Customer Reviews

Exiles in the Garden

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First of all, the book jacket and the Amazon blurb describing the book are incredibly superficial. They don't say at all what this book is about.

Enough rant. Anyway, structurally, this book is as complex as they come, with flash-backs and flash-forwards within each other, and changes in time and place coming without notice. However, the big-picture story is always the same, just being told from another perspective and at a different time. I was left with the feeling I was in the company of a master story-teller, who decided to drop his main narrative for a while in order to explain an earlier thing or two before proceeding. It works, and I was captivated. Part of my interest came from the fact that by accident, I am familiar with many of the settings of the book--New York, Washington, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Maine (yes, the story does move around...), and I like the way the author caught the essence of all of them.

The plot consists of a number of interwoven and interdependent stories. Each story per se is not terribly special. Boy meets girl, marries her, endures personal and professional difficulties, and gets on with his life. Girl immigrates to the U.S., meets boy and marries him, but still longs for the old country, eventually finds her bliss. Fathers have children, then adventures, and finally resolution. That's all ok, but taken individually not terribly uplifting or unique. The interactions among the different plot lines are fascinating, though, and combine together to create a wonderfully intricate story.

What makes the book special, besides the structural fireworks that are fun to observe, is the way it brings out the conflicts that most of us feel at one time or another. The old and familiar vs. the new and exciting. Thinking and reflecting vs. acting without thinking or reflecting. Freedom of thought and speech vs. freedom of action. Above all, the book is about the price we pay for our freedoms, whatever they are. Every main character has freedoms and acts on them, but each pays a heavy price for the freedoms he or she enjoys. To say much more might spoil the book for some, so I'll just conclude with the thought that this is a well-written and excellent book.

Everyone is wounded in his or her own way in this very adult, highly pensive new novel by Ward Just. As the book opens, Alec, a Washington photographer, is at the bedside of his father, the long-nosed, multi-term power broker Senator, who is dying. We learn right away that his marriage has ended: Lucia, born Czech but raised in wartime Switzerland, ran off years ago with a dashing Hungarian with a strong sense of purpose. We also learn that Lucia had a limp, the result of a ski accident that left her partially maimed.

And Alec? He is the only one who has not suffered broken bones or scars, it seems, but he DOES suffer from macular degeneration -- an inability to see clearly. There is subtle symbolism in nearly every page of this masterfully-written novel.

The novel soars when it focuses squarely on the marriage of Alec and Lucia in the 1960s; a town with a powerful social structure, a sense of glamor and excitement with JFK at the helm. Lucia is particularly intrigued by the mysterious emigre couple next door; Alec differs, believing they are "damaged goods, a second-rate theatrical troupe giving nightly performances of the heartbreak of central Europe."

But things change quickly. The couple moves away, and another couple move in -- loud lawyers who tear down part of the garden to build a tennis court. JFK gives way to LBJ and then Nixon. Alec and Lucia move to a bigger house and Lucia moves overseas, leaving him for a chance of a more authentic life with her Hungarian. And Alec? He lives on, avoiding conflict, keeping as far as he can from the Washington scene, living his life the best he can on the sidelines. That is, until, decades later, he comes face to face with Lucia's mysterious father, who was imprisoned first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, risking his life and abandoning his family for his ideology.

This subtle and well-written book demands concentration from the reader. But the questions it asks are timeless: "When do we become exiles in our own life? Is there true honor in turning down the opportunities for adventure to remain true to oneself? Are we foreigners ourselves in our own country?" I particularly enjoyed the inside look at Washington at a time when everything was changing.

Ward Just's newest novel, Exiles in the Garden, follows the life of Alec Malone, a photographer in Washington D.C. Sentimental, yet political, this story and writing are worth the read.

+4
- The characters in this story are honest and intelligent. Alec stays true to himself, not changing for his father, mother, wife Lucia or his employers. While his decisions to never compromise result in loneliness and a sense of professional longing, he does his best to move forward, starting when we meet him in his twenties until the end of the novel when he is in his seventies. The women in his life, Lucia, Annalise and daughter Mathilde, are ambitious and determined to make their lives their own. Lucia's father Andre is the perfect foil for Alec, their few, intense conversations making this painfully obvious to the main character. While all of the characters may not be likable, they definitely have depth. This novel is driven more by character than plot.
- I appreciated the shifts in point of view the novel takes. A majority of it is told from the perspective of Alec, but occasionally the narrative thread will follow either Lucia or Annalise, allowing the reader insight into why they make the decisions they make.
- Just makes use of his political and historical background, effortlessly educating the reader on Washington's culture.
- The ending is realistic and appropriate.
- Doesn't rely on flashy wit or pop-culture; good old-fashioned writing.

