Courtesy Houghton Mifflin
|
Web-Exclusive Book Review
Forgetfulness
By Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)
Review by Wendy Smith, August 2006
|
Exclusive Offer for AARP Members
Interested in buying this book? Click here for discounts
at Borders.com. 10% off list price paperbacks, 35% off list price AARP titles, and, for a limited time,
10% off list price hardcover books.
Not a member? Join now.
People unfamiliar with Ward Just's work are always surprised when I tell them how enjoyable I find his novels. Judging solely from reviews, they have the impression that his fiction is gloomy or narrowly political. It's true that Just writes about people in public life, often politicians or journalists, and the moral dilemmas they face are grave. Certainly this new book, which opens with an injured woman slowly freezing to death, is often harrowing. But I closed Forgetfulness, as I have closed every other novel of his I've encountered, with the feeling of deep satisfaction that true art always inspires.
That satisfaction comes from Just's mastery of technique. His prose isn't flashy, but his sentences are elegantly shaped and effortlessly evocative. His novels are hardly laugh riots, but they occasionally raise a smile with their intelligent irony, sparked by the author's rueful knowledge of human folly. His characters always ring true, and they are never simple. One of the most sympathetic people in Forgetfulness is a French policeman whose methods include torture. The protagonist, Thomas Railles, whose wife, Florette, dies in the first chapter, is a painter who in the past did some part-time spying; he gave it up because he felt responsible for the death of a man he was observing. The subject matter here is serious—loss, grief, guilt, and atonement—yet it's balanced by Thomas's quiet appreciation of life's bounty: wine, good food, music (Billie Holiday's keening voice practically wafts from the pages), and the natural beauty of rural France, where he has lived with Florette for more than a decade.
 
But Nature is dangerous as well—nothing is simple in Just's world. Bored by the after-dinner conversation with Thomas's childhood friends (the two men who got him into espionage), Florette goes for a walk in the mountains and breaks her ankle. She's picked up by four men; we later learn that they're terrorists, coming across the Pyrenees from Spain. They soon regret the rescue, which interferes with their unspecified mission, and cut the woman's throat, then leave her to die.
"I am going to start turning over rocks," says Bernhard, the more sinister of Thomas's two friends, when the murder is discovered. "Trust me. They're dead men." The narrative intertwines Thomas's memories with the developments that ensue when French police arrest a Moroccan and connect him and three friends to Florette's death.
Bernhard insists that Thomas come to Le Havre to witness the interrogation, which turns the painter's stomach. Despite his overwhelming grief over losing Florette, Thomas still has no use for revenge and no particular belief in justice, although he forms an odd friendship with Antoine, the chief interrogator. At the novel's center stands the Frenchman's chilling, unapologetic explanation of his profession's requirements: " 'Patience. Attention to detail…anger, the common denominator of all ideology. [And] you must never, ever forget. Forgetfulness leads to—'
'Forgiveness?' Thomas said.
Antoine smiled again. He said, 'A lack of focus.' "
Well, yes, I do see why people think Just's fiction is grim. No one is innocent, and everyone has his reasons. "We all have blood on our hands, from deeds large and small," Thomas tells one of the terrorists. "The idea is to atone and go on. No regrets is a fine sentiment if you are a cabaret singer." This stark insight is probably as close to a moral as Just gets, and it's not exactly cheering. All we can do is aspire to the "equilibrium" that Florette affectionately saw as Thomas's leading quality, the knowledge that the world that produced the Spanish Civil War, the World Trade Center attack, and the London subway bombings (all referred to in the text) also contains love, the joy of meaningful work (through it all, Thomas paints)—and, admirers of Ward Just can add, the pleasure of reading novels of such remarkable thoughtfulness and grace.
Wendy Smith reviews books for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.
Read more Web-exclusive book reviews
|
