Word: youngblood
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Youngblood Hawke, Wouk...
...YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE (783 pp.)-Herman Wouk-Doubleday...
...defensible; the gross offense of distorting a man's life can be justified to some extent if it helps the novelist to capture the quality of the man's spirit. But there is no literary or historical justification for the cynical trespass Herman Wouk has committed in Youngblood Hawke. It is not merely a distortion; it is an act of violence...
Wouk has borrowed almost everything from Wolfe but his cuff links, although of course there is the customary title-page disclaimer. Wolfe himself is mentioned several times, and Youngblood Hawke, the fictional author, comes to fame 15 years after Wolfe's death. But the list of similarities testifies to the attentiveness of Wouk's note taking: both Wolfe and Hawke had huge physiques; Southern backgrounds; cantankerous mothers obsessed with real estate; awkward, adoring older sisters; affairs with sophisticated New York matrons 15 years older than themselves; compulsions to set down every acre of the U.S. on paper; prose...
Will Jeanie keep her virtue? Will Youngblood be able to pay the Internal Revenue Service the hundreds of thousands of dollars he owes in back taxes? Time after time, when he seems on the point of balancing Hawke's fiscal or romantic accounts, a new tax lien or an old mistress shows up. Jeanie skips teasingly ahead of Youngblood for most of the book's 783 pages, and it may be taken as proof that the Romantic Age is finally over that in the end it is not the girl but the Treasury Department that gets the hero...