Books: You Must Go Home Again

DON'T STOP THE CARNIVAL by Herman Wouk. 395 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

A novel that starts with the map of an imaginary tropical island makes a delicious promise of enchantment—as every reader knows who ever pored over the frontispiece chart in Treasure Island. Novelist Herman Wouk knows the pull of that enchantment. Six years ago, he fled the Manhattan theatrical and literary world, scene of his last two books (Youngblood Hawke and Marjorie Morningstar), and took his family to live in the Virgin Islands. His new novel, set in the Caribbean, begins enticingly with a...