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The Best Goddamn Novel About The Writing Life Ever Written: Book Review of Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke

This is an old column I wrote, one of several hundred (just over 1800, to be exact) I wrote over the past twenty-odd years, mostly about books, movies and the media.

Almost…

Blood On The Typewriter
Youngblood Hawke is the one of the best goddamn novels about a writer’s life ever written, says Ashok Banker

In Stephen King’s new non-fiction book On Writing, the King of bestsellers candily reveals several shocking insights into his life and career. Among the more controversial revelations are the ones about his drug abuse, dependence on presciption medicines and excessive use of alcohol.

Interestingly, these eye-opening tidbits weren’t written after his recent accident as some critics first assumed but were already in the draft that lay on his desk at the time of the accident.

Those who have had the pleasure of reading King’s earlier non-fiction book Danse Macabre as well as his countless interviews (the best of which were collected in the book Bare Bones) will know that cutting open a vein comes naturally to King.

In fact, King is one of the few mega-selling writers whose personal attitudes and professional persona are very much alike. Unlike Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele, or David Baldacci whose personal histories have virtually nothing in common with their authorial voices and sensibilities, King the writer and King the man are much the same person. Or so I deduce after twenty-odd years of reading everything by him I could lay my hands on.

But rarely does an author reveal his whole story in a book, however honest he or she may be in real life. In fact, some of the most brutally honest novelists whose books are filled with shattering human insights and emotional truths so stunning that they haunt the public imagination for generations tend to be miserly with their own personal stories.

How much do you know about any author really? Nowhere near as much as you probably know about, say, a film star or socialite. Even the most famous authors are far more comfortable writing about other people than being written about themselves.

V.S. Naipaul, for instance, was notorious until a few years ago for turning journalists out of his door on the most trivial of excuses – “You’re too young to have read all my books,” he said famously to one young lady reporter. Anything to avoid talking about himself.

Which is why it’s rare to find a book that tells you truthfully what it’s really like to be a writer. Let alone a famous, highly regarded writer.

In fact, there’s not been a truly great novel in generations that takes you behind the scenes of the writing life. There aren’t even too many too choose from: One recent bestseller was titled just that, Bestseller. A pacy, enjoyable novel by Olivia Goldsmith, author of The First Wives Club, Flavour of the Month and other woman-of-substance novels, it was a refreshing insight into the big bad world of modern publishing.

Over the years there have been a few such books here and there. Some have even been quite readable. You might be able to think of several.

But how many really first-class novels have you read that deal with the writing life? Stephen King’s own Bag of Bones is one of the few commercially successful novels that was also critically well-received. But the story concerns itself mainly with the protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with his wife’s sudden death rather than with his career as a bestselling novelist.

Recently, while reading Herman Wouk’s war saga, I decided to go back to one of his earlier, lesser known books. It’s a novel called Youngblood Hawke. Coincidentally, I had picked it up at a second-hand bookstore years ago, after reading a similar essay on novels about writers, written by Stephen King. In that piece, he had recommended this novel highly, and claimed it was the best novel about a writer’s life that he had ever read, or words to that effect.

I began reading Youngblood Hawke with scepticism. Having some minor experience of the writing life myself, I was prepared for another soapy sexy melodrama set against the backdrop of the writing life. Or even a vast, sprawling saga set in the publishing world, just as Wouk’s War novels were human dramas set against the historic events of the Second World War.

There was also the off-putting fact that this novel was first published in 1962 and was set in the period of the late 1940′s and early 1950′s. Now, how on earth could any novel about publishing in that period have any relevance to the field today?

But once I read a few pages of Youngblood Hawke, I had to read a few more. And then a few chapters more. And then another hundred pages, and then another. And so on, until a day or two later I put down this 878 page-novel with a sigh of disbelief.

Youngblood Hawke is not just a novel about the writer’s life. It’s a great novel. I’m saying that with no holds barred, no critical hedging or cadging. I’m not a critic, first of all, just a reader and book-lover. So I’m not ashamed to call a spade a spade, and a heart a heart.

And this one’s a bright, red, pulsing big-hearted ace of a novel. No question about it. It’s the kind of novel that doesn’t take into account the short attention spans of television, the glamorous scene-stealing special effects of big-budget cinema, the thousand distractions of modern living. It doesn’t even make concessions to bestseller ingredients, to commercial viability and smart packaging.

It simply tells its tale, at the length the tale deserves, with the detail and attention to detail that they deserve. Whatever happens seems completely inevitable, as credible (or incredible) as real life itself. I’m sure Youngblood Hawke must have been a bestseller – Wouk never wrote a non-seller in his life, to my knowledge – but it’s not written like a cold-hearted bestseller. It’s a hotblooded genuine giant of a book, a roaring young monster of a story that just rages and reaches for the sky and grabs a fistful.

This is probably the best goddamn story I’ve read in a novel in months. Don’t even ask me which was the last novel I read that touched me so deeply, I can’t remember it’s name.

Don’t be put off by the title. Youngblood Hawke, or Arthur Hawke as the author’s more homely name is in the story, is the protagonist of this redblooded story. He’s a new novelist whose first novel has just been accepted for publication by a major New York publishing house.

The editor assigned to the book, a foppish, pompous, pseudo-literary type that reminds me of half a dozen major Indian editors in New Delhi even today, hates the book as well as its author. He looks down upon it as middlebrow fiction, fit only to sell to the ignorant masses in order to raise money to publish “real” literature.

It’s the same reaction that Dickens, Balzac, Faulkner, and a dozen other great names received when they first sought to be published. And this is where the truth of Wouk’s novel begins – and never lets up. He tells you what it really is like to be a talented, prolific, eventually successful and bestselling American novelist. He shows you every twist and turn of the path with such authority and generosity you simply gape and enjoy the ride.

I won’t tell you the story of Youngblood Hawke because that’s the beauty of this book: A great story, brilliantly told. You will, of course, find some parts tedious, especially if you think television and films are entertainment and books should all be elegantly crafted prose poems less than 150 pages in hardback. But if you take the time and effort to read them, you’ll find that no crafty literary novelist would trouble himself with so much authentic detail.

And most amazing of all, despite the fact that close to half a century divides the period and writing of this novel from the present day, the novel still stands as a valid portrait. If not in every detail of the publishing industry – a few more zeroes have been added to every figure mentioned – then certainly in every human and emotional detail.

As the old cliché goes about writing well: Just cut open a vein and let it flow. Wouk sure as hell opens that vein and it flows so freely and richly, his typewriter must have been washed in blood! Someone get the man a transfusion.

Youngblood Hawke is the best goddamn book about a writer I’ve ever read. What’s more it’s a great goddamn book about anybody, period.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 7:30 am. It is filed under Ashok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.