Word: wouk
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...once, some of the gravy was trickling down to the bookstores. The book clubs were booming, Hollywood was paying fancy prices for books again ($300,000 for Robert Ruark's Something of Value, $250,000 for MacKinlay Kantor's Andersonville, a $1,000,000 deal for Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar). High-priced, quality paperbacks were having the year of their lives...
Whining Paranoiac. For its vast middle-brow audience, TV served up a go-minute helping of Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, with most of the same cast that has carried the show to big-money grosses on Broadway and on tour across the nation. Lloyd Nolan re-created his memorable Captain Queeg, depicting the collapse of a personality, in one shattering crossexamination, from a man-to-man blaster to a whining paranoiac. Captain Queeg's character is complex yet dramatically clear, but most of the other characters in Caine Mutiny must operate as intellectual phobias...
...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...