An Unfinished Season Mixes Memory and Desire in a Just Cause

"It's a mistake," cautions one of the characters in Ward Just's 14th novel, An Unfinished Season (Houghton Mifflin), "to infer the author's life from the author's fiction."

But this compelling work -- set mostly outside Chicago in the 1950s, told in the first-person voice, and rich with convincing detail -- forces the question anyway: How close is this story to its writer's?

"Not very," answered the 68-year-old Just, a Martha's Vineyard resident, who, like the narrator of his latest novel (an August Book Sense "We Also Recommend" title), grew up in Illinois.

"Its events take place the first year of the Eisenhower administration -- that's 51 years ago! When you're back that far, you're dealing with a combination of misremembered memories. What's the line of Eliot's: Where you mix memory and desire?" The author chuckled. "I mean, don't I wish I'd had a summer like young Will Ravan's, you know. Good for him."

An Unfinished Season is narrated by 19-year-old Wilson Ravan, whose parents' marriage is shifting along hidden fault lines, even as young Will becomes involved with the knowing daughter of a successful but troubled psychiatrist. The book's mixture of clarity and reverie is induced in part by a device that's becoming something of a Just trademark: the use of dialogue without quotation marks, so that spoken words and unspoken thoughts, conversation and description, flow together in a semi-elegiac whole.

It's a technique employed in his last three or four books, Just explained. "I was working on a theory of dialogue: that if you eliminate the quotation marks, what you're getting to is kind of the deep structure of the dialogue, almost like the pentimento of a painting. You're not listening so much for regional accents, the way the late George Higgins used to write dialogue; [he was] the modern master of that. This dialogue, the way I see it, it's quite straightforward; and if you take the quotation marks out of it, you can sort of see through it like a pane of window glass, to what's going on underneath and what's going on between the lines.... I've had a couple of editors who've been really quite put off by it, but I've stuck with it."

Persistence is a characteristic virtue of Ward Just, who, after some early years as a journalist, has been writing his elegant and award-wining fiction for the past 35 years. His vocation grew from a childhood immersed in reading, and in observing the surrounding midwestern social and political landscape.

"My world was the world of books," Just said of his youth, "and it stayed that way, for quite some time. My father was a newspaper publisher, and we always had books and magazines around the house.... Dinner-table conversation was mainly about two things: local politics -- Dad was a Republican; not a direction I took, but I could respect it -- and the local economy, because that affected classified and display ads in the newspaper.

"So you tended to become aware of things and develop a world-view, early on. Which I think is all to the good."

Just cites an eclectic assortment of authors as early and later influences. "Somebody my age," he said, "you always have to pay tribute to Franklin W. Dixon, author of The Hardy Boys [series]. Particularly boys, when you grow up and then you start to read in the early to middle 1940s, the sense of pace that Dixon came up with -- that was, I must say, what really got me hooked on narrative. In the early 1950s, I really became quite enamored of James Gould Cozzens, who is I think not read at all today: Guard of Honor and two or three others.... And then, after I passed my 30th year, I really went into Henry James, with a vengeance. Lucky is the man who discovers Henry James in middle age; in the early '70s, I was really quite taken with him. And with Wallace Stevens, a poet with a great concentration of force."

Authors he's read with pleasure more recently, said Just, include W.G. Sebald, Shirley Hazzard, Milan Kundera, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Dennis Lehane. "And often," he said, "I'll go back into some of the old ones: James M. Cain and (Dashiell) Hammett; people with a kind of an austere point of view."

Just's own fictional point of view, in An Unfinished Season at least, seems to mix austerity with a Fitzgerald-like nostalgia. The book came "very quick" to him. "I think I finished it in a year and nine months; normally they take me two and a half years, or two years minimum," Just said. "I was sort of surprised when it showed up finished, although I have to say that during parts of that book I really felt I was kind of writing with a hot hand ... I mean, I was at the typewriter often for eight or nine hours a day, which is a lot. But when something is moving well, you want to be there! You want to be there at the typewriter, if the muse is speaking."

Just's instrument of choice for encountering the muse is a 50-year-old Smith Corona manual portable. ("I've got four in reserve, in case it gives up on me.") And these days, he's less and less inclined to stray from it in the service of promoting books already written.

"I tell you," the author said, with a rueful laugh, "I'm feeling my age.

"There was a time when I'd go to two or three cities, and do two or three events in a day, and it wasn't a problem; but ... you get weary sometimes, you know? The truth of the matter is, I don't do a lot of touring."

Far better, thinks Ward Just, to stay home and await the muse.

"It's unlucky to talk about unfinished work," the author warned, but admitted, "I'm just in the opening stages of a novel; I've got a kind of an opening scene ... I don't know where this thing is going, but I'm having fun. I'm engaged, anyway. I'm back at my typewriter." -- Tom Nolan