Heller manages to write a believable historical account while cleverly incorporating anachronisms (David whines about Shakespeare's prose and how the Bard basically plagiarized some of his own Psalms and Proverbs, and he also bitches about Michelangelo's famous statue of him, which inaccurately depicts David with a foreskin! But what do you expect from a goy sculptor?). Written as a kind of disjointed series of memoirs from the perspective of an aging David, the novel covers just about every facet of the biblical figure: his infamous defeat of the giant named Goliath, his many marriages (but mainly focusing on Michal, Abigail, and Bathsheba), the many battles and wars that his father-in-law Saul waged against him, the death of his first child which leads to his falling-out with God, and his moronic son Solomon whom, he is afraid, will succeed him as king. Indeed, the penis jokes abound throughout this novel, which reads like a weird combination of Thomas Pynchon, Woody Allen, and John Updike, except that it is vintage Heller: serious, funny, seriously funny.
It may help to know that the David in the novel is King David, of the biblical account, kvetching on his death bed about what a mess his life has become but mostly because he can't get it up anymore. In Joseph Heller's novel "God Knows", the Jewish protagonist is an old man named David, looking back with bittersweet fondness but mostly regret at his turbulent life: numerous marriages, ungrateful children, constant battling with in-laws and relatives, and a God that seems to have either forgotten or forsaken him. People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs." You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it." On his return home he "felt like a hero. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning. Two years later he was sent to Italy, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier.
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. He sent it to New York Daily News, which rejected it. Even as a child, he loved to write at the age of eleven, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland. Joseph Heller was the son of poor Jewish parents from Russia. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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