Customer Reviews

Forgetfulness

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Which has done more to retard the upward progress of humankind, nationalism or religious fundamentalism? Both exert their malign influence in Ward Just's masterful new novel. This story of post 9/11 America is told in a refracted way that brings in subtle truths, sets them down, and gives you space to absorb them.

Thomas Railles is a portrait painter of some renown, an American expatriate living with his French wife Florette in a small village high in the Pyrenees. One autumn Sunday Florette goes out for a walk while Thomas entertains Bernhard and Russ, two old chums from his Wisconsin boyhood. She's found in the woods the following morning with her throat slit.

Bernhard and Russ work for one of America's intelligence agencies. While Thomas reels with shock, Bernhard calls in some chits from his French counterparts, who soon bring four Moroccan Arabs into custody. The French think the four men slipped across the Spanish border into France to carry out a terrorist mission. They murdered Florette because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bernhard brings Thomas to Le Havre to watch their interrogation. Thomas has no interest in the Moroccans' politics; he only wants to know what happened to his wife and why. Thomas asks for and gets permission to spend time alone with Yusef, the group's leader. What occurs between Thomas and Yusef in the interrogation room provides an unexpected and profound moral center to the story.

Thomas knew an old Spanish communist who introduced him to the German word "lebensluge," which translates as "the lie that makes life bearable." For the Spaniard, it was the belief that Communism is moral, even if the men who practice it aren't. For Russ and Bernhard, it's that American know-how and righteousness will force the world back into its proper alignment. For Antoine, the French interrogator who becomes Thomas' friend, it's the importance of doing things in the proper way, being "comme il faut." For Thomas, it's believing that a return to painting will get him past Florette's death.

Drinking doesn't dull Thomas' pain. Work doesn't lead to normalcy. Bringing the four terrorists to justice, so important to Bernhard, seems irrelevant. What finally offers redemption to Thomas are particularity and patience - making the effort to see the unique humanity of other people, even your enemies, and having the patience to find and inhabit small moments of grace when the world makes them available. Just offers this up as a more courageous path than the hollow machismo and expedient morality of Bernhard and the current US political leaders that he serves.

This is the wisest book I've read about the true ramifications of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Just gives us adult talk about the damage done when the world regresses to primitive, bloodthirsty tribalism. You can choose to meet it head on, inflicting more damage, or choose to retreat from its burgeoning evil. Either way you're diminished, and there's no clear path back to where you were before.

I haven't read any other novels by Ward Just. I can't recommend this one highly enough. If this is the level at which he writes, I'm eager to read more.

This novel succeeds beautifully in the opening scenes; Florette, suffering from a broken ankle due to a Sunday walk gone bad, is slowly freezing at the base of the Pyrenees. These opening pages get into her mind as she drifts in and out of time, recalling her life and wondering about the four strange men are who have half-heartedly come to her rescue, or what at first apears to be a rescue. Just's descriptions of the little things in Florette's memories are so vivid, you can feel the cold air coming over the mountains. Unfortunately, once Florette's story is done (and she exits the tale all too soon), I found the novel less captivating. There are later bright spots with the memories of the neighbor, Sir Thomas Granger, but Granger is also dead, having passed away soon before the story begins, and we have a novel where the dead are more interesting than the living. The main character of the story is Thomas, Florette's husband, an American expatriate, sometime espionage agent and one of the most passive characters to come along in some time.

When Just's novel focuses on the everyday effects of loss, it's devastating and moving. The story is much less successful at conveying American's attitudes in the contemporary world. Though the novel takes place within the past year (a mention of the London subway bombings provides this clue), many of the American characters have an immediate post-9/11 mindset and, sadly, seem to be possessed of one mind. The dialogue in these sections is clunky, forced and doesn't sound anything like the way real people speak. Obviously Just does know how to write dialogue as he shows us in other sections of the book; it's when he's trying to show us contemporary response to events that Just fails, as if he can't quite make it seem natural - and that's because it isn't. There are characters that seem to come from central casting, such as the Wisconsin policeman who says, "You'd better be on your way" and a Pennsylvania matron who, as much as I tried to think otherwise, came across as a Judi Dench character with an American accent. I was very captivated by the French village where the main characters lives, but now wonder if that may ring as falsely with the French as the American characters did with me.

This book is an interesting entry into the current cultural and political climate, but not a wholly satisfying one.

This book finds sixtyish Thomas Railles, an expatriate, a portrait artist, and sometimes participant in intelligence work for the US, living in a small French village in the Pyrenees with Florette, his French-born wife of five years. But his relaxed life takes an abrupt hit as Florette does not come back from a typical walk and is found the next day frozen to death with her throat slit.

One might think that the book would mainly consist of tracking down the perpetrators and imposing a suitable punishment. But Thomas is a man that is more accepting of life's turns, seeking to understand rather than exact revenge. The book is largely composed of Thomas' reflections and observations of life, where forgetfulness is both a positive and negative factor.

Thomas' artistic eye enables him to notice nuances in people whether it is the reclusive old gentleman living next door on the mountain, the village café operator, or the alleged perpetrator of the crime against his wife as he is being interrogated by the French intelligence service.

