An Unfinished Season: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ Ward Just (Author) "THE WINTER of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago..." (more)
Key Phrases: North Shore, Jack Brule, New York (more...)

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 Withdrawn, secretive, obsessive and "passionately coiled," he hides a harrowing memory that explodes at great cost.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.
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From The Washington Post

In the three and a half decades since the publication of his first novel, A Soldier of the Revolution, Ward Just has established himself as one of the most accomplished and admirable American writers of his time. With An Unfinished Season, he puts an exclamation point on that. Whether it is actually his best novel can be debated -- I have a soft spot for A Family Trust (1978) -- but there can be no doubt that it is on all counts a splendid piece of work: leisurely in pace and meditative in tone, as is much of Just's writing, but also emotionally freighted, witty and sophisticated, and powerfully evocative of both the time (the early 1950s) and the place (Chicago) in which it is set.

Now in his late sixties, Just has published 14 novels, three short-story collections, two works of nonfiction and one play. Older readers of The Washington Post will recall that in the late 1960s he reported for it from Vietnam with great distinction and wrote those two works of nonfiction -- To What End (1968) and Military Men (1970) -- while on staff here. In 1970 he left The Post and daily journalism to become a full-time writer of books. He and I have never met or corresponded -- I joined the paper more than a decade after he left -- though doubtless we have mutual friends.

The transition from journalism to literature is tricky, and not many people make the full leap. Most fiction written by journalists is, like journalism itself, of the moment and thus inherently evanescent. But those writers who made the leap -- Gail Godwin, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Mario Vargas Llosa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- have been well served by their newsroom experience. Journalism has many flaws, as readers so often remind us, but it also has qualities that can be turned into assets by the aspiring writer of fiction. It requires people to ask questions rather than assume they know all the answers, it encourages people to look at the larger world beyond themselves rather than the little one within, it accords high importance to story line and narrative rigor, and it tends to develop an accurate ear for human speech.

Ward Just learned these lessons well. His fiction is keenly observant, as the best journalism is, and he is especially interested in power, a subject that journalists find endlessly beguiling. He has written about how power is sought, used and abused in Washington, about power and influence in the press itself, about power as it materializes in human relationships. He is an astute observer of politics and politicians (Adlai Stevenson plays a cameo role in An Unfinished Season, and plays it beautifully) but to the best of my knowledge has never ground a partisan or ideological ax in his writing. He is fascinated by the ordinary humanity behind the apparatus of power, and explores it with utterly unsentimental sympathy.

The wielder of power in An Unfinished Season is Teddy Ravan, the 50-year-old father of the novel's narrator, Wilson Ravan, who is 19 years old at the time these events take place but who views them from the vantage point of the early 1990s. Teddy owns and operates a printing shop in a suburb of Chicago. The business is successful, but the old easy relationship between management and labor has corroded in the altered atmosphere of postwar America:

"He believed things were out of control, by which he meant directed by unseen hands. He knew that something had changed with the winning of the war and the unquiet peace that followed. He knew this from conversations with his friends at the club, and listening to the men on the floor talking about their new Ford coupe or the Johnson outboard they had their eye on, and the washing machine their wives were after them to buy. Commotion was in the air, both grievance and a new sense of destination. The whole nation had won the war and the whole nation was entitled to share in the victory. My father looked into the eyes of this new face and saw something of himself; but still he would not yield. . . . He ignored the stubbornness of the union and failed to detect the determination of the men to share in the new prosperity. When the strike came he was unprepared. He felt betrayed, as if he were the object of a coup d'état."

