252
After he returns to the
Caine,
Willie, who had admired Keefer,
is forced to concede that Green–
wald was right. Keefer is now
captain of the
Caine
and Willie
his executive officer. In the clos–
ing weeks of the war, the ship is
hit by a Kamikaze, and Keefer, to
his own shame and disgust, hastily
abandons ship, leaving Willie to
save the
Caine
and the men who
have remained aboard, and re–
turns only when the danger is
past. Willie is given command of
the
Caine
after Keefer leaves the
ship in Japan, and he sails home
to New York a man, a hero, pre–
pared to cut loose from his mother
and to fight for the hand of the
Italian girl who had seemed be–
neath him at the beginning of the
war.
It must be noted that Mr. Wouk
is an exceptionally good story–
teller. Willie Keith's adventures,
travails and loves are handled with
a directness and a swiftness that
bear the mark of the practiced pro–
fessional writer. But this is true
of a good many other novels, even
novels dealing with the Second
World War, that have not had a
tenth the success of this book.
What we must consider is the
special quality that has made
The
Caine Mutiny
seem important to
so many people.
It is a quality not to be found
in many best-sellers that depended
for their popularity simply on ro–
mance, sword-play, decolletages
and civil wars. For those books,
despite obvious attractions, cannot
possibly involve the modern mid–
dle-class reader's deepest feelings
about sex, war and society, in a
way that flatters him into the
be–
lief that he is participating in a
thoughtful intellectual experience.
Let us tum to Willie's love af–
fair. It is one of the novel's main
themes and also serves technically
both as counterpoint and relief.
When Willie first meets Marie
Minotti they fall in love, but are
kept from intimacy by the bitter–
sweet realization that their social
backgrounds are worlds apart, for
he is still under his mother's dom–
ination and she is only the daugh–
ter of a Bronx immigrant. So far
their relation has a certain com–
fortable familiarity-tragedies have
been written on just this theme
and innumerable soap operas, too.
There is, to
be
sure, a certain
flavor of the archaic in tracing
the difficulties of a love affair
between two young people who
come from utterly different mili–
eux; when J. P. Marquand treats
it, as he does so often, he removes
the love affair a generation or two
from current reality, presenting
it as part of the recollections of
an aging man. Furthermore, the
liberal-minded middle-class reader
is well aware of the impediments
that have been removed from the
path of true love by the withering
away of the uppermost and nether–
most classes in American society
and the consequent expansion of
