Giving Just His Due

I recently and happily made Ward Just's acquaintance while browsing the Nearly New shelf in the public library. It was an introduction long overdue, something like finally meeting the mutual acquaintance whom friends insist you will find charming. Even though his work is not the sort that makes The New York Times best-seller list or merits Book of the Month Club selection, critics consistently praise his fiction and frequently remark that he does not receive the notice he deserves. I kept him on my lifetime list of authors to sample, sometimes adding a mental asterisk or underline when I read yet another glowing review. "Must check out Ward Just," I'd think, then move on to the latest chart-topping novel.

My "handshake" with Just was his latest novel, "Forgiveness," which probes the emotions of an expatriate artist (and sometime CIA operative) after his French wife is left to die in the mountains by a quartet of Middle Eastern men entering the country illegally. This is Just's first novel set in post-9/11 Europe, but the politics are nuanced and underplayed, and the stateside Americans who make brief appearances do not come off as either sympathetic or admirable. Sometimes the view from abroad can be salutary.

Since our first meeting went so well, I wanted to experience more of Just's milieu and decided the quickest way to get the broadest sampling was to lay hands on as many of his short stories as I could. To the best of my knowledge, there is not yet a Collected Stories of... volume, so I requested "Twenty-One: selected stories by Ward Just" and "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert," a previous compilation, from the library. (There's a fair amount of overlap, but I would have missed a half-dozen good early stories if I hadn't asked for both.)

It was probably the best fifty cents I've spent in a long time.

Just, a former Newsweek editor and war correspondent in Vietnam, tells the tales of journalists and military officers, congressional aides, State Department analysts, CIA apparatchiks, and the occasional elected representative, in pre-Bush-Clinton-Bush Washington and on their assignments overseas. His characters are complex, conflicted, and---a rarity these days---conscience-stricken. (In "Noone," for example, a Roman Catholic congressman agonizes over the wording of a news release announcing a separation from his wife and the obligatory phone call to the archbishop in his home district.)

Many of them are midwesterners educated in the Eastern U.S; they are American to the core, even when (like Just himself) they live abroad a good deal and are well-read, well-spoken, and well-versed in the arts. They smoke, drink whiskey and gin martinis, and are for the most part honorable men.

Lord, how I miss them!