The book moves slowly - fortunately it is rather short - yet it never drags. Thomas' recalling of his past life from his boyhood in Wisconsin, to his life as a struggling artist in New York City, to his painting of a Spanish rebel as an exercise in intelligence gathering - all of these scenes interleaved with reflections on the present take the reader on a journey of understanding the subtleties of life right along with Thomas.

"Forgetfulness" is told through the eyes of a wife first and then her surviving husband. Frenchwoman Florette goes walking on the Pyrenean mountain out her back door, and the first chapter is her stream of consciousness as one bad break leads to another and another (reminding one of Jack London's "To Build a Fire"). In a novel that is usually emotionally muted, her meandering thoughts singularly singe the reader.

When we join painter, retired CIA dabbler and displaced American Thomas Railles; widower already, he seems the typical cut-off-from-his-feelings male. He too, in accustomed Ward Just methodology, ponders many things in jumbled succession, including his wife, but somehow stays curiously detached. Yet it is this detachment that builds in Thomas a "forgetfulness." He cannot, or will not, feed anger toward the Moroccan men -- terrorists perhaps -- who stand accused of killing his wife.

Antoine, the official interrogator of those men, converses with Thomas at one point and states bluntly he doesn't think Thomas has a conscience because Thomas doesn't care what happens to the men. Antoine wants to know whether Thomas believes in justice, without which a society cannot function. Antoine says dealing with terrorists requires a strong stomach, patience, and attention to detail. Not to mention a "certain ideology" by which he means "anger." He says, "The common denominator of all ideology" is anger. "A belief in the righteousness of your cause and the squalor of all other causes." He continues, "It's not for everybody. You need an excellent memory. You must never, ever forget. Forgetfulness leads to --" Thomas interjects, "Forgiveness?" "No not that. Do you think so?" "No, I don't." And so it is."Forgetfulness" is not about forgiveness. "Forgetfulness" explores a man who is acquiescent or complacent or practically fatalistic in attitude rather than truly forgiving.

Later, another character, Victoria, with whom Thomas isn't well acquainted (and earlier found he preferred not to be) talks to him in a reflective moment about her recently deceased centenarian great uncle who was also Thomas' neighbor and who deserted the British Army after wholesale slaughter on a famous World War I battlefield. She quietly observes, "There's a statute of limitations on everything.... I can't fix what Granger did any more than I can change the course of the stars in their heavens. So I decided to let it go. Does that make sense to you?" Thomas says yes it does. And Victoria says she thought it would.

Many conversations take place throughout the book, but quotation marks don't distinguish them from the rest of the text (quotation marks used in this review do not appear in the novel). Their noticeable banishment infuses additional passivity into the novel -- a kind of symbolic supposition that fate can't be victoriously battled against. Not only Thomas, but Antoine and Granger, as well as his two lifelong friends, Russ and Bernhard, all performed service to their countries in ways that cut their souls. And all decayed in some way or another along with the world embalming them live. Russ though is the one whose humanity spills out most affectingly when he suffers a tragedy that causes him to sob and choke while he is on the phone with Thomas. There, another significant ribbon of emotion -- after Florette's foreword -- chokes up the reader.

In the end however, "Forgetfulness" is not a proposition that nihilistic or existential acceptance are all there is. Ward Just demonstrates a belief, through Thomas, in a basic human optimism whatever the circumstances. For Thomas sees in a simple, unexpected and rather poetic event "a moment that approache[s] the miraculous, a moment worth remembering." But it is an almost tacked-on realization, not the fruit of the entire novel's consideration.

In this era, terrorism and its consequences suffuse public and private discussion, emotions, and acts more than we'd like. "Forgetfulness" meditates on the different moral and philosophical approaches that people can take in reaction to violence of this kind. Florette says to Thomas shortly after 2001, when she finds out he had in earlier times done odd jobs for American intelligence, that she doesn't want them to be a part of the American war on terror. And he assures he they won't be. It is promise he cannot keep because he doesn't control the necessary elements -- other people. Ward Just, an author gifted with precise and awesome wordsmith talents, takes his readers convincingly into the remains of a man's life after his most important promise is in shreds. It is a Just trip very worth taking.

Four and a half stars.

This weekend, I read and finished two beautiful books, both fiction: Nancy Culpepper, by Bobby Ann Mason, and Forgetfulness, by Ward Just, both published in 2006.

Ward Just usually but not always writes about Washington and about the kind of people who decide our lives for us without asking us how we want them decided. I've read three of his earlier novels and his collection of short stories, The Senator Who Loved Balzac. They're all really good. In narrative focus and empathy, Ward Just belongs in a family with three other fine American novelists of life and manners among the privileged: John Updike, Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley.

Just keeps getting better.

