Herman Wouk was a good writer. He could spin a compelling tale, and he could embroider some serious ideas onto that tale. His prose was clean, and his characters recognizable. But he wasn't Proust. Or Tolstoy. Or Saul Bellow. He was just good, producing—with The Caine Mutiny (1951), for example—solid American middlebrow work much better than, say, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955).
That seems fair, doesn't it? The run of 1950s middlebrow classics was so much better than what would later come to claim their spot in American publishing that we forget those books were, by design and reception, resolutely middlebrow. These were not pulp, like Robert E. Howard's Tales of Conan. They were not unabashed thrillers, like Ian Fleming's Moonraker or Alistair Maclean's HMS Ulysses. They were not exemplars of genre fiction, like Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley or Rex Stout's Before Midnight. But neither were they Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, or Graham Greene's The Quiet American.
Every one of those books—from Tales of Conan to The Quiet American—first appeared in 1955, the same year Herman Wouk outsold them all with Marjorie Morningstar, his first book after his breakthrough success with his third novel, The Caine Mutiny. And both The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar look awfully good compared with, say, such later bestselling claimants of the middlebrow bestseller as Erich Segal's 1970 Love Story. Or Robert James Waller's 1992 The Bridges of Madison County. Or Charles Frazier's 1997 Cold Mountain (a book lavishly praised by the very highbrow critic Alfred Kazin in one of the last reviews he wrote before his death in 1998).
But looking better than Love Story is too faint as praise for what Wouk achieved. He wasn't Proust, but he was a damn sight better than Erich Segal. A writer's death is not the occasion for harsh judgments, and when Herman Wouk died this spring, on May 17, just short of his 105th birthday, he was given the expected outpouring of tributes.
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