Shock, shock, over.(the bent pin)(Brief article)

OH, to hell with politics. Let's talk about something else.

Increasingly I am finding that the only way to avoid becoming a cultural moron is to ignore the picture part of the TV screen and read the crawl. Do it regularly and you can honestly state that you are watching TV less and reading more, because the crawl is where they dump news of interest to America's literate minority.

This is how I learned that May 27, 2008, was the 93rd birthday of novelist Herman Wouk. His fame rests on The Caine Mutiny; TV fans also recognize his name from the WWII blockbusters The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, which most read after watching the series. My favorite Wouk novel has nothing to do with the Navy or the war, which may be why it often goes unmentioned in lists of his works. It's not about a boy and his ship, it's about a girl and her virginity, and it came out shortly after my 19th birthday in 1955.

Set in Manhattan in the 1930s, Marjorie Morningstar is about a nice Jewish college girl named Marjorie Morgenstern who wants to be an actress. Translating her name so that it will blaze more Waspily from the Broadway marquees she intends to grace, she flails against her family's conservative Judaism and strict kosher observances to reach what she thinks are the sophisticated shores of modern American secularism, only to be continually thwarted by her ever-vigilant mother, who could teach Clarence Darrow a thing or two about the art of cross-examination.

It's a battle that part of Marjorie doesn't really want to win because she is more psychologically secure than she knows, but she succumbs to the zeitgeist of faddish Freudianism, Greenwich Village bohemianism, brittle pseudo-intellectual chatter, and the scurvy underside of the theater district, until, one by one, her defenses break down--first smoking, then drinking, then eating pork and shellfish, and finally losing her virginity before marriage.

It's the only sex scene in a 757-page book about sex and it's only seven sentences long:

 
   Then all changed. It became rough and 
   strange. She was powerless to stop it. 
   She tried to seem pleasant and loving, 
   but she was very uncomfortable and 
   unhappy. It became rougher and more 
   awkward. It became horrible. There 
   were shocks, ugly uncoverings, pain, 
   incredible humiliation, shock, shock, 
   and it was over.