AIRPLANE READING

Blogging as self-promotion: A book review of mine appeared Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times:

It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post. Both are melodramatic, even comical cliches to serve the plot. But what a plot!

Wouk tells the tale of a colossal scientific project in particle physics, the Texas-based Superconducting Super Collider, done in by self-interested politicians who invariably mislead a clueless public with the help of weaselly journalists; meantime, news of a secret Chinese experiment that has found an elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, touches off a national panic about an apocalyptic Boson Bomb.

The 88-year-old author, remarkable for his creativity in old age, has a canny knack for the topical and for touching all the bases. Though conventional wisdom colors the texture of the novel, it speeds the chapters along like, well, a superconductor. You can easily finish "A Hole in Texas" between the takeoff and landing of a transcontinental flight, and without skimming.

Read the rest here. One reader already has. He writes: "My recent airplane reads have been Dan Brown novels. It's amazing how he writes the same basic book again and again and still gets paid. I wanna do a similiar 'find and replace' style of writing and make my millions as well."

Most excellently well put. The breathless, deathless prose of "The Da Vinci Code" reads to me like an Ivy League boy's adventure. Wouk isn't much of a prose stylist either. Next to Brown, however, he's another Dr. Johnson.

Postscript: Ryan McGee writes: "I always like reviews that have energy. Mine sometimes replace 'energy' with 'drunken stupor,' like when I tackled the high culture of 'The Nick and Jessica variety hour.'"