Good as Gold

Heller Returns to the Absurd

Joseph Heller took thirteen years after Catch-22 to publish Something Happened, and then only four more to produce Good as Gold in 1979. Where Something Happened was a slow, suffocating interior portrait of corporate despair, Good as Gold is overtly, aggressively funny — a return to the comic mode of Catch-22 applied to two very different worlds: the chaos of a large Jewish family on Long Island, and the performative meaninglessness of Washington D.C. politics.

Bruce Gold is an English professor, a second-generation Jewish immigrant’s son, a writer of essays no one reads, and a man whose ambitions are considerably larger than his accomplishments. When he is contacted about a vague senior government position — the details of which are never specified, because specificity is not how Washington works — he begins a journey through one of the most accurately observed satirical landscapes in American fiction.

The Language of Power, Emptied of Meaning

The novel’s greatest achievement is its portrait of official political speech. Heller had observed — perhaps from his own government service — that the language of Washington is engineered to communicate nothing while appearing to communicate something important. Gold’s government contact Ralph speaks in a continuous stream of policy language that, parsed carefully, means nothing at all. Press releases contradict themselves within single sentences. Officials take firm positions on both sides of every issue simultaneously. This is not Orwell’s dark Newspeak; it is something funnier and more accurate — the language of people so accustomed to speaking without consequence that they have lost the ability to mean anything.

Decades later, this satire has not aged. The specific phrases change; the mechanism is eternal.

The Gold Family and the Comedy of Belonging

Counterbalancing the Washington material — and arguably surpassing it — are the scenes with Bruce’s family. His father, who refuses to acknowledge him. His step-mother. His siblings. His brother-in-law Sid, who may be the novel’s funniest character. Heller writes the Gold family with a warmth and cruelty that suggests autobiography, and the comedy that emerges from these scenes is rooted in something real: the particular tension of a family that loves each other in ways nobody finds comfortable to express.

Bruce’s parallel life — his ambitions, his affair, his Washington maneuvering — is satirised without mercy, but his family life is treated with a gentleness that suggests Heller knew the difference between what was worth making fun of and what was worth holding onto.

A New Subject for Heller

Good as Gold marked a deliberate widening of Heller’s range. Catch-22 had mined the absurdity of war and military bureaucracy; Something Happened turned inward to the quiet desperation of corporate and domestic life. With this novel Heller took on two subjects he had largely left alone: American politics and his own Jewish background. The Gold family is the most explicitly Jewish material in his fiction, and the book’s preoccupation with assimilation — the bargain a striving outsider strikes between identity and advancement — gives it an autobiographical charge the earlier novels lack. Bruce Gold’s fantasy of becoming, absurdly, the first Jewish Secretary of State is both a comic engine and a serious meditation on what an ambitious immigrant’s son believes he must trade away to be admitted to the rooms where power is held.

Running through the book is a private joke that doubles as a theme: Gold has been contracted to write a book about the Jewish experience in America, a book he never quite manages to write, and the novel we are reading becomes a kind of shadow version of that abandoned project. Heller layers fiction over fiction, mocking the very idea of summing up an identity in a tidy volume.

Form and Its Frustrations

The novel’s structure is also its central problem, and Heller seems to have known it. The Long Island family comedy and the Washington satire are tonally distinct — one is warm, observed, and grounded in real feeling; the other is a brittle, deliberately cartoonish farce — and the seams between them show. Readers who come to Good as Gold expecting the seamless, self-reinforcing machine of Catch-22, in which every absurdity feeds the next, may be frustrated by a book that feels assembled from two strong but separate impulses. The Washington sequences in particular can grow repetitive, as the joke about empty official language, brilliant on first encounter, is asked to carry more pages than it comfortably can.

Yet the unevenness is part of what makes the novel interesting. It is the work of a major satirist testing what else his gifts can do, and even where it falters it does so in service of real ambition rather than mere repetition.

Who Should Read It

Good as Gold is best suited to readers who already admire Heller and want to follow him beyond his most famous book, and to anyone drawn to the tradition of Jewish-American comedy that runs through Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud. The political satire alone justifies the read for students of how power talks. Newcomers to Heller should still begin with Catch-22; those who have, and who can accept a book that is brilliant in pieces rather than perfect as a whole, will find a great deal here to savor — and a great deal to laugh at.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Not Heller’s masterpiece, but essential reading for the political satire alone, which remains one of the funniest and most accurate dissections of Washington ever written.