Miami Herald // An Unfinished Season by Ward Just
Houghton-Mifflin. 256 pages. $24.
Wils meets society, learns some secrets
Coming-of-age story is best in its depiction of older characters.
By Andrew Ervin
What the world needs now is not another coming-of-age story about over-privileged teenagers. Yet in his 14th novel, Ward Just manages to instill a bit of life into this tired genre and in doing so he stakes a legitimate claim for himself as a poor man's J.D. Salinger or a sober man's Richard Yates.
Just has a true gift for describing in intricate detail the bygone mores and manners of upper-crust society. He captures in full the prevailing spirit of post-World War II America in all its confusion and political fervor. Set in and around Chicago of the 1950s, An Unfinished Season focuses on 19-year-old narrator Wils Ravan, by day a lowly newspaper copy boy and by night a habitué of debutante balls and big-city jazz clubs. The omnipresent money consciousness finds expression in every black tie and stiff, neglected cocktail. Little is left to chance, and every detail adds to the acute sense of place.
It's Wils' last summer at home before going off to the University of Chicago. Of course there's a love interest: Aurora, the daughter of a wealthy psychiatrist with a terrible, terrible secret. She is preparing to move far away when summer's over, but maybe you guessed that already.
The novel would make a smashing little Masterpiece Theater series about the rise of the preppy class. Wils' father Teddy arranges a summer job for him at a newspaper -- cue the clichés of gruff, chain-smoking men pounding away at their typewriters -- and you can imagine the emotional devastation that follows after the young man accidentally shows up in the newsroom one day in the wrong attire. ''In my haste and confusion that morning I had mistakenly slipped into my dancing pumps, the ones with the little bow, and when I discovered what I had done I was already halfway to Chicago.'' It's around this time that you will begin to ask yourself why, exactly, you're expected to care about this kid.
The older characters come across better. Teddy Ravan deserves a novel of his own someday, or at least a discrete, poignant short story in The New Yorker. Teddy owns a printing business that is beset on all sides by union trouble. Where this novel succeeds, and in grand style no less, is in Ward's apparent use of the prolonged strike as a metaphor for World War II. ''No one wins a strike,'' Teddy tells his family on more than one occasion, and the same is true of warfare. His company never fully recovers from the labor dispute, and likewise it becomes clear that something drastic has changed in our country, if the anti-communist witch-hunts on television provide any indication.
After the strike, this novel -- perhaps like postwar America itself -- loses its way and begins to meander. Fortunately, Aurora's father, Jack Brune, arrives to pick up some of the slack. His past, which includes some perhaps questionable activities in the war, begins to haunt those around him, and he provides the novel's only real intrigue.
The moral of Just's story has something to do with the way the actions and inactions of the previous generation can affect the next one. If it was his intention to depict the so-called Greatest Generation parents as fountains of vast, untapped wisdom and the younger set as snotty, annoying brats, he has succeeded brilliantly. Wils Ravan is no Holden Caulfield and isn't meant to be, but if he weren't such a phony it would be easier to recommend spending time in his company.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Bloomington, Ill.
Wils meets society, learns some secrets
Coming-of-age story is best in its depiction of older characters.
By Andrew Ervin
What the world needs now is not another coming-of-age story about over-privileged teenagers. Yet in his 14th novel, Ward Just manages to instill a bit of life into this tired genre and in doing so he stakes a legitimate claim for himself as a poor man's J.D. Salinger or a sober man's Richard Yates.
Just has a true gift for describing in intricate detail the bygone mores and manners of upper-crust society. He captures in full the prevailing spirit of post-World War II America in all its confusion and political fervor. Set in and around Chicago of the 1950s, An Unfinished Season focuses on 19-year-old narrator Wils Ravan, by day a lowly newspaper copy boy and by night a habitué of debutante balls and big-city jazz clubs. The omnipresent money consciousness finds expression in every black tie and stiff, neglected cocktail. Little is left to chance, and every detail adds to the acute sense of place.
It's Wils' last summer at home before going off to the University of Chicago. Of course there's a love interest: Aurora, the daughter of a wealthy psychiatrist with a terrible, terrible secret. She is preparing to move far away when summer's over, but maybe you guessed that already.
The novel would make a smashing little Masterpiece Theater series about the rise of the preppy class. Wils' father Teddy arranges a summer job for him at a newspaper -- cue the clichés of gruff, chain-smoking men pounding away at their typewriters -- and you can imagine the emotional devastation that follows after the young man accidentally shows up in the newsroom one day in the wrong attire. ''In my haste and confusion that morning I had mistakenly slipped into my dancing pumps, the ones with the little bow, and when I discovered what I had done I was already halfway to Chicago.'' It's around this time that you will begin to ask yourself why, exactly, you're expected to care about this kid.
The older characters come across better. Teddy Ravan deserves a novel of his own someday, or at least a discrete, poignant short story in The New Yorker. Teddy owns a printing business that is beset on all sides by union trouble. Where this novel succeeds, and in grand style no less, is in Ward's apparent use of the prolonged strike as a metaphor for World War II. ''No one wins a strike,'' Teddy tells his family on more than one occasion, and the same is true of warfare. His company never fully recovers from the labor dispute, and likewise it becomes clear that something drastic has changed in our country, if the anti-communist witch-hunts on television provide any indication.
After the strike, this novel -- perhaps like postwar America itself -- loses its way and begins to meander. Fortunately, Aurora's father, Jack Brune, arrives to pick up some of the slack. His past, which includes some perhaps questionable activities in the war, begins to haunt those around him, and he provides the novel's only real intrigue.
The moral of Just's story has something to do with the way the actions and inactions of the previous generation can affect the next one. If it was his intention to depict the so-called Greatest Generation parents as fountains of vast, untapped wisdom and the younger set as snotty, annoying brats, he has succeeded brilliantly. Wils Ravan is no Holden Caulfield and isn't meant to be, but if he weren't such a phony it would be easier to recommend spending time in his company.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Bloomington, Ill.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
7/25/2004
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