An Unfinished Season: A Novel
by Ward Just

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Book Reviews of An Unfinished Season: A Novel

Book Review: The Old Life, The Loves, The Conversations
Summary: 4 Stars

"It did not seem to me that you could fashion a life until you could make the decisions that governed it" -- with a maturity and honest self-scrutiny that never were granted to, say, Holden Caulfield.", so says Ward Just. He has written a novel that requires much thought and introspection.

Wils Raven is on the cusp of adulthood. He remembers in first person that time, and he is speaking from a 60 year old memory. This is one of the first times Ward Just has written a novel in first person, but as he tells it, "it just came out that way, and it seemed the thing to do." Ward Just started his career as a journalist and soon graduated to the Washington Post, where he reported from Vietnam. He left journalism in 1969 and started his first novel. Since that time he has written 14 novels. This is the novel that was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Wils Raven is a child of privilege. His father owns a newsprint business; they go to the Country Club for golf, dinner and conversation. Wils is an only child. He is studious and not much of an athlete. His father was a renowned athlete, especially in hockey. He would come every evening in the winter, to the luxurious superb of Quarterday, outside of Chicago. He would chide Wils about his lack of athleticism. Wils has the summer to get to know himself better, and he decides he wants to work for a newspaper. H father, of course, has connections and helps Wils obtain his summer job. In-between his day job, he goes to many debutante balls, and it is at one of these that he meets his first love, Aurora. Aurora is fascinating, but so is her father, a well known psychiatrist who marched in the Baatan March and has never really been able to work through that. It appears that Wils is one of the few people that he has told about his time in the Army and that leave a mark in Wil's soul. Dr Jason Brule's death from his own hand changes the life that Wils has set for himself, He is in-between the cold war his parents have set for themselves, his life at the newspaper, the debutante balls and the pull he feels for the "regular" people he meets everyday at his job on the paper. How is he to work out the
dramas of this summer? What will the relationship of all of these new people bring to change his life? We don't know. We can only see from the outside that a change is a'comin'. This is a well related story of a father, his son and the world that he enters in the Eisenhower years of the 1950's. Wils is a wounded spirit coming to terms.

Ward Just is a fascinating man. He has written 14 books, but is not as well known as he should be. He considers himself "undersold". "An Unfinished Season" is one of he best,
and he tells us "It goes without saying that most people think this book is deeply autobiographical, which it is not. The autobiographical parts about it are the things that I remember indelibly as if it happened yesterday. Not the dialogue. Not the people, but the look of things, the look of the dancers, and the kind of conversations that were going on. I remembered all of that pretty well." Highly Recommended. prisrob

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