Youngblood Hawke

 It makes sense that [a:Herman Wouk|9020|Herman Wouk|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1266847920p2/9020.jpg] lived to be 103 years old; he wrote long books, and the edition of [b:Youngblood Hawke|42990|Youngblood Hawke|Herman Wouk|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440384487l/42990.SY75.jpg|769149] I read was 783 pages long. I'm a slow reader who goes word-by-word, which is why I notice useless things like that an end quote missing on page 193 shows up where one doesn't belong on page 679, and that the word "marshal" is incorrectly spelled with two ls on page 616. I'm mentioning these things to point out that if a long book like this one isn't one I like, I'm going to bail on it or say bad things about it.
 No danger of that happening here. I loved Youngblood Hawke and I was sorry to finish it. Its great length of 215,657 words helped make it seep into my veins in ways that even very good shorter books don't. You know how you often hear critics say good things about how some writers depict a character vividly in just a few words? That's true, but when someone with skills like Wouk goes on at length, his characters seem not only real but like people you've known for a while.
 An interesting thing about Youngblood Hawke is that Wouk exhibits some of the same failings in writing as the fictional writer the novel is about. Wouk's description of these failings somehow becomes a kind of peremptory defense against criticism of them.
 If you have any interest in how books get written and published, how Hollywood works, and what life for some in Manhattan was like around 1950, you'll love this book.
 Excerpt:

 Publication day of Alms for Oblivion was drawing closer. In the offices of Prince House Hawke had seen proofs of the first advertisements, and there was little doubt that Jay Prince was planning what Karl Fry called "the old jazzeroo campaign." The opening gun for Alms for Oblivion was to be a full page in the Sunday book section of the New York Times, with the novelist's name spread across the top in solid black letters two inches high:
           HAWKE
    A major new name in American fiction.
followed by a delirious description of the book and of its coal-truck-driving author.
 Prince was full of hopes for the novel. The failure of the book clubs to pick it up had not dampened him. "They'll hop on the bandwagon, Hawke, when we pass our first hundred thousand. They'll make it a special selection or something. They're always doing that. We've got a big goddamn doorstopper of a book here and it's going to sell like hell. You just get on with that next book as fast as you can."