Just's skill brings a restless 1950s Chicago to life
An Unfinished Season
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp., $24
Ward Just resides at the edge of literary stardom, not quite outside the circle, not quite in. Not quite, but almost: No novelist writes with more grace and clarity, or is better at evoking time and place. It is impossible not to admire Just, and if we embrace him tentatively, it may be the fault of his characters: their perfect composure, mordant perception, and a laconic worldliness that seems inborn. They're interesting, but not always easy to warm up to. Just's 14th novel is a case in point.
''An Unfinished Season" is a coming-of-age story set in Chicago and a town called Quarterday just north of it, in the 1950s. The narrator, Wils Ravan, is 19, a lonely and bookish only child. This is his last summer before leaving for college, and he is marking time working as a copy boy at a Chicago daily, hanging out at a jazz club, and going to debutante parties in the opulent northern suburbs.
If the novel has a hero it is his father. Teddy Ravan, a self-made man who scrapped his way to Dartmouth on a hockey scholarship, owns a printing business. Teddy's printers are on strike, and this bitter standoff is straining his marriage. Jo Ravan grew up amid wealth and privilege in Connecticut and cannot understand her prairie husband's stubbornness in the matter. There are threatening phone calls, a rock through a window. Jo departs for a visit back east and extends her stay indefinitely.
Her absence brings Wils and Teddy together. Evenings they drink whiskey and become better acquainted: ''My father told me a good deal about his business and much else besides. . . . I had the idea that he was telling me things he had never told anyone. He said we were in an enviable zone of trust and I did not know how rare that was, so we should enjoy ourselves while the trust lasted." Intimacy is fleeting, trust precarious. It is best, Wils will decide, to protect yourself against them, though there's a price to be paid.
Jo comes home, putting an end to the male bonding, but by now Wils has found someone else to talk to. At a party he falls in love with Aurora Brule, the spoiled and willful daughter of a Freudian analyst. Aurora is an only child, like Wils. Her father is raising her alone.
Here the story pivots from Quarterday to Chicago, from the Ravan farmhouse to the Brule apartment overlooking Lincoln Park. There's a whiff of mystery about the beautiful Aurora and more than a whiff about her antisocial father. Wils dislikes secrets, but Aurora insists on them. ''Secrets," she says, ''are what make the difference, one person to another. That's what a personality is, secrets."
Secrets, dark ones, are a staple of Just's fiction. The past can put a curse on you, and it may not be your fault. Jack Brule was an officer in the Pacific in the recent war and refuses to talk about it, even to Aurora. He stands apart, always, brooding and inscrutable. Obscurity is his essence; Teddy Ravan's is openness and moral clarity. The two fathers live by different assumptions, navigate by different polestars, and so, it turns out, do their children. Wils penetrates Brule's secret, but another dark event, unheralded and explosive, brings a new mystery. Wils's summer collapses abruptly, an unfinished season.
The events leave their permanent mark on Wils, but for all his ensnarement in the Brule family tragedy he is a young man who takes things in stride. ''You're the oldest . . . nineteen-year-old I've ever met," says his boss at the newspaper. ''I think you were born middle-aged, and that's your trouble." It's the novel's trouble, too. Wils simply doesn't sound 19. ''In its cosmic indifference," he reflects, ''the city of Chicago resembled a mighty turbine, three and a half million souls oiling the gears and tending the works while the supervisors stood around reading the racing form." His thoughts swarm with learned references -- the Quattrocento, the ''Ring of the Nibelungen," ''Tannhauser," Odysseus, Siegfried Sassoon. The narrative voice is precise and eloquent -- Just's prose always is -- but a simpler, less discursive melody would be more affecting. ''Aurora and I had gone from lovers to enemies to strangers in minutes," he says, as things come crashing down on them. ''I was the mariner who knew the surface of the sea but had no understanding of the life beneath it." It's elegantly wrought, but what did the moment feel like? Just would do better to let the event speak for itself.
''An Unfinished Season" is impressive nevertheless. Just illumines history from the inside, as usual: city politics, the self-conscious and brittle gentility of the new suburbs, the unfocused restlessness of postwar America. There are vivid snapshots of Adlai Stevenson and Marlon Brando, who wander in and out of the story, and this pearl, describing Wils's editor at the paper: ''fiftyish, saturnine, surly, always badly shaven, nursing a wildfire of a hangover." ''The trick," Wils tells his father, talking of his future, ''is to find something you know that no one else knows." There's no better prescription for a good novel.
John Hough Jr.'s most recent novel is ''The Last Summer."
