An Unfinished Season (ISBN 078618521X)

Novel W.A.S.P.s:
Ward Just is a writer with few equals. He wrote for the Washington Post for many years, most notably as a Vietnam reporter in the seventies. Just successfully made the transition to fiction and hasn't turned back in some three decades. An Unfinished Season is an exceedingly well crafted novel, set in Eisenhower era Chicago. The narrative is exact in the details it reveals, yet still spare enough to leave a reader guessing. The reader is offered a rare inside glimpse of the North Shore W.A.S.P.s of Chicago, frozen in some ways like the cold midwest they inhabit. And frozen like the mysterious poor woman who appears throughout the book. This is something of a coming of age novel, for both the main character, Wilson Ravan, and his father, Teddy Ravan. Wilson Ravan's unfinished season is the period after high school and before college - he's gotten a day job of sorts at a Chicago newspaper. It's here that he gleans the smutty stories he tells at the debutante balls he attends in the evenings. He experiences his first love and his first heartache. Teddy Ravan's unfinished season is the end of his middle age years and possibly of his marriage - the reader never really finds out if the marriage is ending, or just settling in for the long haul to the twilight of the couple's years. This novel is so tightly woven, it's difficult to dissect - and even after finishing it, one can't be sure of it. The reader is never completely let in, which is just as telling as what is learned. Just's prose is deeply symbolic without being corny. This is a quiet, thoughtful book - highly recommended. A beautiful piece of work, and an affirmation of why I read fiction.

More unbelievable than unfinished:
The prose of this novel is pleasurable to read at times. Ward Just effectively conjures images of the 1950's culture of affluent suburbanites in Chicago. But I couldn't really get into the characters. There are moments where we begin to get to know a character, but then Just resorts to declarations like "I was never closer to my father than at that time" (I'm paraphrasing) instead of showing us how and why two characters were close. A couple of pages of dialogue between them wasn't enough to make me feel they were close. The dialogue rarely rings true; it feels like glossy pontifications, not something a real person would actually say. It's rather cumbersome getting through it without quotation marks, too. The other thing that undermined the believeability of this novel is that while the protagonist is only 19, his reflections and interpretations of things sound way too mature. Perhaps this can be explained away by the fact that the novel is a reminicence of a much older man, but he claims to be having all these wonderfully deep insights at the time, not as he's writing his memories. Overall, the book has nice moments, but it didn't move me. I didn't believe that much of what the main character said and thought could be authentic. I think Just is trying too hard to be ethereal but deep at the same time.

High Quality Boredom.:
The quality of the writing here is excellent but the story and characters are very boring. It is the quality of the writing, alone, that can get you to continue reading beyond say the first 50 pages, however there is no big pay off at the end. No punctuation is a travesty; a time waster in an otherwise dreary read.

Beautiful:
What it was like to be 19 in the 1950's in the Midwest...excellent book, especially for those of us who lived through the era at the same age (albeit on the East Coast). A great story, well-written, which makes you think and remember with pleasure and the occasional wince what it was like in that era to be on the cusp of manhood, and then just past it.

Gorgeous writing, spot on historically but a bit sad:
Although An Unfinished Season cannot compare to Just's recent Forgetfulness it was still a pleasure to read for the language alone. I don't agree with the other reviewers who thought the characters were not engaging. I grew up in the 50s and each one of these characters literally reeked of the emotional suppression of that period. What was difficult for me was that none of them seemed to enjoy anything very much. And as suppressed as we were in the 50's we had a lot of damned fun. Another thing not noted by other reviewers was the HINT of some kind of taboo love/attachment between Aurora and Jack. Now that would have been quite enough to make Jack end it all especially in the 50s. Forget the Bataan Death March...his attachment to Aurora was clearly off the 50s radar. No matter what, Just can certainly dance a beautiful dance with the English language. I wish for more like Forgetfulness which is a book I simply cannot get out of my mind.