A Hole in Texas: A Novel » (Reprint)

With this rollicking novel-hailed equally for its satiric bite, its lightly borne scientific savvy, and its tender compassion for foible-prone humanity-one of America's preeminent storytellers returns to fiction. Guy Carpenter is a regular guy, a family man, an obscure NASA scientist, when he is jolted out of his quiet life and summoned to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Through a turn of events as unlikely as it is inevitable, Guy finds himself compromised by scandal and romance, hounded by Hollywood, and agonizingly alone at the white-hot center of a firestorm ignited as three potent forces of American culture—politics, big science, and the media—spectacularly collide.

The New York Times

… Mr. Wouk also uses the nostalgic preobscenity "whatever the Sam Hill it is" to characterize the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle around which this novel revolves. Well, whatever the Sam Hill he may have had in mind with such a premise, he spins it into a crackling yarn and writes with an enduring vigor that whippersnappers might envy. — Janet Maslin