Class struggle and family tensions explode in this novel of life in a Chicago suburb in the 1950s, as a teenager watches his father's psyche crumble in the wake of union problems and marital difficulties. Just, a highly respected novelist, playwright, and former reporter ( Echo House, A Soldier of the Revolution, A Dangerous Friend
), has been praised for his astute sociological and psychological insights. In An Unfinished Season , he tears away the layers of false memory attached to the 1950s and reminds readers what a turbulent decade really felt like. Wils is more than the star of a complex coming-of-age story; Season elegantly chronicles his relationship with his family and the larger, complex world around him. Just deftly handles the diverse subjects of romance, parent-child relationships, class conflict, labor struggles, and suicide. An Unfinished Season is Just’s 14th novel, certainly his most biting—and perhaps among his best—yet. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* Just is a quintessential American writer whose penetrating yet elegant and atmospheric novels seek to decode watershed historic moments. In the prizewinning A Dangerous Friend (1999), he dramatizes the Vietnam War. Here he cycles back to the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the shift from family businesses to faceless corporations and captures the era's essence in a tight time frame: the nineteenth summer of Wilson Ravan, the only child of an increasingly anachronistic printing-plant owner. Wilson is eager to leave the uneasy enchantment of his parents' house on the edge of Chicago's affluent North Shore, but in the meantime he is learning about the wider world by working at a sleazy Chicago newspaper and by becoming involved with a thorny young woman whose famous psychiatrist father is burdened by horrific war memories. In a Fitzgerald-like take on one young man's abrupt awakening to the complexity and injustice of existence, Just masterfully evokes the bittersweet beauty of city and suburb, the immensity of solitude, the fortitude life requires, and death's ever-present shadow. And while his watchful hero thinks about how too much can be made of something, and too little, Just gets it exactly right. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Ward Just is the author of fourteen previous novels, including the National book Award finalist Echo House and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribunes Heartland Award. In a career that began as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Just has lived and written in half a dozen countries, including Britain, France, and Vietnam. His characters often lead public lives as politicians, civil servants, soldiers, artists, and writers. It is the tension between public duty and private conscience that animates much of his fiction, including Forgetfulness. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Marthas Vineyard and Paris. In the three and a half decades since the publication of his first novel, A Soldier of the Revolution, Ward Just has established himself as one of the most accomplished and admirable American writers of his time. With An Unfinished Season, he puts an exclamation point on that. Whether it is actually his best novel can be debated -- I have a soft spot for A Family Trust (1978) -- but there can be no doubt that it is on all counts a splendid piece of work: leisurely in pace and meditative in tone, as is much of Just's writing, but also emotionally freighted, witty and sophisticated, and powerfully evocative of both the time (the early 1950s) and the place (Chicago) in which it is set. Now in his late sixties, Just has published 14 novels, three short-story collections, two works of nonfiction and one play. Older readers of The Washington Post will recall that in the late 1960s he reported for it from Vietnam with great distinction and wrote those two works of nonfiction -- To What End (1968) and Military Men (1970) -- while on staff here. In 1970 he left The Post and daily journalism to become a full-time writer of books. He and I have never met or corresponded -- I joined the paper more than a decade after he left -- though doubtless we have mutual friends. The transition from journalism to literature is tricky, and not many people make the full leap. Most fiction written by journalists is, like journalism itself, of the moment and thus inherently evanescent. But those writers who made the leap -- Gail Godwin, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Mario Vargas Llosa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- have been well served by their newsroom experience. Journalism has many flaws, as readers so often remind us, but it also has qualities that can be turned into assets by the aspiring writer of fiction. It requires people to ask questions rather than assume they know all the answers, it encourages people to look at the larger world beyond themselves