'Forgetfulness' eloquently explores grief

Forgetfulness, By Ward Just, Houghton Mifflin, 258 pp., $25

Thomas Railles is an American painter who lives quietly in Aquitaine, near the Pyrenees. He and his French wife, Florette, have few visitors. Occasionally his oldest friends, Russ Conlon and Bernhard Sindelar, stay for a few days. Sometimes an art critic comes to interview him. And sometimes others show up, strangers, dressed officially, with briefcases and tape recorders. Thomas talks to them in his study. An hour later they leave.

Then one autumn evening Florette goes for a walk after dinner, leaving Thomas in the company of Russ and Bernhard. Her body is found, throat cut, the next day. The local police have little to go on. But Bernhard has other resources. He began his career in military intelligence and has pursued variations on that line of work ever since. He's confident he can find who killed Florette. "Trust me," Bernhard says to Thomas. "They're dead men."

But for Thomas the prospect of settling the score doesn't promise the closure his friend thinks it should: "Not one death or a hundred deaths, silent or noisy deaths, public or private deaths, could bring him consolation. . . . The dead had consolation for eternity, but the living went on living with the consequences of the lives they had made for themselves, and consolation didn't come into it."

"Forgetfulness" is a meditation on how one lives after the unthinkable has happened, on finding the balance between remembering and forgetting, on balancing the need for justice with the need to simply go on -- and on the question of whether justice is possible or even desirable.

For Thomas has to consider the possibility that he may be responsible for Florette's death. Years ago, he did freelance work for Bernhard's employers. Do a little sketch of one particular harbor on the French Riviera, he might be asked, and make sure you find out all you can about one yacht in particular. We know a gentleman, they might tell him another time, who wants his portrait painted. If you were to get the commission, we would like to know more about him. When is he at home? When does he leave? Perhaps Florette's death is payback for the unknown consequences of one of his odd jobs.

And as Thomas Railles learns to live with his memories and his guilty uncertainties, we see through his eyes others who are living with the consequences of the lives they made -- or that others made for them: Florette, who considered moving to Paris when she was young but never did; his elderly neighbor, St. John Granger, who walked away from the trenches of the Somme and never looked back; his old friend Russ, who has to endure the death of one of his children.

In a world dominated by the self-righteous, the confident, and the ambitious, Ward Just explores lives of ambiguity, doubt, and loss. His characters learn the art of compromise and tradeoff -- they are good people who learn the lies necessary to make life bearable.

And if for nothing else, ``Forgetfulness" should be prized for its evocation of grief -- not the shock and tears that immediately follow the moment of loss, but the dull, long pain that follows afterward: the empty nights and the ordinary afternoons when you mistakenly call out the name of someone no longer there.

``Forgetfulness" is an intellectual and emotional marvel of a book.