Customer Reviews

Twenty-One: Selected Stories

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In the autumn there is a special stiff atmosphere to Illinois small towns. A narrator functioned as a driver in his father's quest to be lieutenant governor. They were shunned by the gubernatorial candidate because they were losing. The campaign manager left and the advance men joined other campaigns. Tom Lewis, the son, now middle-aged, is a U.S. Congressman. His seat is safe. In his hideaway office there is the New York Edition of Henry James. To be a Congressman he was compelled to give up his artist female friend, Jo.

Marshall, Harry and Jan are traveling in France. Jan and Marshall go to Germany. Returning to Paris, they learn that Harry has gone to Cyprus. A woman journalist, Paige, from North Carolina has a patron. In various war zones journalists behave like a large unruly family. She asks what is the difference between sex and violence, ecstasy and fear. Mostly she keeps her fear to herself. In her eighth year she learns her parents are separating after forty years of marriage. An English journalist is highly reckless. He has a sense of limitless possibility. He drifts out of her life. In Africa she is in the hospital. She can pay. The bed is hers. Journalists visit her.

Flaubert gives a Congressman his taste for politics. He is forty. He has been in the House since age 28. Burns, a state department employee, a linguist, is being loaned to the CIA. His first year at Langley is disagreeable. In his spare time Burns played backgammon as a substitute for diplomacy.

A Senator's press relations are handled by Gloria Noone. Fatalism has served the Senator well in politics. He hired Noone when she was precise about Iowa having seven districts. The task at hand is to prepare a statement concerning his marital separation.

A medal of honor winner states that after action reports are only half right. He is a captain. He claims his wife understands that his job is soldiering. Changes of administration sweep out government lawyers and even have impact on the private firms. A man named Paul Candler is, as he says, trying to get back into the game. Formerly he was counsel to the president. The office in the proposed firm is only one third the size of the one he had previously. Habits die hard.

Connor was a magazine journalist. His wife was French and had a sense of order. He was transferred to a war zone. The zone resembled a prison. She had dinner parties. Then she left to return to Paris. He is able to spend two years stationed in London, but the marriage has failed. He believes the result would have been different with children.

In another story there is a woman journalist in a war zone who has fallen in love with a fellow journalist. Mention is made of works by Henry James, Flaubert, and others. She goes away and upon her return something is wrong. In the hyper stimulating scene of war he has forgotten her. A man travels with nothing but Walter Lippmann's A PREFACE TO MORALS. He and a friend avoid hotel bars and play bridge. A war zone is a neurotic's refuge. A character's life is enlarged and grows in harmony with the war. Eventually a man who reports on the war and writes to his children frees himself of facts all together.

Stories are set in Washington D.C., war zones, Boston, the Midwest, and Vermont-- the Northeast Kingdom. The stories in the latter half of the book hold more interest than those at the beginning. Formerly I preferred the political stories, but now I have come to enjoy the others.

Ward Just has taken the simplistic, often sparse, journalistic writing style and combined it with the ability to sense what lies behind the surface of normal people's lives (although these people are often seen in an extraordinary situation or enlightenment). What this produces is a collection of short stories that effortlessly place you within the text and brings you to an epiphanous recognition of your own, as well as, human nature's, tendencies.