From a
review of Herman Wouk's
Marjorie Morningstar -
The failure of Marjorie's artistic ambitions was Wouk's wild success. The novelist had already had a bestseller in The Caine Mutiny (1952), but Marjorie was a phenomenon, selling more copies than any American novel since Gone with the Wind and continuing to sell to this day. This is not attributable to Wouk's artistry. A prime example of the literary category that the critic Pearl K. Bell dubbed the "good bad book," the novel is witty and memorable to a fault — and also solidly middlebrow, clumsily written, and twice as long as it should be. In prose simultaneously flat and overwritten, the characters announce their emotions like restaurant orders, and symbols are dropped into the text like cartoon anvils. In the first twenty pages, Marjorie is thrown by a horse named Prince Charming. Pursuing her free spirit — first cigarettes, alcohol, and bad company, then shellfish, pork, and sex — she falls in love with a luftmentsh named Airman. After the two consummate their love, she gropes on the night table for cigarettes and accidentally breaks a glass—the traditional conclusion to a Jewish wedding. "Shock, shock, and it was over" is Wouk's description of the quite literal anticlimax: Marjorie's Recline and Fall.
And from Conrad Black's extended
vent -
Murdoch, because he is probably the most successful media owner in history (so international, innovative and daring) and has, when he can be loosened up to part with them, a considerable store of astute and mordant aperçus, should be a bottomless storehouse of interest. But he is generally not overly forthcoming, rather monosyllabic, an enigma whose banter is nondescript bourgeois filler delivered in a mid-Pacific accent. His idea of humor is pretty coarse, in the Australian manner, without being very original, or very funny.
Murdoch has no discernible attachments to anyone or anything except the formidable company he has built. His periodic foraging trips for media attention (the oddly hoped-for story where he's made to seem human) usually lead to hilarious fiascoes such as the journalist Michael Wolff's effort at comradely biography combined with sophomoric mind reading, a sort of Charlie Rose approach in The Man Who Owns the News: phrases like "Rupert and I thought ..." abound. Of course no one could possibly have the least interest in what — or if — Wolff thinks, and Wolff couldn’t have had any idea what was on Rupert’s mind because Rupert never lets anyone know what he’s thinking. Murdoch's centenarian mother was "okay" (about as affectionate as it gets with Rupert); no business associate lasts long, except perhaps Michael Milken as an exotic financial guru, and economist Irwin Stelzer as a random and chatty, ersatz muse. Save for Ronald Reagan, he turned on every politician he ever supported in every country where he has operated; he discarded every loyal lieutenant, two wives and countless friendly acquaintances, as if he were changing his socks. Murdoch is a great white shark, who mumbles and furrows his brow compulsively, asks questions and listens, and occasionally breaks loose and has pictures taken of himself dressed in groovy black, pushing a baby stroller through Greenwich Village, or has stories written about his supposedly popish-leaning religiosity, published as humanizing touches, much like his orange-dyed hair, in the Sumner Redstone style.
Certainly Murdoch is interesting as a phenomenon if not as a person; a man who is airtight in his ruthlessness, unlimited in his ambition, with the iron nerves to have bet the company again and again. And although he has had some narrow escapes, he always emerges in fighting form. That story is fascinating, but he has the self-confidence never to try to impress people, is monotonous as a public speaker and unfathomable as a personality in regular conversation. Someone who could grasp and present the scope of Murdoch’s talents and ambitions could produce an interesting book, but it would have to be done by acute observation and intuition, and from a bit of altitude, because it is impossible to get anything but a banal smoke screen with occasional ripples of humor out of the man himself. I have long thought that his social philosophy was contained in his cartoon show, The Simpsons: all politicians and public officials are crooks, and the masses are a vast lumpen proletariat of deluded and exploitable blowhards. Almost all studies of Murdoch, including the reflections on him in Sarah Ellison’s book War at the Wall Street Journal on his takeover of the paper, where she was a reporter, are mosquito explorations around his shins, which is all he cares to reveal.
