An Unfinished Season

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Very Thoughtful 1950's USA !
Review: Set between Winter, 1953, and Autumn, 1954 (except at the very end), this is a very, very fine look at the world seen through a very intelligent and sensitive 19 year old only (male) child, and his days in and around the great city of Chicago. Living a priviledged life literally on the golf course/ country club, this book grabs you from the first line, with the descriptions of union troubles and strikes at his father's paper plant, and his father skating in the nearby pond. The 1st person narrator (i.e. the 19 year old) is much quieter and more thoughtful than Dad, the team player who see his business torn apart by the strike. He seeks freedom beyond this narrow confine in the jazz clubs of the city, and the debutante balls among the upper crust, meeting many unusual people, including a psychiatrist with an unusual secret, plus his daughter whom our 19 year falls for. There's a lot going on between the lines, and the prose is perfect thruout. The ending seems very vague, but that may be the author's intention. All in all, a very worthy effort by Mr. Just.

Rating:
Summary: The Unequal Weight of Grief
Review: 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.