-1
- The novel was a little difficult to get into; get past the first thirty pages and it picks up.
- Occasionally passages seem to ramble on with excess descriptions. They are well written, I just found them tedious at times.

This isn't a quick, easy read. It's not full of Washington scandal or sex, it's a novel built on two characters and how what they loved drove them apart.

In "Exiles in the Garden," Alec Malone is a sailor adrift in his own life. Though he sails in calm waters, all around him the people he loves are battling the storms of their lives. Does this make him less than he should be, could have been? Son of a famous senator, Alec has willfully abandoned the dream his parents had for him, to pursue public service, and instead becomes a newspaper photographer. Yet even his commitment to this profession is lackluster. When presented with the opportunity to cover the war in Vietnam, he refuses, not wanting to give "beauty" to violence through his photographic images.

Yet Malone is fascinated by those who throw themselves into political melees, whether it's his father making back door deals in his Senate office or the exiles sharing their vociferous views on political life, who gather for cocktails next door to the Malone household in Georgetown. Even his wife, Lucia, and her background as the child of a Socialist mother and anti-Fascist father, is a mystery to Alec.

The crux of the story comes in the final third of the book, which author Ward Just has well prepared his readers for. It's the unlikely meeting (foreshadowed years earlier) of Alec and Andre Duran (Lucia's father, who left the family when she was only three). The meeting is even more unlikely because at this point, Alec and Lucia have long been living separate lives on different continents. And unlikely because Duran is living (much like the exiles in the garden) in a rooming house with other exiles in Washington. An elderly man at the end of his life at that point, he wants to meet his daughter Lucia, and she brings Alec along for support.

Through the specter of Andre's life story, Alec lays out his own life for comparison. It's a sizing up of what those around him have chosen for themselves and what Alec has elected by contrast. The evaluation is left up to the reader. Does a life fully engaged in the tides of history make for a better person, or simply another way to live?

The author asks this and many other questions, and leaves readers to evaluate for themselves. Not only does he write with a sharp eye toward human failings, but he writes with an intelligence that speaks to the best in his readers, challenging them to give sincere thought to the dilemmas he presents in his fiction. Having lived for years in Washington, his portrayal of not only the climate of politics, but the nature of the city (its focus, drive, and social milieu) is aptly conveyed in his story line. Author Ward Just mixes the personal and political in an interesting way toward an even greater end. Few writers can match his skill.

Ward Just has produced yet another subtle novel for grownups, particularly grownups who live in a capital city but have opted out of its primary business, politics.

Just is a master of construction. The novel is made from a complex set of flashbacks, inner observation, re-entrant structures, etc, that are a wonder to observe but do not interfere with the narrative drive.

The main theme of the book is, I think, the contrast between living a private life and a life of political adventure and involvement. Alec, the viewpoint character, is a lifelong observer - he is a professional photographer and a good one. His father was a senator, and his wife's father was some kind of political hero/actor. Without spoiling the narrative, I can tell you that we see Alec struggling quietly with what makes a life worthwhile in the light of his father, his wife's father, and his politically-involved neighbors. The crux of the novel comes toward the end, in a series of unexpected meetings.

Even his daughter chooses to take part in the action in a way that Alec never does. But Alec has his life, and it is one that many might envy.

Do you envy Alec? Read the book and find out. If you're a writer you will definitely envy Ward Just's skill.

A few reviewers have opined that the book is dull. Perhaps subtlety moves across the line into dullness for them. I didn't see it that way, and I'm betting that you won't either. If you want more action, go read a spy thriller or something.

This is a novel about living life, not just the dramatic moment.

Ward Just is the author of fifteen previous novels, three collections of short stories, a play and two works of non-fiction. His most recent novel was the justly praised Forgetfulness, a novel so good that I bought two copies of it (though by accident).

