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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Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 1, 2011

I give this unusual, meandering novel credit: I had no idea where it was going yet it held my interest throughout its circuitous journey. More than that, it made me think. What starts as a story about a wealthy rogue at the end of the Nineteenth Century segues into a World War II-era story about a young man who invigorates a prep school football team before he begins collegiate life and pursues an interest in sculpture. The story takes seamless detours into tales of small town violence (a vicious assault upon a female student) and big city violence (a mugging on Chicago's South Side) while exploring questions of perspective and memory. Tying together the stories of the rogue and the intellectual are a boarding school, a cathouse, and a bust sculpted by Rodin.

Rodin's Debutante focuses on two characters. Tommy Ogden, the son of a wealthy railroad baron, has no need to work and so indulges his passions: hunting, sketching, and sleeping with the women provided by the "social club" that leases him a space for his engagements. To the dismay of his wife, Ogden converts their estate into a boarding school for boys who can't fit in elsewhere. The bulk of the novel follows Lee Goodell, the son of a small town judge, who attends Ogden Hall before pursuing an intellectual and artistic life at the University of Chicago and in Chicago's Hyde Park. Like Rodin, Goodell becomes a sculptor. Two episodes of violence are central to the story: the vicious assault of a girl who is Goodell's classmate before he attends Ogden Hall and Goodell's own mugging years later. The two attacks have very different consequences for the two lives ... and that, I think, is one of the novel's points: you never know how your life will turn out. You may or may not be able to shape your future; you may or may not be able to remember your past -- and you may or may not want to do either one.

Although most of the novel is narrated in the third person, Goodell tells his story in the first person in a couple of segments, a jarring shift in point of view that at first puzzled me. This may have been one more way for Ward Just to illustrate the importance of perspective, an issue that lies at the novel's heart. Sometimes perspectives differ and the truth of the matter is hard to know: A headmaster believes that people learn only from their defeats, while Ogden thinks that defeat teaches nothing: it "stays with you and becomes the expected thing."

The differing perspective of urban and rural America is one of the novel's most intriguing themes (small town America, according to one of the novel's voices, provides the country with armies while urban America provides governance) but the larger theme is how people view similar events in different ways, and how the truth, whatever it might be, often remains concealed -- just as the hidden interior of a sculpted stone may never be entirely revealed. At the same time, some perspectives in the novel parallel each other, leading to the same result for different reasons: the small town leaders don't want to publicize the assault of the school girl while residents of the South Side Chicago neighborhood want to keep a lid on Goodell's mugging. In each case, the community believes that airing the truth will lead to harm (the loss of a sense of communal safety in the small town, retributive police action in Chicago). From their perspectives, it is the community that stands to suffer the greatest harm from the crime, not the victim. Of course, the victims see it much differently.

While these ideas make the novel well worth reading and thinking about, the book might not appeal to readers looking for a conventional plot-driven story. Ward Just tells the story in a nonlinear style, resulting in the meandering feeling I mentioned; events trigger memories of other events, stories beget more stories. That didn't bother me but I suspect some readers will be put off by it. A more significant criticism to me is the novel's tone. I rarely felt an emotional connection, either positive or negative, to the characters. I don't necessarily need to like the characters to enjoy a novel, but I want the novel to make me feel something, and about all I felt while reading Rodin's Debutante was curiosity about what might happen next and admiration for Just's writing style. There's little dramatic tension; conflict, when it comes, is usually low key, often described in a voice so detached as to drain it of vitality. A couple of scenes involving Lee and a mugger and one involving Lee and the assault victim are exceptions, as is a wonderfully written scene in which young Lee overhears his father meeting with town leaders in the aftermath of the girl's assault. If the novel had reached that level of intensity more often, I would give it five stars and recommend it highly. I recommend it nonetheless, but for different reasons: the sureness of the writing style and the ideas it explores.

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