For the most part, Forgetfulness is set in France, the protagonist an expatriate American, a painter who has done odd jobs for the CIA in the past and still is connected through childhood friends to the agency. In his late fifties, Thomas retire to a secluded valley town in the Pyrenees(?) to paint. He meets and marries Florette, a spirited Frenchwoman, and they live happily together. One evening, while Thomas is talking with two boyhood friends who are visiting for the day, Florette goes hiking in the mountains. She falls, breaks her ankle. She is discovered by four Arab men who are passing through on clandestine business. They carry her part way down the mountain, then leave her in the freezing snow, then slit her throat and disappear.

Most of the novel is about Thomas's efforts to come to terms with her absence and the fact of her murder. When the French capture the men who killed Florette, Thomas is permitted to listen in on their interrogation. His part in the interrogation over, Thomas returns home and buries himself in his painting. But eventually, he returns to America after more than twenty(?) years away --France has been taken away from him by his memories.

Foprgetfulness is a subtle novel of character. That's nothing new for Just, although he does it exceptionally well each time. Some of his passages take your breath away! But this novel explores new themes, and for the first time in Just's writing --as far as I know-- he addresses a world that includes, indeed is shaped by, terrorism.

I'd never read anything by Ward Just before and forget how I came to order this (I have a backlog of new books purchased over the past several months). This novel was engrossing and beautifully written. An artist loses his wife - possibly due to his own past foray into the "spy" business, possibly due to chance and random misfortune. The novel explores dualities - America vs. France, artist vs. government agent, country vs. city, forgiveness vs. vengeance - in a fresh and truthful way. The protagonist feels real and fleshed out, and his thoughts and decisions seem to spring organically from a mix of his character and the untenable situation in which he finds himself. Very highly rated.

This is the first book I've read by Ward Just. He is a wonderful writer. I had to adjust to the pace of his writing -- slow and deliberate -- but it is wonderful to see how he writes about a man, and a nation, and a world gone wrong all at the same time, without any sense or contrivance.

This is the story we must tell of our times, I think; not the story of nations or of terrorists or of wars, but stories of people living their lives in the swirl of contemporary events.

Not, perhaps, a great novel, but a novel of great decency and strong writing.

I have known of Ward Just and his writing for decades, but Forgetfulness is my first experience of reading Just's work, which goes all the way back to 1970. It was a great place to start, because this is an absolutely beautiful book. The jacket copy speaks of it as being about the "shadow world" of espionage and international intrigue, but Forgetfulness goes so far beyond that in its language and artistry. Early on in the narrative, protagonist Thomas Railles, a former CIA "odd-jobber," says something that perhaps characterizes a deeper theme of this exquisite novel -

"Facts anchor the work, whatever it is you're composing, a picture or a piece of music or a novel or a poem. But memory has to anchor the facts, alas. And so I fall short ..."

Ward Just, who I have been told lives part of the time in France, where most of this novel takes place, never falls short, whether in facts or memory. On the same page, shortly thereafter, Thomas calls forgetfulness "the old man's friend." And as the story gracefully unfolds, one begins slowly to understand why he might feel that way, because this is a story not so much about CIA operatives or part-time odd-jobbers or murder and methods of torture and inquistion as it is a probing look at loss, sadness and regret. Thomas Railles is a painter, and a good one, recognized and respected in the international art world, and, if all of the details given here of sketching and painting are any indication, I would not be surprised to learn that Just too is a painter, and one who knows that the line between various artistic endeavors is often a very thin or blurred one.

"To some degree," Just writes of his portraitist protagonist, "all portraits were self-portraits, as all novels were to some degree autobiographical ... A visage was sometimes true or false at the same time, the natural affect of a hundred brushstrokes or a dozen rewrites. Autobiography resided in the style of compostition and from that the viewer could conclude whatever he wished or nothing at all."

Whatever he is, War Just is not, at least in his art, forgetful. This guy knows what he's doing and can create powerful scenes that look easy, like the one in which Railles, still grieving the loss of his wife, murdered in a chance encounter with terrorists, is caught in a sudden storm and turns to face the elements, raising "his walking stick, brandishing it like a medieval warrior in combat with a dragon or other supernatural phenomenon." Shades of Shakespeare's King Lear!

Forgetfulness is a book which shows a writer at the peak of his creative powers. Ward Just could perhaps be called, at least chronologically, that "old man" he describes herein, but "forgetfulness" has not yet become a serious problem. This is a wonderful story, and I will recommend it highly. And I'll also be reading more of Ward Just soon! - Tim Bazzett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

This splendid novel rings especially true with this aging reviewer, who finds himself ever more likely to seek clues to the significance of current events and personalities in his recollections of the past. And of course, Thomas Railles, being the artist he is, has a facility for especially vivid recollections of his late wife and friends, as well as the two hometown pals currently bedeviling him.

The book is not the best choice for those who favor slam-bang action, with the protagonists zipping about the world in pursuit of whatever it is, followed by a dramatic shootout to wrap up all loose ends. Those sorts of books are fun, but not what this is by any means.

Ward Just might be the greatest living American writer. However, this is not one of his best books (more specifically, it is not in the same class as "Unfinished Season" or "Echo House"). Where in his other books, the character's introspection and reflections on the past lead to a fuller understanding of life, the protagonist's musings in this book seem self-absorbed and disconnected.