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Department. He is “a squat Navy fullback from California, of no means or family.” Mr. Wouk quotes from the letter he wrote his congressman asking for an appointment to the Naval Academy. “My life aim is to serve as an officer in the U.S. Navy.” We are told he speaks Russian learned from “Czarist settlers in Fort Ross, California.” Anyway he got appointed; has risen; is gung ho and wants to command a battleship. The marriage? “Rhoda returned an arch glance redolent of married sex.” Elsewhere—the Nazis are on the march.
    There are three children. Son Warren was involved in “an escapade involving an older woman and a midnight car crash. The parents had never raised the topic of women, partly from bashfulness—they were both prudish churchgoers, ill at ease with such a topic….” Son Byron is in Siena carrying on with one Nathalie, niece of a famed American Jewish writer, author of
A Jew’s Jesus
. Byron has recently turned against his Renaissance studies because “‘I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter.’” Further, “‘The poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills. That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home.’”
    At this point my worst fears about Mr. Wouk seemed justified. The Russian-speaking Victor Henry who reads a chapter of the Bible every morning to his family and is prudish about sexual matters is, Mr. Wouk wants us to believe, a typical gallant prewar goyisher American naval officer. If I may speak from a certain small knowledge (I was born at West Point, son of an instructor and graduate), I find Mr. Wouk’s naval officer incredible—or “incredulous,” as they say in best-seller land. There may have been a few religious nuts here and there in the fleet but certainly a naval officer who is about to be posted as an attaché to the American embassy in Berlin would not be one of them. In those days Annapolis was notoriously snobbish and no matter how simple and fundamentalist the background of its graduates, they tended toward worldliness; in fact, a surprising number married rich women. West Pointers were more square but also rowdier. Mr. Wouk’s failure to come to terms with the American gentile is not unusual. Few American Jewish writers have been able to put themselves into gentile skins—much less foreskins. With ecumenical relish, Mr. Wouk tells us that son Byron (who marries a Jewish girl) is circumcised.
    With an obviously bogus protagonist, Mr. Wouk must now depend upon the cunning of his narrative gift to propel these characters through great events: Berlin under Hitler, Poland during the Nazi invasion, London in the Blitz, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; and not only must he describe the sweep of military and political action but also give us close-ups of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini. It is Upton Sinclair all over again and, to my astonishment, it is splendid stuff. The detail is painstaking and generally authentic. The naïve portraits of the great men convince rather more than subtler work might have done.
    Henry’s reports from Berlin attract Roosevelt’s attention. Mr. Wouk’s portrait of FDR is by no means as sycophantish as one might expect. No doubt the recent revelations of the late president’s sexual irregularities have forced the puritan Mr. Wouk to revise his estimate of a man I am sure he regarded at the time as a god, not to mention shield against the Cossacks. With hindsight he now writes, “Behind the jolly aristocratic surface, there loomed a grim ill-defined personality of distant visions and hard purpose, a tough son of a bitch to whom nobody meant very much, except perhaps his family; and maybe not they either.” This is not at all bad, except as prose. Unfortunately, Mr. Wouk has no ear for