Ties that shape a coming of age

In the pantheon of expert fictional observers of the Western political scene, Ward Just is both the most American and arguably the least recognized. Perhaps this is because his vision of the people who run the world on our behalf is, for all their conventionality, the most profoundly subtle and, in its insight, the most radical. Yes, from one point of view Just’s dozen-odd novels, not unlike John le Carre’s or Graham Greene’s, are a catalog of the scumbags who make up the political establishment. There are diplomats making snap decisions about the fates of African republics in the 1960s, businessmen in the Reagan years picking up post-Soviet stockpiled arms to transship to any number of warring ethnicities, Kennedy-era bureaucrats practicing nation-building in Vietnam. But in his body of work, which is more varied than that of Le Carre, Greene or even Alan Furst, Just is less concerned with telling us what these people do, or even who they are, than with their origins: the childhoods, families, schools and bedrooms that mold the professionals composing the face the world judges America by. It is a focus that surpasses even Furst’s clear-eyed cynicism in its implications for our future.

“An Unfinished Season” is the story of a summer in the 1950s, the last before college for Wils Ravan, a young man living in a suburb north of Chicago carved out from prairie, “the unfashionable western point of a triangle whose eastern points were Lake Forest and Winnetka.” He has grown up on his father’s “family’s homestead, except now it had nine large rooms instead of six small ones, and where the barn had stood, an emerald lawn with oval flower beds....” His father, Teddy Ravan, a former hockey team captain from Dartmouth, now 50 and owner of a printing business, carries a gun to protect himself during a bitter union battle with his workers. Behind the union, Teddy sees all the corrupting, lefty Roosevelt weaknesses of the New Deal, and this portrait of an Eisenhower Republican is completed when he returns home each night from the office to his wife, whom he finds waiting for him with cocktails, “trim in slacks and a sweater, an ascot at her throat.”

In these surroundings Wils’ education means, more than anything else, learning to assume the desiderata of the ambient sense of masculinity: to drink, wear a tux, listen to jazz, befriend bartenders and smoke. Everywhere in his apprenticeship is the 1950s expectation of conformity and conventionalism: There is his father’s conviction, for example, that “[t]eam play was what made America the great country that it was,” and his repeated admonition, “Loners lose.” Wils must also learn, with what today seems like precocious worldliness, how to stay afloat amid the ups and downs in the lives of the adults around him, his father’s shifting career and his parents’ evolving, sometimes spiraling, marriage.

As virtually everywhere in Just’s novels, much of this book is given over to a fine delineation of stereotypes: the businessmen and politicians of his father’s circle; the North Shore debutantes and their dates at their coming-out parties. So much so that assuming, or learning how to inhabit, these stereotypes seems to be the object of Wils’ life. And though it’s illuminating to see certain parts of the American experience from this perspective -- Teddy muttering “Bastards ... lowlifes” in front of the televised Hollywood hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, referring not to the committee but to the unfriendly witnesses, or speaking with deep personal venom of “that bastard Hiss” -- it’s nonetheless true that readers expecting something further from this depiction than Just’s measured, often beautiful, portraiture risk disappointment. And in that disappointment, they risk missing what this book and Just’s unique fictional project are about.

Wils has a tendency, originating perhaps with a year of sickness as a child, toward being something of a loner. Though his adolescent rebelliousness doesn’t seem to go much beyond insisting on attending the University of Chicago rather than his father’s alma mater and interrupting his social schedule with a summer job at a Chicago tabloid, it’s this same very slight list away from his father’s life that leads Wils to choose, among the standard-issue debutantes coming out in the summer season before he begins college, a strange girl standing alone and “watching the floor as if she expected a knife fight or other bloodletting.” Her name is Aurora, and her conversation “instantly set her apart from Debbie, Mimi, Gigi, and Dana.” Possessed of a European sensitivity and a smart, convincing gravitas -- the daughter of a distant, mysterious and charismatic psychiatrist -- Aurora attracts Wils to herself and her father and her father’s lover, a rouee and beautiful Cypriot named Consuela.

In this strange household, filled with the mysterious and the bohemian, the sensual and the intellectual, Wils comes to spend his summer. But his attraction to this world, it becomes clear, can take him only so far from the values and tastes of his father’s suburban universe, and when it comes time for Wils to step far enough outside his conventionality to accompany Aurora to where she needs to go -- it is a fantastically subtle moment, without the slightest drama or sentimentality, which readers will have to experience for themselves -- the forces governing Wils show that their hold is profound and tenacious.

And so it is that when, at novel’s end, we find Wils grown to be a United Nations functionary, properly enrolled now in the army of Just’s characters who run the world, we realize that this pivotal summer of Wils’ childhood remains for him an unfinished season, a time of expectations against which he never really rebelled but which he never entirely fulfilled either.

It is this kind of understated portraiture of the conventional that, more than anything else, slightly marginalizes Just. But to think of him as an aspiring Le Carre, always falling a bit short of the mark, is a fundamental misreading of his art. It’s not the political world that draws Just’s focus but the private one. Family, that microcosm of the wider political world, is his territory, his attention focused on the bonds between spouses, between parents and children, between lovers -- powerful bonds of love that, Just insists again and again, are shockingly ambivalent in the many kinds of pain, compromise and loneliness that characterize, and compound, their power.

Just’s social observation, for all that it is deeply attuned to the conventional, is misleadingly subtle. His work is more aptly compared to Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time,” that unique and brilliant 4,000-page portrait of the privileged classes of early-to-late-20th-century Britain, than to the more overtly political writings of Just’s contemporaries. As in Powell, the fact that so many of Just’s characters end up one way or another in government is not the object of their lives but a byproduct of who they are and where they come from. How this is the case -- how government draws people and which people are susceptible to its pull -- is the radical insight of Just’s fiction, portraying the maze of ambition, expectation and personal history creating the people who make the political, administrative, diplomatic and military decisions that rule our country and our lives.

As with Powell, one reads Just, here and elsewhere, with the feeling that something slight but essential is missing. One waits for the dramatic moment that will indict Wils’ background, parents, employers and friends with some sort of judgment. That moment never arrives. Dramatic events occur without shaking people out of their complacent assurance of their place in the world. But this is not a disappointment, and here the comparison with Powell is most telling: It is precisely this sense of what is not here, of being on the surface, that is the very art of Just’s books. There is, as Just’s fiction (and Powell’s) powerfully demonstrates, no guiding intelligence, no narrative epiphany, no national identity or noble mission. There’s just an intricately woven fabric of relationships and expectations out of which grows our political and ethical identity, and one can neither step out nor redirect the course of one’s life. “I have never had the slightest illusion that I could bend the world to my will,” Wils says at novel’s end, “and I refused to bend to the world’s, and so I have lived a kind of shadow life.”

It is precisely this shadow life that lives in Just’s novels too, in their dramatization of how deeply rooted are the cultural and biographical forces that have created the face our country presents to the world, how fundamental these forces are to our identity and how unlikely they are to change. *

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From An Unfinished Season

Look there, she said. It’s Adlai Stevenson.

He was alone, lost in thought, carrying a heavy briefcase, hatless.... He looked like any tired businessman on his way home after a hard day at the office. Not so long ago he had been a presidential nominee, Americans attending to his every thought and deciding at last that they were the wrong thoughts, perhaps too precise for the perilous times and that, all things considered, muddled syntax from a five-star general was preferable. On the night of his defeat he quoted Lincoln to the effect that he was too old to cry and it hurt too much to laugh, and with that quip returned to private life and now, on a warm August afternoon, was strolling up Astor Street alone, a common citizen once again.