Although permeated with a painfully accurate consciousness of the embarrassments that nip at the heels of the unwary, it is not averse to modest redemptive possibilities: "Bacon cheeseburgers, Cheryl Ladd posters, Ibsen revivals, pine tar room fresheners, the scent of wisteria on another guy's terrace?they're all out there for the Lonely Guy with red blood in his veins and the courage to say: 'I can have these things, too, even though I happen to be living alone for the moment.'" Should you be one of those fated to wander lonely as a cloud, give yourself a head start and take this guide with you...
...2) His children: two sons away at college and a 12-year old daughter Dina who, in common with almost every pi-son in this novel, talks like a hired gunman: '"Mom's really pissed, ain't she?' 'I hadn't noticed.' Gold did not look up...
...Why else would he have made Shampoo, which winds up with him on a hill, albeit a Beverly Hill, puzzling over the folly of the human condition...
...First 'contemporary universal constituency' and now this 'you're boggling my mind.' I tried it out on a couple of people and it boggled their minds...
...Friedman is a wily scout, brimming with helpful hints on how to handle the uneasy situations that strew the Lonely Guy's path like hidden mines...
...Playful cataloguing aside, this book is a study of forlorn-ness and the measures of solace one can take to ameliorate it...
...It is vituperatively funny: You never feel good about laughing, but you laugh all the same...
...On Coping with Psychotherapy: "As a general rule, the Lonely Guy who tells the doctor too much risks losing his mystery and allure...
...Gold plans, of course, to leave all of them behind him?figments of his pre-illustrious past, like the Coney Island neighborhood he grew up in...
...Gold's father, Julius, is a baiting sonofabitch who refuses to pack off to his condominium in Miami, preferring to camp in his chil-drens' homes where he can sneeringly monitor their and everyone else's doings...
...You are not a listener anymore,' they whispered...
...his once starry vision of power and grace has dimmed and he turns down his ticket to the top: "His season in the White House was over...
...It's so wan and Kierkegaardian...
...Right after Bruce signs on to do "a study of the contemporary Jewish experience in America" (although by his own admission he doesn't know what it is and hasn't the faintest idea what to write) with Pomoroy, an old pal and book editor, he gets tapped—word of his talent having spread ever since he wrote a favorable review of the President's book, My Year in the White House—to perform in the major leagues...
...That Heller manages to condescend to everyone (including those who will take his somewhat infantile political satire for telling and profound social diagnosis) while seeming to be one of the gang qualifies as a perverse accomplishment...
...The only ones to respond at all will be people who are curious about everything that moves...
...All of Canada may be a Lonely Guy...
...She don't want you to go to Washington, does she?' 'I'll let you know when I find out.' 'Balls, Dad...
...Friedman himself concedes that the dividing-lines are flexible: "Warren Beat-ty gets you mixed up because of all his dating...
...On Eating Alone in Restaurants: "After each bite of food, lift your head, smack your hps thoughtfully, swallow and make a notation in a pad...
...But nothing, as he has famously quipped, succeeds as planned...
...When an offer of a government post finally comes through, Gold is sitting shivah for Sid...
...Good as Gold is not humanely funny, the way Catch-22 was, nor does it possess the desperately humorous anomie that marked Something Happened...
...There is something pale and lonely about it, especially if it doesn't have any veins...
...He tears the wings off people instead of flies: " 'And all those Christians ain't so hot either, you know...
...Before that, though, there are a few small problems to be gotten out of the way...
...Listen, you better be goddamned careful what you put in any more articles you write...
...He touches upon every national prejudice—the unspoken as well as the spoken—and has subverted the commonplace most dear to Americans by writing a novel whose motto might well be: "With malice toward all, with charity toward none...
...Diners will assume you are a restaurant critic...
...His name has appeared in obscure literary magazines as well as Playboy and Ladies' Home Journal...
...He will still have his dreams, the ones where he's metamorphosized into Van Cleef and Arpels and the angels of sleep fill his ears with everything he wants to hear: '"You are a stunning, sparkling jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, and it's all yours...
...That crap on child rearing you had in the Ladies' Home Journal last year didn't do me no good.'" (3) Last but definitely not least, "the webwork of his origins," his father, stepmother and manifold siblings: The Jewish Family to end all Jewish Families, they make Sophie Portnoy look like the Mother of the Year...
...No longer under his spell, the psychiatrist may turn his attention to other patients...
...You must know it's not going to hurt you...
...On Cooking: "Veal is the quintessential Lonely Guy meat...
...We all feel it would be a good idea to start using you here as quickly as possible if we decide we want to use you at all...
...One mustn't feel sorry for Gold, however...
...She's not going to be throwing any eggs in the pan at four in the morning, but Jacqueline Onassis may be a Lonely Guy...
...He may be a secret Lonely Guy...
...A veritable minor-league Machiavelli, "a master at diplomacy and palace intrigue," he has devised undergraduate courses "on the psychology of sociology in contemporary American literature and on the sociology of psychology in English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," and has plagued the lecture circuit: "Gold was flexible and unopinionated now and able—with just a few minor adjustments in emphasis—to deliver essentially the same speech to an elderly reactionary religious group that he had given the day before with equal success to a congress of teen-aged Maoists...
...Bruce Gold, a ripoff artist posing as a successful academic, has written "mannered and trite" short stories, "atrocious" poems and a "derivative" one-page novel...
...People of what little royal blood survives come in homage on soft footsteps and pay you money...
...Wide-eyed at the plummy appointments Ralph dangles in front of him—an ambassadorship, head of nato, or even the possibility of becoming the first Jewish Secretary of State (Gold, you see, has this theory he's been researching for years that Henry Kissinger isn't Jewish)—Bruce prepares for a glorious future...
...Friedman's self-parodying manual contains some of the funniest writing I've read in a long time...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 7
