When the American Jewish author Herman Wouk died at the age of one-hundred-and-three, David Rose hadn’t read any of his books, and decided to give one a try. Now a little over a year has passed, and Rose has read most of them—and has concluded that Wouk is a truly great, and greatly underrated, novelist:
Shining through all Wouk’s work is a profound understanding of human nature, and his characters ring true because of their flaws. Wouk himself was a devoted husband, married for almost 66 years until his wife Betty’s death in 2011 (she was also his literary agent). But . . . adulterous liaisons do crop up in even the best-regulated fictional families, while poor Youngblood Hawke, [the protagonist of the eponymous novel], finds himself badly damaged by a long entanglement with an older, married, sexually alluring socialite.
But the thing about Wouk is that although he wasn’t merely [a devoted husband] but deeply religious, the scion of a distinguished rabbinic line who studied the Talmud every day, he was never judgmental. He knew how people behaved, and why, but he didn’t condemn them—unless, like Adolf Eichmann, portrayed in some of the most dramatic scenes in War and Remembrance, they were truly evil.
This points to another key feature of his literary make-up: he was, above all, a Jewish writer, steeped not only in the culture of the American Diaspora in the manner of a Philip Roth or a Saul Bellow, but Judaism’s intellectual and spiritual traditions, which also provide the subject matter of his principal non-fiction books. More than anything, what distinguishes Judaism from Christianity, especially in its more deterministic . . . variants, is its attitude to sin, repentance, and redemption—something whose origins lie in the flawed lives of its patriarchs.
He was also an unabashed Zionist, who spent much time in Israel and got to know figures such as David Ben-Gurion who are portrayed in his two Israel novels, The Hope and The Glory. . . . Nowadays, Zionism is even less fashionable in bien-pensant circles than literary fiction that consciously builds on the methods of 19th-century novelists. Maybe that also explains why Wouk’s reputation is suffering—if it’s still being considered at all. But who writing now dares tackle such vast themes, or emulates his ambition? It’s time for a Wouk renaissance.
Read more on The Critic: https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2020/american-tolstoy/