Pop Pageant

By JOHN SNOW

As doorstop best sellers go, Herman Wouk's melodramas The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were tolerable entertainment. The historical framework of World War II was well enough known that the author could focus on the adventures of his solid-oak characters without having to teach history. That's not true of The Hope (Little, Brown; 693 pages; $24.95), Wouk's earnest novel about Israel's first two decades, beginning with the fight for independence in 1948 and carrying through the Six-Day War in 1967.

The author's new book destroys itself before the reader's eyes, as a fascinating popular history battles without success to free itself from a fat, tedious novel. What is interesting here -- Wouk is right about this -- is the improbable succession of bluffs and heroics by which the new and perilously weak Jewish state managed to defend itself. But the writer, now 78, chooses to deal with Israel's wars, and the confounding historical intricacies that shaped them, on a level that allows only slightly more subtlety than a grade- school Thanksgiving pageant.

The furniture of novel writing clutters chapters that might otherwise explain what happened. It is simply irritating, for a reader trying to understand the murk of the Suez crisis, to be patronized by docudrama as characters dash on- and offstage costumed as a paratrooper, a general, an intelligence operative, their wives and mistresses, and so on. Or, to take the contrary view, it is emotionally unsatisfying to read endless stuff about John Foster Dulles and Suez when what you want is the paratrooper and the lady in intimate clutch.