A Family Trust

It's been almost forty years since I first encountered Dement, a bustling Illinois burg an hour or so west of Chicago, in Ward Just's 1972 novella "Honor, Power, Riches, Fame and the Love of Women," and I was delighted to visit it again when I purchased a remaindered copy of "A Family Trust" in 2008. This is an old-fashioned family saga, treating and tracing the changing fortunes of the town and its people over the course of three lengthy episodes--1953, 1960 and 1973--through the lens of Dement's home-grown newspaper "dynasty." Neither the family nor the town traverse the two decades unchanged, of course, and much of the journey is seen through the eyes of the patriarch's granddaughter, described by my spouse as one of the few plausible female characters she's ever read from the hand of a male novelist (me, I thought I'd seen plenty, but what do I know?). Ward Just is one of our finest contemporary novelists, for all that he has somehow contrived to remain largely beneath the popular radar over the course of a long career. I'd recommend this one and "Jack Gance" to start with, and the short story collection "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert" (which includes "Honor, Power") as between them a proper introduction to this under-celebrated writer. After that, just about any of his other titles are safe bets.