An Unfinished Season
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin, 251 pages, $24
A boy watches with pleasure out his second-story bedroom window while his father, just home from work, skates around the “eyelid”-shaped pond on their cherished land in an unincorporated township north of Chicago called Quarterday. Teddy Ravan, owner of a printing company, shoots hockey pucks into a net and takes victory laps, reveling in his prowess and privacy beneath arc lights hung in a ring of sheltering sycamores.
But this is a brutal winter, not only due to record-breaking cold, but also because of a protracted strike at Teddy’s plant, a vehement protest that has taken him by surprise. Things have gotten so ugly, Teddy carries a gun. He has always found immense satisfaction in his work, in the careful manufacture of something tangible and handsome. But of late Teddy has drifted away from his former hands-on, ink-stained involvement in the everyday labor of the plant, and consequently he’s out of touch with his workers, who, in the “unquiet peace” following the Korean War, want “to share in the new prosperity.” The House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings are under way, and Teddy is all too willing to blame the communists for his woes.
It is fitting that the reader meets Teddy and Jo’s only child, Wilson, called Wils, in the role of spectator, because watching is what Ward Just’s soulful and eloquent narrator does best. Wils is not a man of action like his father, but rather of reflection. After spending most of 8th grade at home with a mysterious illness, Wils acquired the habits of solitude and attentiveness, and now, as the story gets under way, it’s summer, and he’s 19 and just about to graduate from high school and launch his life, one that he’s determined to make as radically different from his father’s as possible.
But it’s thanks to his father’s connections that Wils has secured a summer job as a copy boy at a sleazy Chicago newspaper. And Wils has also bought a new tux and a fine pair of dancing shoes with his father’s blessing, in preparation for the summer season, a dizzying round of two dozen extravagant debutante parties slated to take place along the North Shore.
As this precious summer begins, Wils, who is devoted to “learning the angles” and who impresses adults as awfully mature for his age, finds himself leading “an appealing double life, bon vivant by night, workingman by day.” And doesn’t he love to regale the sheltered “girls in armored evening dresses, pearls swinging against their throats” with gritty tales of big old bad Chicago, cigarette and drink in hand. At summer’s close he’ll move to Hyde Park and enroll in the University of Chicago.
This is Ward Just’s 14th novel, and it couldn’t be more ravishingly atmospheric in its subtle evocation of the contrast between the good life of the wealthy and powerful and the grim realities of the poor and voiceless. Nor could the novel be more penetrating in its understanding of the vagaries of memory, the weight of secrets kept and the consequences of stories irresponsibly told. Just’s admirers embrace every one of his sophisticated and commanding novels–which include “Echo House,” “A Dangerous Friend” and “The Weather in Berlin”–because they treasure his radiant prose, unerring moral compass, thoughtful and deep-feeling characters, and worldly, politically astute story lines. But Just’s avid readers are too few in number given the breadth and significance of his gifts. Perhaps “An Unfinished Season,” one of his finest creations, will serve as his breakout book.
What makes Just so compelling? A former journalist who reported on the Vietnam War, Just is fascinated by the quandaries of reportage, not only for its own sake, but because it’s a practice that can be seen as emblematic of all of our efforts to chart and navigate the fast-moving stream of life. Just writes of the valiant yet impossible effort to attain objectivity in the face of outrage and tragedy, the all-but-impossible quest for truth in a world of subterfuge and lies, and the bottom-line pragmatism that can engender over-simplification, sensationalism and avoidance of serious controversy. Just, who writes with lucidity and authority, who is direct but never austere, and who so exquisitely articulates the undercurrent of feeling and thought that attends every waking moment, is an expert in the dissonance of cultural collisions and generational differences, as well as the emotional fallout of war.
All of these crucial themes are examined with fresh insight and supple imagination in “An Unfinished Season” as Just also pays quiet homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby.” He pays tribute with the sheer beauty of his prose and the deep resonance of his metaphors, by conjuring of a magical yet decadent and endangered place of privilege and excess, and in his insights into the confounding aftermath of a world war, the death of romance and the strivings of those excluded from the charmed circle. This improvisation on an earlier work links two key epochs in our pell-mell history and inspires the reader to consider our own transitional time within this continuum.
