Bruce Gold, who in the first line of this novel was asked to write a book about life as a Jew in America, asks himself in the last line: “Where to begin?” Gold is disingenuous: he is smart enough and cannot help but understand that he has already become the author (or rather, Heller’s co-author) of the novel “Gold, or As Good as Gold,” which fits between this request and this question. But, like any true phenomenon of art, the novel goes beyond the given topic and tells, like any true phenomenon of art, about human life in this world. The realities of political life in the United States of the 70s introduced into the novel allowed Heller to subject figures of the modern establishment to scathing criticism, which he did with his characteristic brilliance.