NEWSWEEK

AT 95, HERMAN WOUK
​PLANS HIS NEXT CHAPTER

BY LOUISA THOMAS ON 4/8/10 AT 8:00 PM EDT
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Still, Wouk, a month away from his 95th birthday, knows he cannot write forever. He has described The Language God Talks  as a "summing up," even if he is toying with the idea of writing a sequel. Earnestly written and very brief, it is an unusual work—partly a quick trip through developments in cosmology, partly an episodic memoir, partly an essay on faith and science. At the end, it portrays an imagined conversation between Wouk and the scientist Richard Feynman: historical fiction about the drama of the believer and the skeptic. In real life, Wouk met Feynman while researching the atom bomb for War and Remembrance . Feynman wasn't interested in fiction; he called calculus "the language God talks." But during a summer at the Aspen Institute, the two men spent hours talking, and Wouk has been thinking about his exchanges with Feynman and other scientists ever since. He even tried to learn calculus.

Feynman was a secular Jew, and yet something about the way he saw the world resonated with the observantly religious novelist. One day Wouk came across an interview in which Feynman said, "It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe … can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama." The huge stage and the human drama: "This is the subject I've been thinking about my whole life," Wouk says.

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