‘As the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception.’ This prescient remark was made by Gore Vidal, covering the Republican Convention of 1968. Actually, nowadays the Reagans are not just the rule: they are the President. Ten years later, Vidal said in an interview: ‘I am perfect for television. And that’s all a President has to be these days.’ Vidal is a more solid and dependable” figure now than he was five years ago (greyer in the temples, heavier in the back); but whether his telly-flair will take him far is open to question. He will need to get his smile fixed, for one thing: it is twitchy, furtive, full of childish malevolence. ‘Above all, a politician must not sound clever or wise or proud,’ he has said. But that is exactly how Vidal sounds. Unpatriotic Gore: this has always been the key to his invigorating contempt.
What can Vidal achieve in the new babel of the airwaves, while staying recognisably himself? It has never been clearer that the trend of American politics is one of attrition, trimming and compromise. In times of recession, everyone huddles towards the neutral warmth of the centre. Reagan is learning this — if ‘learning’ is quite the word we want. Falwell and the New Right are learning it too. Gore Vidal, more than anyone, surely, has known it all along.
Observer 1982
Joseph Heller, Giantslayer
A good title isn’t exactly a seal of approval, but a bad one will seriously detract from a novel’s aura. Interestingly a ‘brilliant’ title, like Hangover Square or Ballad of the Sad Cafe, is almost a guarantor of very minor work. It appears that the classic titles give substance to an idea that, when it comes, seems to have been there all along: Pride and Prejudice, Hard Times, A Portrait of the Artist as a “Young Man, Lolita. To risk a Hollywood intonation, Joseph Heller’s titles vary in quality, and in some sense gauge the quality of the books they give a name to.
The catchy and catching Catch-22 put its finger on a central modern absurdity, and the catchphrase passed straight into the language. Even more weighty and haunting, in my view, is Something Happened, a novel whose refrain is one of unlocatable loss (‘something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage’), a novel where nothing happens until the end, the fateful accident presaged by a random cry in the street: ‘Something happened!’ With Good as Gold the Heller stamp starts to smudge: Bruce Gold is the cheerfully venal hero, and all novels that pun on a character’s name tend to seem, well, a bit Sharpe-ish, like Blott on the Landscape. It has to be said, too, that God Knows sounds particularly flat and perfunctory; it sounds like a God-awful movie starring some grinning octogenarian. Perhaps ‘God’s Wounds’ might have been better (for the novel is dark); and no doubt the obvious contender, ‘The Book of David’, was disqualified by E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel.
At first, God Knows reads like God’s gift to readers. All novelists in every book are looking for a voice – the right voice in the right place at the right time — and Heller, at first, seems to have found the perfect, the consummate medium. Here he gives us the deathbed memoir of King David (‘I’ve got the best story in the Bible. Where’s the competition?’), filtered without apology or embarrassment through the modern, urban, decadent and paranoid consciousness of Joseph Heller. While the comic possibilities are infinite, they are not the only possibilities on view, Heller being a comic writer whose chief interest is pain. David, at seventy, fading, receding, seems the true instrument for Heller’s brand of envenomed elegy. ‘The older I get, the less interest I take in my children and, for that matter, in everyone and everything else.’ Or, in a more familiar cadence: ‘I get up with the fucking cricket.’
With a justified smirk Heller furtively maps out his fictional island. And what riches are there, what streams and melons and ores. David agrees that it was odd of God to choose the Jews — but why didn’t He give them anything? He gave them bread without scarcity and that’s all that He gave us, along with a complicated set of restrictive dietary laws that have not made life easier. To the goyim He gives bacon, sweet pork, juicy sirloin, and rare prime ribs of beef. To us He gives a pastrami__Some Promised Land.