American Romantic by Ward Just

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 1, 2014

Ward Just is skilled at conveying emotions, at making the readers feel what his characters feel, and that is the greatest strength of American Romantic. It tells of the long life of Harry Sanders, in all its fullness as well as its thinness, and allows the reader to feel the highs and lows alongside Harry.

Harry starts the novel as an American mid-level bureaucrat in the Foreign Service on a tour of duty in Vietnam during the early 1960s. The war is smoldering and American-funded clinics are burning to the ground. Writing reports about wasted foreign aid is Harry's day job; nights he spends in temporary respite with Sieglinde, an x-ray technician serving on a German hospital ship until its sudden departure. When an opportunity arises for secret (and officially deniable) peace talks, the Ambassador gives Harry the leading role. Harry is smart and ambitious but sufficiently "under the radar" to take on the assignment without causing eyebrows to be raised. The harrowing mission leads to a moment of consequence in Harry's life.

Later, the story shifts to Sieglinde who, having fled her "doomed love affair" with Harry, travels without a destination. Her story (less interesting than Harry's) is abandoned midway through the novel when the story jumps to the present. Harry is now in genteel retirement in the south of France. The reader catches up on his life through his memories, sometimes focusing (again with less interest) on people who are part of Harry's life, particularly his wife. After another moment of consequence, for which Harry is again unprepared, the story returns to Harry's present.

Some themes of American Romantic -- the unwelcome American on foreign soil, the ambiguity of male-female relationships, the sense of unavoidable destiny, the struggle to reconcile religion with the harsh reality of daily living -- echo Graham Greene. Like the stories told around Harry's father's table when he was young, the point of American Romantic is often revealed indirectly. The stories told at his father's table by important political figures stopped short of their ending, requiring the listener to read between the lines because the storyteller, lost in memory, was unable to state aloud the story's "missing piece." The same can be said of American Romantic. There are often hidden meanings in stray remarks, unfinished stories, and half-buried memories.

What to make of the title? Sieglinde tells Harry that he is an American romantic because he believes an invisible hand is shaping events and issuing warnings that he does not understand. An ambassador tells Harry that "in diplomacy you are the master of your own fate as long as you keep your eyes open," yet Harry thinks "of diplomacy as Sisyphus thought of his wretched stone." Whether Harry shapes his own fate or is guided by an invisible hand is left for the reader to decide. By the time he retires, perhaps Harry is a romantic in a different sense. He looks back on a life that, but for its two moments of consequence, took place in the blink of an eye, and he understands that "failure is more commanding than success." On the other hand, failures alone do not define a life, as we realize upon reaching the book's predictable but satisfying conclusion, which can only be described as ... romantic.

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