This zany, sexy version of the story of King David, told as a modern allegory of what it is like for a Jew to survive in a hostile world, is "original, sad, wildly funny, and filled with roaring. . . . Heller's King David, a splendid creation, is not so much a man for all seasons as man in all his seasons" ("The New York Times Book Review"). Something Happened Good as God and now (God Knows. Joseph Hellers powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply moving new novel 1s the storv of David—yes, that David: warrior king of Isracl, husband of Bathsheba, father of Solomon, slaver of Goliath, and psalmust nonpareil as well as the David we've never known unal now: David the cocky Jewish kid, David the fabulous lover, David the plagrarized poet (his best work eribbed by everyone from Chaucer to Freud to Auden), David the Jewish father, David the one-time (and yearning-to-be-again) crony of God..….At last, David 1s telling his own story, and he tells allequally unembarrassed by his faults, his sins, his incomparable glory. It seems that God owes David an apology. And David's waiting for it. As he lies now on his deathbed (every need tended to by a lovely, supple, perfumed virgin), preparing to name his successor (will it be the scheming Adonijah? the dim-witted Solomon?), he looks back on his long, crowded hfe. He rants, he jokes, he grieves, he talks poetry, he talks dirty, he holds nothing back … He re-creates his most spectacular triumphs on the battlefield—including a play-by-play rendition of his historic bout with Goliath (“Next 1 stuck out my tongue”’).…and his years on the lam, running from Saul, the homicidally insane king who happened also to be his wife's father (“You think you've had problems with in-laws?”’ He talks about his many wives: Michal, the original Jewish princess … Abigail, the only woman who ever returned his love in kind… and the single great passion of his hife, the irresistble, irrepressible, altogether magnificent blonde whom he stole from another man and who alone continues to arouse his desire—Bathsheba, who visits his chambers every day to lobby for her son Solomon, but who refuses ever again to lie with David. He tells of his sons: Absalom, who killed his own brother and then died waging battle against David himself, but whom David still loves.…and Solomon and Ndonugah, now joekeving for power bevond the walls of Davut's palace...and the baby, Barhsheba's fArstborn. whose Iife Good took—so untariv!—in vrerributren for Davumd's own sims. And he plavs havoe with our sense of time: complamming that Nlichelangelo portraved him as unctreumetsed (“It may be a good piece of work, taken all im all, but 1e just isn't me”) hkening Jerusalem to Coney Island...asserting that his own story 1s the best in the Bible (‘““Moses has the Ten Commandmenrs, its true, bur ve got much better lines”) And as David waits for (cod to make Flis move, we wonder: What must Solomon do to win out over Adonijah? Will Bathsheba give in to David's tender entreaties? Will David stop insisting that God apologize? Will God apologize? And just what, exactly, does God know? God Knows is an ancient story, a modern story, a love story. It is a novel about growing up and growing old, about men and women, about fathers and sons, about man and God. It is a novel whose seamless meshing of biblical intonatton and the most outrageous contemporary idiom is a joy. Ít is a novel of emotonal force, tmaginative richness, and unbridled comic inventon. It is quintessentual Heller. JOSEPH HEILER was born in 1923 in Brooklyn, New York, and lives now in East Hampton, New York. His first novel, Catch-22, was published in 1961; Something Happened, In 1974; and Good as Gold, in 1979. He is also the author of the play We Bombed in New Haven.
