The Caine Mutiny is a powerful and sentimental tour de force of a novel, about command, responsibility, and becoming a man. Willie Keith is a wealthy dilettante, a Princetonian pianist who's highest calling in life is composing witty couplets at parties. To avoid the draft, he signs up as officer in the US Navy, and after a checkered journey through the academy finds himself aboard the WW1 era USS Caine, a garbage scow of a destroyer-mindsweeper. Their first captain, a genial screwoff and expert shiphandler, is promoted and replaced by Captain Queeg, a petty disciplinarian who immediately becomes the monumental tormentor of Keith's life and the other junior officers. As the Caine conducts escorts and other sundry errands around the Pacific, Queeg's abuses and irrationalities mount, until the exec, Lt. Maryk, relieves him of command at the height of a typhoon under Article 184. Maryk, Keith, and Keefer (an aspiring novelist) are court-martialled, but are acquitted only through the brilliant legal manueverings of the lawyer Greenwald, who badgers Queeg into a paranoid breakdown on the witness stand, and subsequently states that the intellectual Keefer manipulated the whole thing. Men like Queeg are necessary because peace time naval service is tedious and mediocre-that they would be promoted into positions of authority in war is what saves the rest of us while we train to fight.

I have to disagree with this judgment about the necessity of Queeg. Command may be hard and lonely, but Queeg reveals himself as obsessed with minutia, repeatedly refusing to take responsibility for his actions and his command, disproportionate and retaliatory to his subordinates, and incapable of engaging effectively with any sort of external reality. He may not be a clinical psychopath, but any system which would give him command is insane. A man like Queeg is a weak link, to be taken out of the chain for the safety of all.

The main plot is bookended by Willie's pursuit of a girl, which is sentimental and mawkish, and seems almost entirely arranged for him to overcome his prejudices and the inertia of his life. Otherwise, this is a stylish and compelling book, one that stretches to the full length of the story with grace and elegance. Wouk served on a very similar destroyer minesweeper during World War 2, and the authenticity is absolute. I'm thrilled I read it.