Rodin's Debutante - Softcover

Just, Ward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0547752652 ISBN 13: 9780547752655

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2012

Synopsis

“Ward Just is not merely America’s best political novelist. He is America’s greatest living novelist.”—Susan Zakin, Lithub  

“An achievement . . . [that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates.”—New York Times Book Review

Tommy Ogden, an outsized character holding court in his mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys’ school. His decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emotionally potent novel.

Lee’s life in the small town of New Jesper, Illinois, is irrevocably changed by the rape of one of his high school classmates. His father, a local judge and a member of “the Committee” of civic leaders that runs the town, votes to suppress the crime in the name of protecting their community. His mother responds by forcing a move to Chicago’s North Shore, where Lee enrolls in the private Ogden Hall School for Boys. Both the crime and the school come to profoundly shape Lee’s knowledge of how the world works. Years later, Lee meets his victimized classmate. Their charged encounter is a confirmation of his understanding that how and what we remember lies at the heart of life.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

An achievement . . . [that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates. New York Times Book Review
Tommy Ogden, an outsized character holding court in his mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys school. His decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just s emotionally potent novel.
Lee s life in the small town of New Jesper, Illinois, is irrevocably changed by the rape of one of his high school classmates. His father, a local judge and a member of the Committee of civic leaders that runs the town, votes to suppress the crime in the name of protecting their community. His mother responds by forcing a move to Chicago s North Shore, where Lee enrolls in the private Ogden Hall School for Boys. Both the crime and the school come to profoundly shape Lee s knowledge of how the world works. Years later, Lee meets his victimized classmate. Their charged encounter is a confirmation of his understanding that how and what we remember lies at the heart of life.
Sharply observant, pragmatic, mordantly funny, and stubbornly romantic, Ward Just is a spellbinding storyteller . . . Rodin s Debutante is a powerful tale of daunting revelations and determined self-expression. Donna Seaman, WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio
An understated and delicate offering by a master. Kirkus Reviews
WARD JUST s sixteen previous novels include Exiles in the Garden, Forgetfulness, the National Book Award finalist Echo House, A Dangerous Friend, winner of the Cooper Prize for fiction from the Society of American Historians, and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

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From the Inside Flap:

Tommy Ogden, an outsized character holding court in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Auguste Rodin, and instead announces his intention to endow a boys’ school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emotionally potent novel.

Lee is a small-town boy, the son of a judge, who at an early age eavesdrops on the deliberations of his father and other civic leaders as they successfully suppress the news of the brutal sexual assault on a classmate—giving Lee his first intimations of the difference between fear of the known and fear of the unknown. This unsolved crime marks the end of Lee’s boyhood and precipitates his arrival at Tommy’s misbegotten school Ogden Hall, where he is enthralled by the bust of a mysterious girl in the library, known only as Rodin’s Debutante. Both the crime and the school come to profoundly shape his knowledge of how the world works. His subsequent success as a sculptor of marble, living on the dangerous streets of the South Side and then marrying into the haute-intellectual culture of the university, plays out against the raw grab and glamour of midcentury Chicago. Years later, Lee meets his victimized classmate. Their charged encounter is a confirmation of his understanding—so powerfully under the surface of Just’s masterly story—that how and what we remember lies at the heart of life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0547752652
• ISBN 13: 9780547752655
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272