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 PLO.
Each joke is earned, prepared for and exquisitely timed. When the prose rolls along in its high old style, we brace ourselves for the deflation. Here is the effect, in miniature: ‘And the anger of Moses was kindled and he demanded of the Lord: “God damn it, where am I supposed to get the flesh to feed them?'” The interfolding of the ancestral voice with the voice of blasphemous modernity provides the main technical business of the novel. And, for a while, Heller has it pat.
The favourite targets are lined up against the wall: sex, cruelty, Jewishness, and universal injustice (for which God is a handy embodiment). ‘Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work; but someone has to do it* — where the first two elements are ordinary enough, and the third is pure genius. ‘Are you crazy?’
David asks his new mistress Abishag. ‘I’m a married man! I don’t want Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maccah, Haggith, Abital, or Eglah to find out about us.’ David’s trials are universal: ‘Evil would rise up against me in my own house. So what? This was an eventuality taken for granted by every Jewish parent.’ But he is also a man of his times: ‘When my lovely daughter Tamar-was raped by her half-brother Annon, I was upset, naturally. Mainly, though, I was annoyed.’ After all, as he points out later, ‘She’s only a girl’.
‘Girl-crazy Samson was a natural pushover for Philistine twat’, but David deplores intermarriage; his first wife is, of course, a Jewish Princess, and she talks like one too. To win Michal’s hand, he must pay her father Saul the bride-price of 100 Philistine foreskins. ‘It takes six strong Israelites, we figured, to circumcise one live Philistine. The job turned easier after I finally got used to the idea of killing the Philistines first.’ He tells his men ‘to bring back the whole prick’ and, sure enough, bring back the whole prick becomes the battle-cry of the campaign — Not to everybody’s taste, one has to admit; but I was one happy reviewer until page seventy or so (a fifth of the way through), at which point the novel curls up and dies.
Something happened. God knows what. Initially one assumes that the joke has simply run its course, and that the novel is maintained only by the inertia of its ambition. But in fact the joke, the promise, is boundlessly strong: it is the ambition that fails and retracts. Significantly, the two thematic counterweights to the main action — God and the present day — fade without trace into the vast and sandy background. ‘God and I had a pretty good relationship’, muses David, ‘until he killed the kid.’ And indeed God was a lively presence, a nasty piece of work (‘the Lord, of course, is not a shepherd, not mine or anyone else’s’), a divine underwriter of the nihilism we first glimpsed in Catch-22. To the question ‘Why me?” He jovially answers, ‘Why not?’ As David says, ‘Go figure Him out’. David never does. Between him and his maker there is only silence, which is poignant, and biblical; but it doesn’t fill the pages.
What does fill the pages? Writing that transcends mere repetition and aspires to outright tautology. Here’s an accelerated foretaste: ‘lugubrious dirge’, ‘pensive reverie’, ‘vacillating perplexity’, ‘seditious uprising’, ‘domineering viragos’, ‘henpecking shrews’, ‘sullen grievance and simmering fury’, ‘gloating taunts and malignant insults’, ‘loathed me incessantly with an animosity that was unappeasable’, ‘tantrums of petulance and tempestuous discharges of irrational antipathies’. The units of spluttering cliche sometimes achieve paragraph-status. They get bigger and bigger — and say less and less.
No reader should be asked to witness an author’s private grap-plings with his thesaurus. Comic effervescence having been stilled, Heller is left alone with his material — i.e., oft-told yarns from the Holy Book. He churns on through the chaff long after the inspiration has been ground to dust. The donnée of God Knows must have seemed as lithe and deft as the young David with his sling; the finished book looks more like ‘the big bastard’ Goliath, brawny, apoplectic, and easily toppled.