Forgetfulness

I'd never read anything by Ward Just before and forget how I came to order this (I have a backlog of new books purchased over the past several months). This novel was engrossing and beautifully written. An artist loses his wife - possibly due to his own past foray into the "spy" business, possibly due to chance and random misfortune. The novel explores dualities - America vs. France, artist vs. government agent, country vs. city, forgiveness vs. vengeance - in a fresh and truthful way. The protagonist feels real and fleshed out, and his thoughts and decisions seem to spring organically from a mix of his character and the untenable situation in which he finds himself. Very highly rated.

This is the first book I've read by Ward Just. He is a wonderful writer. I had to adjust to the pace of his writing -- slow and deliberate -- but it is wonderful to see how he writes about a man, and a nation, and a world gone wrong all at the same time, without any sense or contrivance. This is the story we must tell of our times, I think; not the story of nations or of terrorists or of wars, but stories of people living their lives in the swirl of contemporary events. Not, perhaps, a great novel, but a novel of great decency and strong writing.

I have been reading Ward Just's work with pleasure ever since I stumbled across his collection of stories, "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert," in 1975 or so. The novels that he wrote in the 70s, starting with "A Soldier of the Revolution" (1970) were good; the ones he wrote in the 80s, perhaps especially "Jack Gance," struck me as even better. I thought that "Echo House" (1997) was a remarkably good political novel and "A Dangerous Friend" (1999) remains one of the best novels ever written about the Viet Nam mess. "The Weather in Berlin" (2002) was a totally different but superb novel about a gifted movie maker. And "Forgetfulness" (2006) may be the best thing he has ever done. I am not sure only because I haven't yet had time to give it the second reading it deserves. Perhaps I should note that Just's work has never been fashionable; he is much too concerned to live in and write about the world most of us have to live in to be recognized as "post-modern." But I never was very fashionable myself.

This book finds sixtyish Thomas Railles, an expatriate, a portrait artist, and sometimes participant in intelligence work for the US, living in a small French village in the Pyrenees with Florette, his French-born wife of five years. But his relaxed life takes an abrupt hit as Florette does not come back from a typical walk and is found the next day frozen to death with her throat slit. One might think that the book would mainly consist of tracking down the perpetrators and imposing a suitable punishment. But Thomas is a man that is more accepting of life's turns, seeking to understand rather than exact revenge. The book is largely composed of Thomas' reflections and observations of life, where forgetfulness is both a positive and negative factor. Thomas' artistic eye enables him to notice nuances in people whether it is the reclusive old gentleman living next door on the mountain, the village café operator, or the alleged perpetrator of the crime against his wife as he is being interrogated by the French intelligence service. The book moves slowly - fortunately it is rather short - yet it never drags. Thomas' recalling of his past life from his boyhood in Wisconsin, to his life as a struggling artist in New York City, to his painting of a Spanish rebel as an exercise in intelligence gathering - all of these scenes interleaved with reflections on the present take the reader on a journey of understanding the subtleties of life right along with Thomas.

Which has done more to retard the upward progress of humankind, nationalism or religious fundamentalism? Both exert their malign influence in Ward Just's masterful new novel. This story of post 9/11 America is told in a refracted way that brings in subtle truths, sets them down, and gives you space to absorb them. Thomas Railles is a portrait painter of some renown, an American expatriate living with his French wife Florette in a small village high in the Pyrenees. One autumn Sunday Florette goes out for a walk while Thomas entertains Bernhard and Russ, two old chums from his Wisconsin boyhood. She's found in the woods the following morning with her throat slit. Bernhard and Russ work for one of America's intelligence agencies. While Thomas reels with shock, Bernhard calls in some chits from his French counterparts, who soon bring four Moroccan Arabs into custody. The French think the four men slipped across the Spanish border into France to carry out a terrorist mission. They murdered Florette because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bernhard brings Thomas to Le Havre to watch their interrogation. Thomas has no interest in the Moroccans' politics; he only wants to know what happened to his wife and why. Thomas asks for and gets permission to spend time alone with Yusef, the group's leader. What occurs between Thomas and Yusef in the interrogation room provides an unexpected and profound moral center to the story. Thomas knew an old Spanish communist who introduced him to the German word "lebensluge," which translates as "the lie that makes life bearable." For the Spaniard, it was the belief that Communism is moral, even if the men who practice it aren't. For Russ and Bernhard, it's that American know-how and righteousness will force the world back into its proper alignment. For Antoine, the French interrogator who becomes Thomas' friend, it's the importance of doing things in the proper way, being "comme il faut." For Thomas, it's believing that a return to painting will get him past Florette's death. Drinking doesn't dull Thomas' pain. Work doesn't lead to normalcy. Bringing the four terrorists to justice, so important to Bernhard, seems irrelevant. What finally offers redemption to Thomas are particularity and patience - making the effort to see the unique humanity of other people, even your enemies, and having the patience to find and inhabit small moments of grace when the world makes them available. Just offers this up as a more courageous path than the hollow machismo and expedient morality of Bernhard and the current US political leaders that he serves. This is the wisest book I've read about the true ramifications of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Just gives us adult talk about the damage done when the world regresses to primitive, bloodthirsty tribalism. You can choose to meet it head on, inflicting more damage, or choose to retreat from its burgeoning evil. Either way you're diminished, a