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Overview
“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
Synopsis
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 ReviewTommy 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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Editorials
From the Publisher
"Don't be misled by the title; this engaging coming-of-age tale has little to do with either Auguste Rodin or a debutante. Instead it begins early in the 20th century with Tommy Ogden, a rich, enigmatic Chicagoan who drunkenly decides one day to endow a boys' prep school. Flash forward a few decades to Lee Goodell, who attends Ogden Hall School for Boys and privately wants to become a sculptor. We follow his life, witnessing the two acts of violence that change him. Rodin's Debutante is a surprising story, never going where you expect it to, and Just's spare prose packs a solid emotional punch. A-" –Entertainment Weekly"To his immense credit, Just doesn’t turn this into a whodunit—in fact, we never learn who committed the crimes—but is instead focused on the intricate, almost Jamesian unfolding of the personal and private lives of his sharply delineated characters. An understated and delicate offering by a master."—Kirkus Reviews
"Just extends his grand inquiry into family, honor, and injustice in his beguiling and unnerving seventeenth novel. Like An Unfinished Season (2004), this bildungsroman is set on Just's home ground, northern Illinois, where Tommy Ogden, a man of enormous inherited wealth, flagrant taciturnity, and an excessive avidity for shooting animals, turns his massive prairie mansion into an ill-conceived boys' school at the onset of WWI. Lee Goodell, the son of a judge, grows up in a nearby small town, a bucolic place until the Great Depression delivers tramps and a horrific sex crime. Lee, dreamy, kind, and willful, attends Ogden's school, then headed by a Melville fanatic, where he plays football and swoons over a sculpted bust by Rodin. Determined to become a sculptor, Lee rents a basement studio on Chicago's South Side, where a knife attack jeopardizes his artistic vocation and involves him in the lives of his poor, struggling neighbors and the mission of a compassionate African American doctor. Stealthily meshing the gothic with the modern, the feral with the civilized, in this mordantly funny yet profoundly mysterious novel, Just asks what divides and what unites us. What should be kept secret? Which teaches us more, failure or success? And of what value is beauty? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Award-winning Just attracts more readers with each uniquely compelling novel."—Booklist , STARRED review
Chris Bohjalian
[Just] is a rarity in American letters: a beautiful stylist who is capable of writing a gripping political thriller. While his novels often have a relentless narrative power, his characters are meticulously drawn. He has a grasp of the demons that drive us all.—The Washington Post
Steven Heighton
The voice here is not so much omniscient as protean, zipping out of the consciousness of one character and into another's, so that minor figures…suddenly gain stature and depth. In Just's generous world, each walk-on gets to steal the show, if only for a page…Rodin's Debutante is an achievement. Into a couple of hundred fast-moving pages, it compacts an impressive array of characters, settings, ideas and scenes…—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
In Ward's solid 17th novel, a boy comes of age in mid-20th-century Chicago and tries to find a way to create art in the face of the world's harshness. Lee Goodell, an adventurous youngster, lives in New Jesper, a quiet town on the outskirts of Chicago where his father and a cabal of influential locals act as a well-meaningprotectorate of the town. After the coverup of a horrific sexcrime at Lee's school, the young Lee's illusions are broken, and he takes this loss of innocence with him toboarding school at the Ogden Hall School for Boys. Lee's education takes place inmany arenas: the classroom, the football field, his sculpting studio, the Chicago streets, a free clinic, and among Hyde Park intellectuals, but when the victim of the sex crime fromLee's childhood returns to find out the truth of what happened, Just creates an opportunity for Lee to recognize the confluence of allthese influences on his life. Just's prose is clean and powerful, andwhile Lee is a bit flat—even when he's bad, he's good—his coming-of-age is filled withrich observations and finely tuned details. (Mar.)Library Journal
Born into wealth, irascible Tommy Ogden cares only about hunting. When his annoying wife tells him she intends to travel to Paris so Rodin can sculpt a bust of her (we are at the onset of World War I), he responds, "Go and be damned," and decides to turn their Illinois estate into a school for boys. Several years later, Lee Goodell grows up in a pleasant town on Lake Michigan where his father is a judge. In 1946, however, things change for good. A tramp is murdered and a girl sexually tortured, events that Lee's father and other town leaders work to contain. Lee is sent to Ogden Hall, under headmaster Augustus Allprice. There, and later in Chicago's South Side, Lee comes to terms both with his vocation as a sculptor and his town's past. VERDICT Just's 17th novel (after Exiles in the Garden) is a somewhat uneven coming-of-age story with a youthful protagonist who is less compelling than the brutish founder of Ogden Hall or the school's off-kilter headmaster. A far cry from tales of an artist's tortured angst or of youthful erotic yearnings, this enjoyable book will appeal more to adults nostalgic for the 1950s than to today's teenagers. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]—Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, TucsonKirkus Reviews
A novel that plays out against a backdrop of Chicago and its environs, a setting that shapes the characters in unexpected ways.
Crusty Tommy Ogden wants to make a statement to his wife and to the world in general, so he decides to transform his family manor in New Jesper, Ill., into a school, grandly known as the Ogden Hall School for Boys. Problem is, Ogden knows nothing about education and in fact only cares for shooting game (elk, deer, boar—it makes no difference). Flash forward a generation or two: Lee Goodell, son of local judge Erwin Goodell and future student at Ogden Hall, overhears a conversation about iniquitous events that have recently occurred about a month apart in New Jesper—first the brutal murder of a tramp, and second the even more savage rape of Magda Serra, a local student. At a meeting at Judge Goodell's, the local nabobs make a decision to desensationalize the potentially damaging news coverage. Magda, so traumatized that she scarcely speaks a word thereafter, leaves town with her mother, Lee continues his life as a student at Ogden Hall, and later as a young intellectual at the University of Chicago, studying sculpture and philosophy. At the urging of Melody Goodell, the judge's wife (who feels she's now "seen the face of evil" in New Jesper), the family moves to a safer and more secure existence on the North Shore, living out their lives in full-throated ease amid country clubs and manicured lawns. Lee eventually marries a promising philosophy student at the University, but then Magda returns, still cautious, still uncertain, but determined to try to find out the full story of what happened to her on that dark day of her violation. To his immense credit, Just doesn't turn this into a whodunit—in fact, we never learn who committed the crimes—but is instead focused on the intricate, almost Jamesian unfolding of the personal and private lives of his sharply delineated characters.
An understated and delicate offering by a master.