Word: reader
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...with the world than it does today. As the book goes along, one is inclined to forgive Henry, and the author, the narrative necessities that shoot him hither and yon and miraculously equip him with the Russian and German necessary to do his work for Wouk, F.D.R. and the reader...
...scale of World War II. What soon becomes clear, though, is that Winds of War is an upside-down Bildungsroman, in which the author, not the characters, keeps growing. Wouk's passionate interest in the war, his desire to evoke it, often carries him (and sometimes the reader) beyond conventional narrative into a curious kind of telescoped history...
...very well. Bodies begin to accumulate in novel ways. Midway through the book, Marlowe, the film company's doctor, turns out to be a British treasury agent as well as a physician. Nazi gold is involved, and guilt for long-ago deaths. Amid the systematic carnage, the reader begins to think of the film version of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians...
...What the reader learns is this: six boys are born in the same summer in a village in the American Southwest. One dies young; five live to manhood. They separate, though bound together by their origin and by a mistress shared serially. No one is named. Each is referred to by his profession: the actor, the poet, the musician, the painter. That is four; the last, the curator of these memories, is a teacher of English...
Jones is very strict. If it is his business to have insights, and the reader's place to appreciate them-well, that is not a bad division of labor. The novelist who follows this course becomes a presence in his own novel. A cinematic kind of novelizing is more fashionable now, in which the page is a movie screen, wondrous but neutral. Jones's writing is less glittery but more personal, very high-level gossip that is fascinating because, like all gossip, it defines the gossipist...