The 3,000-Year-Old Man

By Paul Gray

GOD KNOWS by Joseph Heller; Knopf; 353 pages; $16.95

You loved him in the Old Testament. Well, here he is again, ladies and germs: the guy who put the kibosh on Goliath; the main squeeze of the lovely and talented Bathsheba; the papa of Solomon, an extremely influential person in his own right; and, last but not least, a close personal friend of the Man Upstairs. A King of Israel once, a prince of comedy now. Let's hear a really warm welcome for (buh-duh-dump-dump) David!

But cereally, folks. Author Joseph Heller's fourth novel does indeed feature the biblical King David as its hero and narrator. And it offers a host of other familiar names and time-tested stories. God Knows even looks exactly like a real book, with pages and print and dust jacket and everything. This disguise is extremely clever, considering the contents: the longest lounge act never performed in the history of the Catskills.

Heller's David comes onstage in the same condition that afflicted the original at the beginning of I Kings: "Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat." This time around, the dying leader has more to worry about than just the squabbling between his sons Adonijah and Solomon over who will succeed him. There is his reputation to consider: "I don't like to boast--I know I boast a bit when I say I don't have to boast--but I honestly think I've got the best story in the Bible. Where's the competition?" This premise undeniably has promise: David looking back on his tempestuous career not only from his deathbed but with the hindsight that nearly 3,000 succeeding years have contributed to his soul.

Unfortunately, Heller uses this poetic license chiefly as an excuse to troll for gags. If a punch line requires omniscience, then David knows it all: "Some Promised Land. 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 P.L.O." So the old fellow is up on Yasser Arafat and the contemporary mess in the Middle East? Yes and no. When Heller wants to try for irony, he keeps David in the dark: "I put garrisons in Damascus and in the Golan heights, and I knew that the Syrians would never again be a problem for the children of Israel."

Consistency in the central character? As this David likes to remark, "Fat chance." What holds God Knows together, barely, is the enduring vitality of the original material (see especially I and II Samuel), which is both a saga sacred to I millions and one of the glories of Western narrative art. Heller is I most successful when he simply allows his source to do most of the I work, either by lifting large swatches of language from the King James translation or by going against the scriptural grain.

Suppose, just for laughs, that the wisdom of Solomon is a myth. Says David: "I'll let you in on a secret about my son Solomon: he was dead serious when he proposed cutting the baby in half, that putz. I swear to God. The dumb son of a bitch was trying to be fair, not shrewd." Dialogues between exasperated father and nincompoop son appear to be modeled on the old radio sketches of Jack Benny and Dennis Day. David: "Do you understand what I'm saying to you about Joab? Do not let his hoar head go peacefully down to the grave." Solomon: "What's a hoar head?" After one particularly frustrating session, David tries to get rid of the young man by telling a servant to "show him the door." Replies Solomon: "I've seen the door."

Not all of David's jokes are as old as he is; they only come to seem that way when he tells them over and over again. "The devil made me do it" is a corker that had pretty well run its course when Flip Wilson retired it about a decade ago. Heller makes David say it no fewer than three times. Who can forget the noted humorist and slugger Reggie Jackson and his boast "I'm the straw that stirs the drink"? Certainly not Heller, who uses this line three times as well. The spirit of Woody Allen is sometimes summoned forth: "That which is crooked cannot be made straight, although with that one I believe there are psychotherapists who might disagree." When all else fails, a common enough occurrence in this narrative, Heller turns to the slapstick of Mel Brooks circa the comedy routine "The 2,000-Year-Old Man" and the film The History of the World-Part I: pointless anachronisms (" 'Send a wire!' I shouted. 'We have no wires,' Jehoshaphat recalled for me") and noises in descending orders of rudeness.

There might be some saving grace in all of this if it amounted to good, dirty fun. Even this modest goal is infrequently achieved. The rest is a disappointing hodgepodge of repetition and irrelevancy. Heller's attitude toward the past remains steadfastly muddled. He obviously appreciates and exploits ancient grandeur; he also cannot resist the urge to deface every monument he encounters. A certain biblical hero had a remedy for such behavior.

As recorded in I Samuel 25:22, David is enraged that his messengers have been rebuffed by a wealthy man; the warrior swears murderous vengeance on this household and, among its inhabitants, on "any that pisseth against the wall." Luckily for the guilty, David's wrath is shunted aside by Abigail. God Knows where he might have turned next. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Let's call him a giant. His teeth, not Bathsheba's, were like a flock of sheep that have been even shorn. With her it was merely flattery. But everything about Goliath was larger than life. I have to chortle even now at the violent transformations he underwent when it finally began to dawn on him why I was there .. . How he howled and roared when he finally recovered from his initial moment of shock. You'd think he'd been speared in the liver. For forty days he had asked of the Israelites that they send down a man worthy to engage a Philistine champion of his mettle in single combat. Instead, he'd been given a youthful shepherd who was ruddy and of a fair countenance. He had expected Achilles. He'd been given me. And to top it all off, I was carrying a stick."