The legendary sportswriter Red Smith once remarked that writing was not difficult: "All you do is sit down in front of a typewriter and open up a vein." Imagine for a moment the accomplishments of Herman Wouk. Apparently not content to rest on a duly deserved reputation for such works as THE CAINE MUTINY and THE WINDS OF WAR, to name just two of his novels, he continues to publish at the age of 88. Lest anyone believe that he is living on his past, A HOLE IN TEXAS, his most recent effort, is a lively and entertaining novel, enjoyable and easy to read.

The hole in A HOLE IN TEXAS is the aborted excavation in the Lone Star State of the Superconducting Super Collider, a scientific project of mammoth proportion that would have allowed physicists to locate a minuscule particle known as the Higgs boson. In 1993, perhaps for political but certainly for budgetary considerations, the U.S. Congress pulled the plug on the Collider and hundreds of scientists in Texas were left in a deep hole.

Guy Carpenter, the main character of the novel, is one of those scientists. A middle-aged physicist with a young wife and child, he was able to move from the defunct Texas project to work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab on the terrestrial Planet Finder. This project, the son of the Hubble Telescope, is also facing potential funding problems. Good science does not come cheap and the change purses of taxpayers are no longer easily opened to fund scientific projects.

Carpenter and the scientific community are stunned one day to hear the Chinese government announce that they have discovered and isolated the Higgs boson. The significance of this discovery is that the Chinese now have the ability to produce the Boson Bomb, a weapon that dwarfs atomic or hydrogen bombs in destructive magnitude. A special news bulletin by Peter Jennings, interrupting a nationally televised sporting event, demonstrates the importance of the news of the Chinese discovery.

With the Higgs boson as his vehicle, Herman Wouk takes the reader on a paradoxical and often humorous journey that pokes fun at modern media and politicians. One of Carpenter's allies in the response to the Chinese announcement is Representative Myra Kadane. The Congresswoman succeeded her late husband in office. Her house committee has the task of investigating not only why the Super Collider was shut down prematurely but also why the Chinese accomplished what American scientists could not. As the investigation commences, Guy Carpenter offers his scientific insight in exchange for a glimpse into the opulent life of the rich and powerful in Washington and in Hollywood. Carpenter is the major beneficiary of this trade.

The plot thickens with the news that one of the Chinese scientists working on the Higgs boson project was a fellow grad student with Carpenter at Cornell. Not surprisingly, this information when discovered by the media adds the final ingredient, sex, to national crises. Every element is now in place for a media frenzy.

Granted, A HOLE IN TEXAS is not a classic novel and is not to be confused with THE CAINE MUTINY. But you will enjoy the skewering of politicians, media moguls and a few Hollywood types and attorneys thrown in for good measure. At 88 years of age Herman Wouk has written an entertaining novel. Perhaps like the legendary artist Grandma Moses, he can continue to work at his trade well into his 90s.