An Unfinished Season

Rating:
Summary: Deep, rich story, made unnecessarily difficult to read.
Review: Good, engaging writing, but made much harder to read because HE DOESN'T PUNCTUATE. Most annoyingly, he doesn't put what his characters are saying in quotation marks, so the reader is left to try to sort out where a descriptive phrase ends, and where the voice of a character begins. The guy has a good reputation, and possibly thinks he's risen to the level of stardom that the extra keystrokes necessary to properly punctuate his writing are a waste of his precious time. Earth to Just: Punctuation enhances readability.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful coming-of-age novel from a brilliant writer
Review: Reading novelist Ward Just is a journey to a different era in American literature. His work fits comfortably in the period of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Indeed, readers of Just's most recent novel, AN UNFINISHED SEASON, may be struck by its distinct similarity in theme and tone to Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY. Both novels view the clash between American cultures and class as observed by a young, innocent narrator learning difficult life lessons.

The Nick Carraway of AN UNFINISHED SEASON is Wilson Ravan, a nineteen-year-old resident of Quarterday, Illinois, an affluent North Shore suburb of Chicago. "The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago" begins the novel. The winter in question is the early 1950s when Midwestern America and the nation are suffering the trauma of post-World War II metamorphosis brought about by anticommunist fervor, worker unrest and reexamination of the role of the United States in a changing world. In the brief time frame of the novel, young Ravan will graduate from high school, prepare to enter the University of Chicago, spend his summer on the North Shore social circuit, and work as a copy boy at a tabloid Chicago newspaper. Along the way, the struggles of his father and mother to confront both business and personal dilemmas will awaken Wilson to the complexity and injustice of life. Just like Nick Carraway, he will see the destruction caused by shallow and callused people.

Young Ravan meets Aurora Brule at one of the numerous debutant dances of the summer. The young couple fall in love. Aurora's father, Jack Brule, is a society psychiatrist, a man of complexity and mystery. Dr. Brule is a man burdened by tragic memories of World War II. Through this character, Ward Just, a veteran of the Vietnam conflict, is able to share with the reader his views on the experience and horrors of war. Like Ernest Hemingway, Just has led a rich and adventurous life. Those experiences form a foundation for his writing. Be it combat, politics, journalism or any number of issues, Just is not afraid to share with the reader his life experiences through the characters of his novel.

Ward Just grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, a middle-class community north of Chicago lacking the social status of the mythical Quarterday community chronicled in AN UNFINISHED SEASON. His family owned a small paper, the Waukegan News-Sun, where Just spent his early years as a journalist. While this novel is not a biographical work, it is nonetheless written from the perspective of a man who has experienced the evils of yellow journalism. Just knows his profession and he also knows well the politics and psyche of the Midwest. Whether it is the working class laborers of Ted Ravan's factory, or the upper class debutantes of Lake Forest and Winnetka, the characters in this novel have been superbly created by a writer of brilliance and insight.

Ward Just may be one of America's best-kept secrets. This is his 14th novel, and although several of his previous efforts have earned accolades and writing awards, he may still be an unknown talent to many readers. AN UNFINISHED SEASON is a coming-of-age story reminiscent of not only THE GREAT GATSBY, but also of J.D. Sallinger's CATCHER IN THE RYE. For those familiar with Ward Just's work, AN UNFINISHED SEASON is an anticipated summer treat. For first-time visitors to this novelist, be glad that you have thirteen other novels to read while you wait for his next effort.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman


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: Rich language, meandering plot
Review: Ward Just is a writer's writer, with rich, tonal language, subtley hued and endless in its metaphors and allegories. The writing is reminiscent of Stegner in style. However, what promises and is close to portending a great story, reneges on the reader. The plot never forms and vignettes, written with great care and richness, meander to the point of tangentiality. The characters beckon initially but the reader ends up holding only an ephemeral sense of who the story is about. There is technique and fineness of description, but the plot is lost and the characters suffer in the author's attempt to give them solidity. What we have is something but we're never sure what the 'something' is. There is a sensibility - of time and place - Chicago, the McCarthy era brewing amid the fear of unions and communism, debuttante parties, the newsroom sensationalism, the 'slumming' of the college student in the summer as he mixes with journalists and jazz afficionados. The environment is painted vividly but the pictures merely overlap without blending. We have snapshots and an outline. What we lack is the final story, the blending of ideas leading to a fruition of plot and character development. I read the book for the beauty of the language, all the while lamenting the lack of solid story and depth of plot. So much was possible and so little was produced. It is a shame to see so much promise and receive so little in the end.

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.

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.

Rating:
Summary: The deceptive decade of the 1950s
Review: With almost half a century of perspective, most of us remember the 1950s as a deceptively serene time in America. The race issue hadn't yet erupted, the pill had not yet "liberated" women, gays were still in the closet and a sense of national innocence had not yet been corroded by the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate.

Ward Just has set his latest novel, The Unfinished Season, against this backdrop, which is recalled today with such a contradictory mixture of both fondness and derision. Written with his usual elegance, depth and understatement, this coming-of-age novel traces a formative summer in the life of Wilson (Wils) Ravan, the son of an upper class Chicago family.

Wils is 19-years-old, a combination of innocence and awakening maturity, who is spending his last summer at home in the mythical Illinois community of Quarterday, north of Chicago, before going to the University of Chicago. During the day, he works as a copyboy at a downtown Chicago newspaper, a job he attained through his father's friendship with the publisher. In the evenings, he makes the rounds of debutante parties on Chicago's opulent North Shore.

The two worlds are a study in class contrast-the working class domain of tabloid journalism, viewed as inherently sordid by Wils's social class, and the upper class milieu of the country-club set, scorned by Wils's newspaper colleagues as a snotty bastion of privilege. Occasionally, the two worlds collide, as when Wils forgets to change out of his dancing shoes before strolling into the newsroom and is mocked by the City Editor for being a swell.

In the first part of the novel, Wils's key relationships are with his parents, whose marriage is suffering from the strains of a labour dispute at his father's printing business. There are threatening phone calls, and then a brick smashes through the window of their home, mildly injuring his father. Wils' mother, a product of Connecticut gentility, wants her husband to settle with the strikers, but Teddy Ravan, a no-nonsense Midwesterner who views the strike leaders as Communist agitators, insists on standing his ground. The price he pays is his wife's alienation.

Wils enjoys a brief season of male intimacy with his father, as the two bond at cocktail hour while Mrs. Ravan makes a prolonged visit back East to her parents. But soon his affective centre of gravity shifts toward Aurora Brule, the 18-year-old daughter of a prominent Lincoln Park psychiatrist. Wils has met her on the debutante party circuit. They initially seem to be at a similar place in their lives, preparing to leave the nest for university, mildly rebellious against their fathers, skeptical of their social class but not willing to forfeit its advantages.

This is a modest, episodic story built around the tensions between two generations-one limited by their life experience, the other limited by their lack of life experience. As with Just's earlier fiction, the strength of The Unfinished Season is not so much in the characters or the narrative but rather in his precise depiction of the way people think, speak and behave in a particular place at a particular time. The ethos of 1950s Midwestern America is itself the most memorable creation, "character" if you will, of this novel. Working on a deceptively compact canvas, the author has infused his work with large themes that fester just below the surface-much as they did during the decade of the 1950s itself.·