Historical Whodunit

...His most meticulous and even finicking research, however, is lavished on the actual men he brings mto the story as crucial figures in Henry's world Oddly, Wouk writes his most effective prose when he deals not with the Henrys but with Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin?one proof that research sometimes pays off At a party the Henrys attend in Kannhall, Gormg's baronial hunting lodge outside Berlin, "Adolf Hitler was playing with the little Goring girl The happy, excited crowd of eminent Germans were laughing, coming, clapping hands, their eyes shining at their leader in his plam field-gray coat and black trousers as he held the beautiful white-clad child m his arms teasing her with a cake Suddenly the little girl kissed the Fuhrer on his big pale nose, and he laughed and gave her the cake A cheer went up, everybody applauded, and women wiped their eyes " Stalin, m conferences with Pug Henry at the Kremlin, doodles "in red ink" a wolf "with bared fangs and a hanging tongue " When Churchill and Roosevelt meet secretly off Newfoundland, Henry is deeply moved as he watches his chief, "this half-disabled gray man, heaving himself one agonized step at a time over a gangplank a few feet long Roosevelt might have wheeled over in comfort and with dignity But m his piteous fashion he could walk, and to board a British battleship, at Winston Churchill's invitation he was walking ". In the foreword, Wouk assures us that "the history of the War m this romance is offered as accurate the words and acts of the great personages, as either historical, or derived from accounts of their words and deeds in similar situations " But why should anyone demand such rigorous documentary accuracy from a novelist, or be impressed by his long and strenuous toil (seven years of Wouk's life) m libraries and archives both here and in Germany, Poland, Italy, England, and Russia9 We return to War and Peace not for its scrupulous historical accuracy about Napoleon, Kutuzov and the Battle of Borodino, but for what Tolstoy profoundly tells us about the effect of war on Natasha, Andre and Pierre, each of them a superbly realized human being, rather than a Walter Mitty-Lanny Budd fantasy like Victor Henry Of Wouk's imagined characters, only Natalie and her Berenson-like uncle Aaron occasionally shake free of their strategic slots on the War map, and come alive Indeed it would be shocking if these two did not show an independent spirit once in a while, for the fate of the Jews under Hitler is of course more than just another certifiable set of historical circumstances in Wouk's crowded panorama A Jew whose orthodoxy is not in the least perfunctory, Wouk has dedicated The Winds of War to his sons with the somber Hebrew word zachor??remember...

...Natalie Jastrow, a brilliant Radcliffe-educated Jewish girl, no Momingstar she, who is trying to get out of Italy before a declaration of war traps her for the duration as an enemy alien Each of these imaginary characters is made to pull a heavy share of the historical weight Wouk assigns him...

...The very model of a modern naval officer, Pug, at 49, is a churchgoing, iron-disciplined Annapolis man of humble origin dreaming of a battleship command, who m early 1939 is assigned to Beilin as the American naval attache A memo he writes from the German capital, predicting the Nazi-Soviet pact, attracts Roosevelt's attention, and for the next two years Pug swings tirelessly around the globe carrying top-seciet messages from his chief to Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and Stalin His front-row view of history giadually convinces this normally conservative Navy man that without American intervention, Hitler will conquei first Europe and then the world...

...Yet the trouble is that in Wouk's supercon-scientious zeal for shoehormng into the novel absolutely every scrap of information about the War, he throws both discrimination and emphasis overboard The effect, though this was certainly far from Wouk's intention, is to make everything, including the destruction of the Jews, seem at once impiobable and haphazard, because it is all so miscellaneous Nothing is merely mentioned or suggested??whether relevant to his grand design or not, the lectures, in light dramatic form, go grinding on about the Siena Palios, mad horse races dating back to the Middle Ages, Jewish weddings m Poland and Russian diplomatic banquets, how the British solved early problems of radar, the roots of Nazism in 19th-century German philosophy Though Natalie and her groom have less than three days for their War-crossed honeymoon, her small talk over the champagne is "We created Hitler, more than anybody We Americans Mainly by not joining the League, and then by passing the insane Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, during a deep depiession After Smoot-Hawley " Incurably didactic, reluctant to waste a drop of research, Wouk invents a German military tieatise by one General Armm von Roon The tone of this make-believe memoir is wrong??it is too simple-mindedly defensive to be a convincing parody of cultivated German prose??but the excerpts are a convenient dumping-ground for lots of military facts that Wouk couldn't fit into the narrative The von Roon sections are also the least readable parts of the book, since they lack the wealth of homely detail that Wouk takes such pains to include everywhere else...

...The very readability of The Winds of War provides its own tantalizing mystery, and though I spent many hours thinking on this enigma alter the six-day bicycle race it took to read the book, I have come up with irritatingly tentative answers, at best For the moment I can only acknowledge, as I reluctantly did after reading The Came Mutiny and Mai jone Mornmgstai, that the writer Herman Wouk is a pro of a strangely unclassifiable type It is surely no small achievement that when Maijone Mornmgstai was published m 1955, one finally had a name for this particular kind of New York Jewish girl, just as when Sinclair Lewis devised his archetypal character in 1922, another sort of American was forever after called a Babbitt I have never wanted to reread either Wouk's novel or Lewis', yet the achievement remains important for having passed into social, it only marginally literary, history...

...The Winds of Wat (Little, Brown, 885 pp , $10 00), let the reader beware Meals will be uncooked, work neglected, children shooed away, telephone unanswered The rather embarrassing truth is that this klutz of a book??pedestrian in style, absurdly grandiose m ambition, shamelessly sentimental about patriotism, marriage and children, populated mostly with creaky steieotypes for characters??is as hypnotically readable as a well-honed detective story, even if we know perfectly well how its main event, the Second World War, came out...

...Wouk's purpose in The Winds of War is to set down everything he remembers and has learned about World War II by recounting the fortunes and misfortunes of Victor (Pug) Henry, a fictional character whose exploits are the thread on which Wouk strings the history of America and Europe from the spring of 1939 to the bombing of Pearl Harbor two and half years later (The sequel will take him to the Japanese surrender ) But the name Henry will not become a synonym for any breed of man, for Wouk requires his Wasp paragon of honor and probity to be too little and do too much...

...While Wouk bombards the leader with his prodigious research into the international feinting and sparring and shelling of these early War years, he does not neglect the domestic front, where Henry's family presents almost as many problems as his missions to Berlin, London and Moscow His feather-biained wife, whose horizon stretches only as far as the nearest hairdresser, drifts into an affair with a prominent scientist—a convenient peg for some tricky paragraphs on uranium fission and the Manhattan Project The elder Henry son becomes a Navy pilot and marries the sexy daughter of an isolationist senator, the feckless (but handsome) younger boy, to his parents' Piotestant dismay, marries...

...These details, m fact, help explain the book's compelling readability It is also the secret of Twie-style "The black-coated equerry padded down the wide hall, knocked quietly on the gilt door, and coughed softly 'Your Majesty, His Highness is dead' " By telling us the color of Roosevelt's jacket and tie as he mixes a superlative martini, Wouk, like Time, seems to close the gap between the ordinary reader and the extraordinary personage of history But by bringing the Second World War down to the level of comfy novehstic romance, Wouk also deprives it of the resonant urgency m the word zachoi Whodunits are fun to read because we feel no emotion stronger than curiosity To reduce Hitler??and Roosevelt and Stalin??to the undemanding dimensions of fictional adventure takes consideiable skill Nonetheless, for all Wouk's moral seriousness, m the end it is clear that he does not know how to take history seriously enough...