A loner and a jazz lover who has been haunting a famous Chicago club since he was 15, Wils doesn’t fall for the typical marriage-minded North Shore debutante. Instead he is drawn to Aurora Brune, a smart, sharp-tongued, journal-keeping, eavesdropping young woman who lives in Lincoln Park with her famous and enigmatic psychiatrist father, Jack, whom Wils finds equally intriguing. Like Wils, Aurora is an avid observer and somewhat detached from the social whirl in which she wryly participates and clinically dissects. As she and Wils attend lavish parties, and slip off on their own in the fragrant midsummer nights, Just subtly links the plush North Shore to the rougher world Wils sees through the jaded eyes of the newspapermen he works with, a shadow realm of mobsters, trashy scandals and rat-infested tenements in which a black woman nearly froze to death on the street in the winter past, saved only by the high alcohol content in her blood.
But both of Wils’ spheres are mere facades. Wils tells Aurora that the newspaper he works for is “a story factory. You make stories the way a furniture factory makes chairs. The stories are supposed to be well made and comfortable, so that you can sit in them without fear that they’ll break down or disappoint you in any way.” And the North Shore’s pastoralism is a stage set for mansions that, according to Aurora, are fortresses, not homes. “You stay in and the world stays out.”
But exclusiveness doesn’t preclude trouble. While Just makes it clear that, at base, it is absurd and arrogant to compare the problems of rich folks with the dire straits of the poor and oppressed, it is nonetheless true that, as Wils discerns under the spell of a band of elderly black blues musicians, “the blues crossed racial lines, even the divisions among the classes. . . . Behind the finger-snapping facade of the blues was a glum house of betrayal, thwarted ambition, sexual totalitarianism, lies, and misprision.”
This is brought to painful fruition when the story shifts to Aurora’s father, Jack Brune, a man of few words and many intense emotions who endures violent headaches and refuses, ordinarily, to talk about his experiences in the Pacific theater during World War II. But when Aurora finally brings her beau home to meet her father, Jack does talk to Wils about the true terror of war, of confronting hatred head-on–not only the enemies’ hatred of you but, more damningly, your hatred of them:
“In your passion you become like them. No difference between them and you, and you find yourself thinking thoughts that are unimaginable and committing acts that are more unimaginable still. . . . The abnormal becomes normal and you are–reduced. And you enjoy it, this reduction. The more extreme, the more pleasure you take.”
How powerfully these words resonate in light of our current military embroilment. And how brilliantly Just crafts Jack’s wrenching story to dramatize war’s long shadow. No war ever truly ends. It lives on in the psyches of those who survive it, and their horrors and grief are passed down from generation to generation. Wils muses, “[O]nce you were tortured you stayed tortured.” And Jack, as it turns out, is a doctor who cannot heal himself.
As Wils’ vision of a golden summer gives way to unexpected tragedies, he contemplates the nature of stories that are told and of secrets that are kept. His father says, “Sometimes I think the only memories worth having are the ones that are private,” and Wils himself concludes, “The exact truth was profoundly private, as closely held as the most shameful secret; and to speak of it would be to lose it, a truth so hard won.”
And yet Wils has faith in humankind. He has told the haunting story of his 19th summer in retrospect, and at its conclusion, he steps into the present to reveal that he has, indeed, become a man of the world, even a man of judicious action, having learned to turn his penchant for observation into a force for good.
Most of life unfolds out of reach of our consciousness. What writers of Ward Just’s high caliber do is bring all that is hidden into focus through a lexicon of gorgeous and indelible images: cityscapes full of promise, fecund land-scapes, a dreamy moon, a seething newsroom, a crowd enthralled by a jazz band, a young woman throwing a champagne glass over the edge of a bluff along Lake Michigan, a young man standing before a window feeling that anything and everything is possible. Wils worries that he makes “too much of too little,” but when it comes to what really matters in life, that’s rarely the case for any of us.
