Among the hundreds of authors who participated in the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the ranking figure was Herman Wouk.
The career-making novel for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, “The Caine Mutiny,” was published more than a half-century ago, but Wouk was not merely gathering more laurels for a lifetime of distinguished work. Remarkably, at 94, he made a rare trek to UCLA from his self-described “lair” in Palm Springs to talk about his latest book, “The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion.”
Although Wouk is best known for the thrilling war novels that have been made into movies, including not only “Mutiny” but also “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” he has also been one of the great explainers and defenders of the Jewish faith. Indeed, “This Is My God,” first published in 1959, is a good introduction to Modern Orthodoxy.
His latest book is another confession of faith, but it is fully engaged with the world in which we live now. The title of “The Language God Talks,” a phrase he borrowed from the late physicist Richard Feynman, refers to calculus, and it represents Wouk’s entry into a debate between religion and science that has never been livelier than it is today. But Wouk insists that we ought not to forget “God’s other language,” the language of the Bible and the Talmud.
Wouk takes on not only Feynman — “my kind of agnostic,” he jokes — but also a couple of other Jewish physicists and Nobel laureates, Murray Gell-Mann (“a Nobel-class tackler of problems, but for him the existence of God is not one of them”) and Steven Weinberg (“a quarreler with God in the vein of Job”). He offers a deft survey of the scientific enterprise that characterizes recent history, ranging from the Manhattan Project to the Hubble Telescope, before turning his attention to the ancient and enduring questions that have always vexed the human mind: Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we make sense of the lives we lead in between?
“The curtain rises on the Mosaic drama, and LIGHT floods the stage; on the humanist drama, a BANG shakes the theater,” writes Wouk. “Beyond those two mighty metaphors, calculated to shock our primal human senses, the scenarios diverge.”
To his credit, and appropriately enough, Wouk never quite explains how he reconciles religion and science. It’s as if he were fully embracing the uncertainty principle of modern physics, but there’s something of the talmudic pilpul at work here, too. Wouk’s book is hardly a religious tract. Rather, it is more nearly a memoir, much enlivened by the author’s vivid recollections of his family history, his wartime exploits, his writing life, his wide-ranging travels, his experiences in Hollywood and on Broadway, and much else besides.
“The Language God Talks” is a kind of compact philosophical autobiography and an opportunity for readers to glimpse the innermost musings and intimate experiences that prepared Wouk for the many books he has bestowed upon us, including this one. n
Jonathan Kirsch is book editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
“The Language God Talks” by Herman Wouk (192 pages, Little, Brown and Company, $23.99)