An Unfinished Season [Library Binding]

Ward S. Just (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2009

"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within." In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicago's North Shore, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his father's life unravels. Teddy Ravan -- gruff, unapproachable, secure in his knowledge of the world -- is confronting a strike and even death threats from union members who work at his printing business. Wilson, in the summer before college, finds himself straddling three worlds when he takes a job at a newspaper: the newsroom where working-class reporters find class struggle at the heart of every issue, the glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. These worlds collide when he falls in love with the headstrong daughter of a renowned psychiatrist with a frightful past in World War II. Tragedy strikes her family, and the revelation of secrets calls into question everything Wilson once believed.
From a distinguished chronicler of American social history and the political world, An Unfinished Season is a brilliant exploration of culture, politics, and the individual conscience.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Just's novels (Echo House; A Dangerous Friend; etc.) never exceed a tidy length. But they contain such a deep understanding of the long arm of history, the pernicious abuse of power and the folly of human nature that their intellectual and emotional weight should be measured in metaphorical tonnage. An assured chronicler of the American character, in his 14th novel Just returns to his own roots in the Midwest, examining the heartland as a state of mind. In the 1950s, narrator Wils Ravan's family lives in a Chicago suburb. At 19, about to graduate from high school, Wils is an observer of his parents' strained marriage and his father Teddy's stubborn resolve to defeat the union organizers behind the strike at his printing factory. Wils's summer job is as a copy boy at a Chicago tabloid, where he becomes aware of the routine corruption in city government and finds himself complicit in the yellow journalism that destroys reputations. On another level, he attends dozens of country club dances given for debutantes on the North Shore. At one of these events he meets Aurora Brule, the strong-willed daughter of a mysteriously aloof society psychiatrist, Jason "Jack" Brule, and they fall in love. Jack Brule, meanwhile, becomes the novel's most compelling character. Withdrawn, secretive, obsessive and "passionately coiled," he hides a harrowing memory that explodes at great cost. The summer's events leave Wils ruefully disillusioned and aware of his lost innocence, but committed to the social and ethical code that will guide his life. It's always a pleasure to read Just's prose—crisp and intelligent, animated by dry humor and by a realism that is too humane to be cynical. This novel, with its resonant questions about the class divisions that most Americans refuse to acknowledge, is one of his most trenchant works to date.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Just is a quintessential American writer whose penetrating yet elegant and atmospheric novels seek to decode watershed historic moments. In the prizewinning A Dangerous Friend (1999), he dramatizes the Vietnam War. Here he cycles back to the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the shift from family businesses to faceless corporations and captures the era's essence in a tight time frame: the nineteenth summer of Wilson Ravan, the only child of an increasingly anachronistic printing-plant owner. Wilson is eager to leave the uneasy enchantment of his parents' house on the edge of Chicago's affluent North Shore, but in the meantime he is learning about the wider world by working at a sleazy Chicago newspaper and by becoming involved with a thorny young woman whose famous psychiatrist father is burdened by horrific war memories. In a Fitzgerald-like take on one young man's abrupt awakening to the complexity and injustice of existence, Just masterfully evokes the bittersweet beauty of city and suburb, the immensity of solitude, the fortitude life requires, and death's ever-present shadow. And while his watchful hero thinks about how too much can be made of something, and too little, Just gets it exactly right. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 251 pages
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1439566062
• ISBN-13: 978-1439566060
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,185,197 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

WARD JUST is the author of fifteen previous novels, including the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Unequal Weight of Grief, June 24, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Unfinished Season: A Novel (Hardcover)

Ward Just's novel about the loss of innocence is the type of novel that can sneak up on a reader with its unassuming style and emotional power. Told in the steady voice of narrator Wils Ravan, AN UNFINISHED SEASON is set mostly in and around Chicago during the 1950's. Wils, who will soon enter the University of Chicago, spends his summer divided between working for a tabloid newspaper and attending the obligatory debutante balls: seersucker jacket by day, tux by night. These diversions, and the promise of leaving home for his own future at the end of the summer, make it easier for Wils to turn away from the troubled turn in his parents' marriage, something Wils can define only as "unequal grief". When at one of the dances Wils encounters a girl unlike those he has met before, he finds himself entering her world and leaving behind his own. Aurora Brule captures his heart, but it is her father Jack, a man who zealously guards his innermost demons, who haunts Wils long after the summer ends.

This surprising complex novel is only 250 pages long and yet it manages to weave in the political and historical atmosphere of the time, with the McCarthy hearings and tabloid journalism and the relative innocence of the upper class. It evokes a time when the country's own innocence was on the brink of disillusionment. Written without quotation marks, this book demands slightly more concentration that a more traditionally punctuated novel, but the confident language of Wils's voice makes it easy to navigate.