Well into Exiles, Alex gets a letter from his wife, Lucia. She has written from Europe to tell him she is leaving him for good. Swiss-born, she's never felt anchored in Alec's Washington (DC). Now she's met a man, a European intellectual who makes her feel, she writes, as though her life is contained within, tied together by, a "red thread" that gives it shape and meaning.

All of Alec's life, he has suffered a delicate malaise of disconnection. He has never felt bound by such a thread.

Any novel worth its salt about Washington touches on politics but in this novel, politics sets the stage --is scenery-- setting but not substance. Alec grew up with politics, his father a five-time senator, but Alec has rejected his father's life just as, later on, as a photographer for a Washington-based newspaper (the Post?), he turns down an offer to go to Vietnam to photograph a war he doesn't believe in. Alec may wonder if he has been brave enough in his life, but he has consistently refused to inflate the value of things he doesn't believed in (like the war) and has lived the penalty for his refusal.

His life with Lucia began unravelling when foreigners --exiles-- moved in next door to his house. Lucia became a fixture at their nightly soirees and Alec didn't, and the distance in interests and enthusiasms between them drove a wedge between them. Alec loses Lucia. He continues with his life. He leaves the newspaper, he gains transitory fame as a photographer of actors, acting and films. He meets, and becomes a uncommitted but lifetime partner with, a class B film actress.

His former life -life with Lucia--intrudes when Lucia discovers that her long lost father, an old-style European revolutionary, is in a nursing home in Washington. Lucia doesn't even remember her father: he deserted her mother and her when she was three. She asks Alec to go meet him. Alec does.He finds himself fascinated by a man who has had no hesitations in making bold choices in his life. Why? What's the difference between the life of an Alec and an Andre (Lucia's father's name)? Just doesn't offer any easy answers in this extraordinary short novel, only a nuanced picture of a man struggling to make sense of his own, not someone else's, life.

As always in Ward Just's writing, the book is filled with absolutely on the mark details ("A steward, immaculate in white, served drinks in long glasses to three girls sunning themselves on the foredeck. When the girls raised their hands to receive the drinks, their arms curved like swans' necks. The steward carefully placed a long glass in each and backed away, a priest at the altar." pp. 167-8) and small, sly truths ("Kim Malone once said that in the United States Senate pomposity was a sacrament. You didn't necessarily treasure it but you missed its absence." p. 223).

I like this summation of Alec's life, on. P. 238: "In life, as in golf, you played against the course, not your opponent. ... Alec supposed that he could be described as having had a sidelines sort of life, peaceable for the most part. Wasn't it Orwell who observed that pacifism was a respectable ideas so long as you were willing to accept the consequences?"

This is a subtle novel that doesn't embrace a simple solution or truth. It is also exquisitely written. But that's almost a given in any novel written by Ward Just.

This rather subdued novel, set in Washington DC during the Bush II era while looking back at lives and life in the Kennedy/Johnson years, focuses on Alec Malone, a seventy-year-old photographer, who almost daily visits his dying father Kim in an exclusive Virginia hospital, who is a former US Senator of nine terms and a mover and shaker during FDR's presidency. It is during these visits that Alec reviews his life of forty years ago, while his father drifts in and out.

In the present, Alec's life consists of "a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA tour." He leads a "chamber-music sort of life except for the Wagnerian reveries" - lengthy reveries not being an uncommon indulgence on his part. But the fact is that Alec has always been frustratingly cautious and passive in the eyes of his parents, co-workers/journalists, and most importantly his long since departed wife Lucia.

Forty years prior in the mid-1960s, Alec on assignment to photograph the Swiss ambassador is taken by his au pair, the very attractive Lucia, though with a slight limp. She, being a Czech escapee from Hitler as a little girl in WWII, is at first content with the security that Alec provides. But the European exile community that Lucia meets in the garden of the next-door home of a shadowy count and countess intrigues Lucia. They were, to her, "rootless and unsettled" and, though "dangerous to others because they had so little to lose," smart and invigorating, but, to Alec, they were merely a "second-rate theatrical troupe giving nightly performances of the heartbreak of central Europe." It wasn't long before Lucia left for Switzerland with one of them, Nikolas Janos, an intense writer from Hungary.

