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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
In footsteps of Kissinger, August 20, 2004
A professor and a writer, Bruce Gold feels unappreciated by his family. He is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He still lives in New York and sees his old friends from his childhood in Coney Island. His friends don't seem to respect him, either.
He sees an opportunity to change his life when he meets an old university friend, the Protestant Ralph Newsome, who used to copy all of Gold's course work and who got better grades for it. Newsome now works for the President, who is impressed by Gold's writings, and a high government position is dangled in front of Gold. To ease his way into the government, he duly decides to divorce his old wife and marry a daughter of a rich establishment family. This leads to humiliation at the hands of the father of that family. "You have aspirations and regrets and feelings of inferiority and I don't," Pugh Biddle Conover tells Gold.
The novel takes place in the late 1970s, after Henry Kissinger's stint as Secretary of State with presidents Nixon and Ford. Gold has been collecting materials about Kissinger for years and plans to write a book about him. Gold detests Kissinger, as does everyone else in the book. Kissinger is "a noisy, babbling fellow who was always trying too hard to be entertaining and made war like a Nazi," Conover says. To which, Gold says, "please don't put me in the position of defending the one person on earth I disapprove of most."
Conover mocks Gold as a Jew and for his political aspirations. Both Conover and Gold's father believe that Jews have no place in government and that Kissinger was an aberration.
Gold is well aware of Kissinger's infamies: "his role in the Cambodian war, in which an estimated 500,000 died," and his involvement in overthrowing the Allende government in Chile. Yet, when Gold angrily asserts that Kissinger wasn't even a Jew, is it because Gold really does detest Kissinger or is it because Gold himself wants to be the first Jewish Secretary of State?
This is a very good novel. Some objections, however, have been made about the ending. Without revealing it, I will say that the unexpected event is the sort of thing that jolts people back into reality, as it does to Gold. Another criticism of the book is the stuff on 1970s politics and events. In my opinion, there wasn't too much of that and also I thought that by mentioning these things, it made the novel more realistic.
"Good as Gold" has been unfavorably compared with "Catch-22." They are different books, despite some similarities (for example, the government officials that Gold encounters could easily have stepped out of "Catch-22"). "Catch-22" is a book mainly about young men and appeals to readers in their 20s (perhaps the only time in their lives they will ever read novels); "Good as Gold" deals with the themes of the middle-aged. It is a book about a mid-life crisis and dealing with aging family members.
It is also a book about an outsider desperately wanting to be an insider and how far he will go to get ahead. Gold believes Kissinger is vile and yet...It's a useful novel because it records a phenomena that occurs again and again in American life. Perhaps another novel about ambition will be written some day about a protagonist who gazes with disgust and envy on Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, instead of Kissinger. Until then, we have "Good as Gold."
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
one of the all time funniest books I have ever read., April 24, 2001
It so apropos today. Bruce Gold has a job at the White House... to make sure the politicians say absolutely nothing of any importance at all, but sound like they are. This book is biting. Hilarious. I have read all his books and oddly enough while I loved Catch-22, and Something Happened, this one sticks with me. It is all about the Orwellian newspeak which I seem to hear everywhere these days. But done with a wicked sense of humour. Laugh out loud funny. The best political satire I have ever read.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good as gold, indeed., July 30, 2002
Good As Gold is Joseph Heller's third masterpiece. Heller, who sadly left us in 1999, was notorious for taking an eternity between books (13 years between his first two.) And, although this may be true, one thing is certain: when Joe Heller delivers a book, it's a guaranteed masterpiece. Every new Heller release is an event. Good As Gold is as good as the best of them. By turns screamingly funny and heart-piercingly true, this is one of the few books that can make you laugh and cry at the same time. The book works simultaneously on multiple levels. It is a fable of "The Jewish Experience" in America; it is a satiric and highly biting look at the hypocrisy and incompetence at work in everyday government affairs; it is a funny and all-too-sad peek into the lives of the typical American extended family (you could also see the entire thing as an attack on Henry Kissinger - indeed, the only complaint I have about the book is that Heller sometimes follows this tangent too far.) The book, as always with Heller, is very cleverly written. There are no numbered chapters: instead, the book is split into a number of different sections, all with a certain title, which also happen to be titles of works being written by the protagonist (who is, among other things, a writer) - in this way, the book plays out the very story and experience it is purporting to have the main character write himself. An essential read from the greatest American author of the second half of the 20th century.
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