In God Knows Heller experiments with a first person monologue, as he did in Something Happened. However, whereas Bob Slocum's tone was flat and passionless, David's voice is ardent and self-defensive. There's a strong oral quality to his narration, as if he is speaking to what he hopes is a sympathetic audience. Certainly his topic of how a youth who embarked "so early on the high road to success" in killing a Philistine giant has been brought to his present "low state of mind" is calculated to tug at the readers' heartstrings, perhaps even influencing them to agree with David's personal application of Nietzschean philosophy: "If character is destiny, the good are damned."

God Knows is very much an old man's book, flavored with the bitterness that loss of physical vitality evokes. And the structure emphasizes that bitterness. The book begins and ends with a present description of...