Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Herman Wouk's current best-seller, as shown by a number of reviews, is a novel to praise indiscriminately or to ignore fully. Those who praise it do so because it is an affirmation of mid-twentieth century American morals and values. Those who despite it seem to think that American morals and values are not worth affirming. Between these two critical poles lies poor Marjorie Morning-star, a mediocre-to-good contemporary novel, whose one distinction is its affirmative tone. This seems like a fairly shoddy critical standard. It we are "anti-affirmative" we cross off conventioal morals...
Simply, Marjorie Morning-star is about a middle class New York Jewish girl, Marjorie Morgenstern, who wants to be an actress. She falls, and after losing her chastity, becomes a respectable and loving mother and wife. Marjorie's final position in society is to Wouk a triumph, and not a failure. Throughout the novel, Wouk points out the gap between the average American woman's ("Shirley's") conception of herself, and the reality of her possibilities. Every "Shirley", Wouk believes, wants to be Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley, and is incapable of being such. Since Wouk sides with the "Shirleys...
...personally have no quarrel with Wouk's conception of the average American woman. Greater thinkers than he Shaw, for one, believed that women were dedicated biologically and cosmically to only two purposes--catching a mate and bearing children. Shaw envisaged women as infinitely superior to the meandering, excitable man; and the conflict between male and female, in his works, is the basis for comedy on a high plane. Not so with Wouk, for his women seem to flounce and grovel around in a prolonged adolescence before they finally settle down, scarred but happy, to a respectable life of breeding. Despite...
Another rather disturbing trait of Wouk's is his tendency to lump the pastimes of his average people together with their morals. He is not content to show that people are admirable when they adhere to conventional morality, but must also show that everything they do--listening to soap operas, watching abominable movies--is just as admirable. Fortunately such passages are few, but their overall effect is to liquidize and sentimentalize the viewpoint that Wouk takes...
Marjorie Morning-star is characterized by its author's love for life as it is--people who live by religion, petty prejudices, and conventional morality, people who are a thousand adjectives good and bad. When Wouk does not drift off into sentimentality, he creates finely and vividly constructed scenes, and often the characters are so familiar that one finds if difficult to view them critically. The prose has a polished unpolish; it is eminently readable and perfectly suited to the novel form. Wouk might easily be remembered as a leading American novelist...