At about the time his father dies, Alec meets Lucia's father Andre Duran, who mysteriously turns up in a Washington hostel after being thought dead for over sixty years. Alec is forced to confront his father-in-law's story of being a leader of brutal resistance fighting in Europe and subsequent confinement in horrendous prison camps for twenty years in contrast to his own refusal to accept a combat photographer's role in Vietnam. Even his father's willingness to engage in the rough and tumble world of Washington politics and his ex-wife's fearless skiing resulting in a mangled leg stand in marked contrast to his life.

The book is a subtle look at choices that we all make - often involuntarily. In addition the nuances of Washington political and social life are explored, especially in terms of the views and participation of expatriates. Despite the absence of significant action, the book is an easy read. Yet there is a certain vagueness, maybe emptiness. Alec lets his devoted girl friend of many years, actress Annalise Amiral, slip away; Lucia disappears to Switzerland; and Andre only appears briefly towards the end. It's definitely not the most cheerful book of the year.

This is a complex book and one I doubt I could have appreciated if I were under 35. You simply have to have a lot of life experience under the belt in order for the book to resonate. There are multiple layers of nostalgia, introspection, and re-weighting of life events through older, wiser eyes (one young reviewer said it felt like "work" and she was only reading for pleasure -- I imagine it could feel like work if you didn't have a reserve of memories to tie to the pages). Larger than life parents become too real/fragile; lovers become learning experiences, children become "other" people. Given the weightiness of it, the book is surprisingly never gloomy, but it is laced with melancholy throughout. About midway through I thought: he's kind of the male Anita Brookner. And so, we get those kind of distilled feelings and thoughts rendered with a masculine touch. A keeper.

Alec Malone, a photographer, lives alone. He has routines. Kim Malone, his father, a former Senator, was loyal to the institution of the Senate. When Alec was young he refused his editor's suggestion to go to Vietnam. His interest was not politics.

Roses grow splendidly in Washington's climate. When Alec's wife Lucia arrived in Washington from Zurich, Washington, in the days of Kennedy, had glamour. Lucia's mother had been a professor of European history. She believed the small vigorous nations were fundamental to European culture. She said American was barbarian and Prague fraternal. Lucia was three years old when she left Prague.

A count and countess, Paul and Marie, lived next door to the newly married Alec and Lucia in Georgetown. People at the parties of Paul and Marie spoke of Walter Benjamin, The parties had exiles in attendance. The exiles claimed they had been on the wrong side of the world. They called themselves gastarbeiter, guest workers.

In 1967 Paul and Marie returned to their house in Kleinwalsertal. The following year Alec and Lucia decided their daughter Mathilde needed a larger room and moved. After vacationing for a month in Switzerland Lucia sought a separation from Alec. Her new friend had been one of the exiles in the garden, a person who attended the parties of Paul and Marie.

Later Alec meets Annalise in Annapolis. Working in films, Judy Jones had become Annalise Amiral.

This novel is romantic. The view of history embodied in the work is cosmopolitan, expansive. The characters are of sufficient interest to capture the reader's attention. The craft of the writer is evident.

Exiles in the Garden is a very good political/historical novel set in Washington, D.C. The interesting characters are fully developed and the dialogue is appropriate and sophisticated. The main characters are all exiles for different reasons who share common threads. Each actor is removed from something important by the contexts of history, and each player attempts to understand and communicate a personal story.

For some characters, the context of their stories is the attack on their country (particularly Czechoslovakia) that in their minds forced them to act; their decisions were involuntary. For members of a younger generation, it was their parents who were affected by political change, and memories of changes in ways of life are second-hand, sketchy, and idealized. The need for action is ambiguous and voluntary for this group.

Andre and Alec represent the two generations and provide a point/counterpoint of personal wartime decisions. Andre's story is one of heroism in Czechoslovakia while the younger Alec's story appears to be one of lack of professionalism related to Vietnam. The little stories these two characters tell each other show a global perspective even though they have relatively narrow views of the whole historical context. It does not really matter what the two characters say but rather the peace of mind brought on by the communications.

Readers will enjoy Ward Just's novel. It focuses mainly on life reviews of the aging characters as they try to come to some absolute truth about their cultures. Andre and Alec demonstrate that this is not possible and that people benefit most from life reviews that are ultimately enigmas not absolutes. Readers learn the key to ending life with Erikson's notion of "ego integrity" rather than "despair" is to take pleasure and comfort in personal/historical enigmas. A good novel to read after Exiles in the Garden is Prague by Arthur Phillips (see my review on Amazon).