Wouk wanted to know how so many people in Europe and America allowed the Holocaust to happen. He didn’t set out merely to write a family saga or to smuggle a history lesson into a story. Even in literary fiction, this kind of authorial restraint and fidelity to human complexity is surprising.īut the main reason the novels still feel urgent has to do with the nature of Wouk’s ambition. With Wouk, it takes hundreds of pages of seeing the character in action before you can decide - and even then, your verdict is liable to remain uncertain and subject to change. These are also novels in which you can’t immediately tell whether a character will turn out to be mostly admirable or mostly not. She takes some aspirin and goes to bed early. They are the kinds of books in which an attractive young woman in a doomed love affair comes down with a cold - and doesn’t die. Although sweeping, the novels aren’t melodramas. and Churchill to Stalin and Hitler, plausibly make cameos. The World War II books follow the Henry family - Pug, his wife, Rhoda, and their three grown children - through the war years, providing a framework in which the era’s most prominent figures, from F.D.R.
Wouk is often grouped with middlebrow writers of popular historical fiction - James Michener and Leon Uris, say - but his novels are better understood as pointillistic character studies in historical settings. That an American, a person of some authority, could be so cavalier about the Nazis in a story set after the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of equal rights, not to mention after Hitler had imprisoned his political opposition and eliminated the free press - was both mind-boggling and infuriating. When I read this, I wanted to throw the book at the wall. Tollever tells Pug that the worst of it was Kristallnacht, “when Nazi toughs had smashed department store windows and set fire to some synagogues.” But, he says, “even that the Jews had brought on themselves, by murdering a German embassy official in Paris.” Besides, the whole thing was exaggerated by the press as far as Tollever knew, “not one” Jew “had really been physically harmed.” In sum, Tollever had enjoyed the post immensely: “I haven’t drunk a decent glass of Moselle since I left Berlin.”
“The Germans do things in politics that we wouldn’t - like this stuff with the Jews - but that’s just a passing phase, and anyway, it’s not your business.”
“Hitler’s a damned remarkable man,” Tollever says over drinks in Pug’s elegant Washington, D.C., living room. Pug discusses the job with a fellow naval officer, a man named Tollever who previously held the position.
At the beginning of Herman Wouk’s novel “The Winds of War” (1971), the book’s hero, Victor “Pug” Henry, is offered a post as the United States Navy’s attaché in Berlin.
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