Against this background of change, uncertainty and tension, Wilson plays out his own quiet drama, "traveling from one realm to another, crossing the line that divided youth and maturity." A great deal happens to him. His family's beloved house in a suburb called Quarterday is attacked, though no serious injury is inflicted. His grandfather dies, leaving his mother bereft and confused. He goes to one debutante party after another on the fashionable North Shore, but spends his days at a summer job with a raffish downtown newspaper. He falls in love with a beautiful, mysterious girl named Aurora Brune, with consequences that are surprising (to him and the reader alike) and that have lasting effects on him. For him it is a time of "discovering how disturbed life could be and how unexpected its events and how unsettled and discouraging, all in the space of a summer."

It is a book about growing up, but it's anything except a coming-of-age novel. Wilson Ravan is a mature man looking back at "all these summer fragments" and still seeking "coherence" in them, rather than the self-absorbed adolescent one is accustomed to encountering in the conventional novel of the genre. He spends the summer in "three parallel worlds: the newspaper, the parties, and the house in Quarterday," and he understands with delight that "each day was a fabulous journey to the unknown." Both during the summer itself and four decades later, he casts a clinical eye on his circumstances and himself -- "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.

It is an immense pleasure to watch -- indeed, to participate in -- Wilson's struggle toward self-awareness, but that is scarcely the only pleasure offered by An Unfinished Season. It seems to me that Just has never been so observant as he is here, and that his prose has never been so layered and rich. There are innumerable passages that I could quote at length, but two must suffice. Just seems to have gotten out of newspaper work as fast as other opportunities allowed, but clearly he has never lost his affection for it (at least as it was practiced when he was young), and he writes about it with humor and love. Yes, Wilson "had no intention of becoming a newspaper reporter, then or later. The work was repetitive and easily grasped and didn't lead anywhere I wanted to go," but:

"I loved my job -- grace and favor from the publisher, who was a golfing friend of my father's -- and the atmosphere of the newsroom, never quite real, as if the people we wrote about were mere characters in a play or novel who did not exist outside the narrow columns of type. Its atmosphere was as special and specific as the locker room or infantry bivouac with its own language and code of conduct, as disheveled as life itself, a man's cruel world where the odds were eternally six-to-five against. The paper was a carnival of love nests, revenge killings, machine graft, and Communists deep in the apparatus of state and national government. . . . It was easy enough for me to believe that the world of the newsroom was the real world, wised-up and unforgiving, brutal as a matter of course, life's mediator, but always with a reassuring insinuation of the indomitable American spirit asserting itself in countless miniature acts of selflessness."

That is smart, witty and true. Newsrooms and newspapers aren't that way any more, but that is exactly how they were then, and Just has preserved them as carefully and perfectly as a butterfly pinned in a glass box. Ditto for Chicago:

"Chicago itself had a nineteenth-century identity, a noisy, unlovely city of iron and concrete, a city on the grab, fundamentally lawless, its days spent chasing money and its nights spending it; loveliness was always just beyond the point. The city had elbow room but God help you if you fell behind because there was always a more muscular elbow. The city was ruled by a half-dozen old white men to suit themselves. You were permitted to go about your business so long as your business didn't interfere with their business. If it did, they invited themselves in. In its cosmic indifference, the city of Chicago resembled a mighty turbine, three and a half million souls oiling the gears and tending the works while the supervisors stood around reading the racing form. I was 19 years old and that was my view of things after my circus summer at the newspaper -- an unlovely city, not unloved. I knew that wherever I would go in the world, Chicago was the place I would return to and recognize at once, its fedora pulled down over one eye, a wisecrack already forming in its mouth."

Just about perfect, it says here. Every once in a while -- not often, for sure -- an author does a reviewer a favor and writes a book with such elegance, élan and acuity that the only way to review it -- to give readers some sense of the pleasures that await them in it -- is to quote from it, at length and with gratitude. John Gregory Dunne did that a couple of months ago with another novel about the heartland, Nothing Lost; now Ward Just does it with An Unfinished Season. A beautiful, wise book.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 251 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618036695
• ISBN-13: 978-0618036691
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #886,076 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 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)    (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 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 EnglandUSA) - See all my reviews (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

7 of 7 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.