An odd book in many ways, divided against itself. One recurring thread, the best, is an evocative memoir about the travails of a Jewish-American family, much as Wouk’s own, struggling to survive in the Bronx tenements back in the 1920s, prospering in the 1930s, moving to Manhattan. Here we meet the hard-working immigrant father—one foot still in the old world of the Pale, the other in the new world of small business and the neighborhood shul—and that indomitable force of nature and fiction, the ambitious Jewish wife and mother, harridan-saint, whose adoration and protection of her brilliant if unsophisticated son, the author, knows no bounds.
Wouk was born in 1915. The narrative usually follows Wouk’s own life very closely. His father was a pious man stuck in the laundry business, his mother a housewife who worshipped him and her family. Herman, here named “David,” the unsophisticated son, the boychick eventually cracks out of the shell and emerges as a promising young writer. Wouk wrote gags for the Fred Allen radio show for five years before joining the Navy during the Second World War.
Wouk then departs from the autobiographical using an odd plot device: he sends off his young literary protégé, so much like himself, to law school and eventually to Wall Street where he becomes a successful corporate tax lawyer and occasional substitute literary agent. The lawyer character gets invited to the White House during the Watergate epoch, not to fix the president taxes, but to touch up Nixon’s speeches, and ends up on a secret mission or two to Golda Meir in Israel.
In real life Wouk did serve briefly as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and must have wanted to draw from that unique experience for this book, but here his unlikely fictional device of transforming of gag writer/tax lawyer into powerful speechwriter, diplomatic emissary, and presidential confidante seems totally implausible.
Why such a device? In Across the River and Into the Trees Hemingway, the non-combatant, daydreamed himself as a general; in his last unfinished book Fitzgerald, the burned-out for-hire screenwriter imagined himself the head of a film studio; and perhaps here Wouk chose his protagonist’s profession for a similar reason—plain old-fashioned wish-fulfillment; his being every Jewish momma’s fantasy, “my son the attorney.”
Wouk, writing from experience, returns to his 1930s experience as a fledgling writer in the gag trade with a tortured on-again off-again love affair with a shiksa chorus girl. All this rings true, and is often very touching.
But in the pages Wouk chooses to set in the time the book was written, c. 1985, his secret agent/attorney protagonist, now defender of Nixon, chooses to lecture us about everything from the precarious state of Israel to the sorry state of literature in general. Wouk is unable to disguise his odium for many of the successful Jewish-American writers who followed in his footsteps, but who criticized or even satirized what to Wouk was Paradise Lost. He writes disdainfully about these recalcitrant Jews as if they were his contemporaries, but the authors he choses to slap on the wrist much more resemble Roth, Bellow, and Mel Brooks then they do any of Wouk’s own generation.
All in all, Wouk looking backwards nostalgically at a rich and fulfilling past is a much more convincing old-school teller of tales and celebrant of the best of Jewish-American life than he is as a curmudgeonly finger-pointing moralist and flag-waver.
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Top reviews from other countries
SKH
Inside, Outside - Herman Wouk
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 4, 2021Cathy
Virtually unreadable because of the typography
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 2, 2021