I highly recommend this novel for readers of literary fiction, especially those who like fiction in the style of Tobias Wolff's OLD SCHOOL. This intimate look into the turbulent summer of a teenage boy deserves a place on the bookshelves of serious readers.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Look of Things,The Look of The Past, The Conversations, October 2, 2005

By 

prisrob "pris," (New England USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: An Unfinished Season: A Novel (Paperback)

4.5 stars

"It did not seem to me that you could fashion a life until you could make the decisions that governed it" -- with a maturity and honest self-scrutiny that never were granted to, say, Holden Caulfield.", so says Ward Just. He has written a novel that requires much thought and introspection.

Wils Raven is on the cusp of adulthood. He remembers in first person that time, and he is speaking from a 60 year old memory. This is one of the first times Ward Just has written a novel in first person, but as he tells it, "it just came out that way, and it seemed the thing to do." Ward Just started his career as a journalist and soon graduated to the Washington Post, where he reported from Vietnam. He left journalism in 1969 and started his first novel. Since that time he has written 14 novels. This is the novel that was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Wils Raven is a child of privilege. His father owns a newsprint business; they go to the Country Club for golf, dinner and conversation. Wils is an only child. He is studious and not much of an athlete. His father was a renowned athlete, especially in hockey. He would come every evening in the winter, to the luxurious superb of Quarterday, outside of Chicago. He would chide Wils about his lack of athleticism. Wils has the summer to get to know himself better, and he decides he wants to work for a newspaper. H father, of course, has connections and helps Wils obtain his summer job. In-between his day job, he goes to many debutante balls, and it is at one of these that he meets his first love, Aurora. Aurora is fascinating, but so is her father, a well known psychiatrist who marched in the Baatan March and has never really been able to work through that. It appears that Wils is one of the few people that he has told about his time in the Army and that leave a mark in Wil's soul. Dr Jason Brule's death from his own hand changes the life that Wils has set for himself, He is in-between the cold war his parents have set for themselves, his life at the newspaper, the debutante balls and the pull he feels for the "regular" people he meets everyday at his job on the paper. How is he to work out the dramas of this summer? What will the relationship of all of these new people bring to change his life? We don't know. We can only see from the outside that a change is a'comin'. This is a well related story of a father, his son and the world that he enters in the Eisenhower years of the 1950's. Wils is a wounded spirit coming to terms.

Ward Just is a fascinating man. He has written 14 books, but is not as well known as he should be. He considers himself "undersold". "An Unfinished Season" is one of he best,
and he tells us "It goes without saying that most people think this book is deeply autobiographical, which it is not. The autobiographical parts about it are the things that I remember indelibly as if it happened yesterday. Not the dialogue. Not the people, but the look of things, the look of the dancers, and the kind of conversations that were going on. I remembered all of that pretty well." Highly Recommended. prisrob

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Novel W.A.S.P.s, July 12, 2006

By 

Dionne A. Wood (Parma Heights, OH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Unfinished Season: A Novel (Paperback)

Ward Just is a writer with few equals. He wrote for the Washington Post for many years, most notably as a Vietnam reporter in the seventies. Just successfully made the transition to fiction and hasn't turned back in some three decades.

An Unfinished Season is an exceedingly well crafted novel, set in Eisenhower era Chicago. The narrative is exact in the details it reveals, yet still spare enough to leave a reader guessing.

The reader is offered a rare inside glimpse of the North Shore W.A.S.P.s of Chicago, frozen in some ways like the cold midwest they inhabit. And frozen like the mysterious poor woman who appears throughout the book.

This is something of a coming of age novel, for both the main character, Wilson Ravan, and his father, Teddy Ravan. Wilson Ravan's unfinished season is the period after high school and before college - he's gotten a day job of sorts at a Chicago newspaper. It's here that he gleans the smutty stories he tells at the debutante balls he attends in the evenings. He experiences his first love and his first heartache.

Teddy Ravan's unfinished season is the end of his middle age years and possibly of his marriage - the reader never really finds out if the marriage is ending, or just settling in for the long haul to the twilight of the couple's years.

This novel is so tightly woven, it's difficult to dissect - and even after finishing it, one can't be sure of it. The reader is never completely let in, which is just as telling as what is learned. Just's prose is deeply symbolic without being corny.

This is a quiet, thoughtful book - highly recommended. A beautiful piece of work, and an affirmation of why I read fiction.