Rodin's Debutante

Praise for Ward Just "A master American novelist."—Vanity Fair "Masterpieces of balance, focus, and hidden order . . . his stories put him in the category reserved for writers who work far beyond the fashions of the times."—Chicago Tribune "[Justs] vision of the people who run the world on our behalf is, for all their conventionality, the most profoundly subtle and, in its insight, the most radical."—Los Angeles Times Book Review "There comes a moment . . . when a reader is brought up short by how spectacularly well Ward Just writes fiction . . . Its effect is nearly explosive."—Boston Globe "One of the most accomplished and admirable American writers."—Washington Post Book World "[Just] has ardently crafted impeccable fiction for four decades now . . . Though dense with information on every page, Just's books are always sensibly sized and highly readable. This writer is an undersung American treasure."—Chicago Sun-Times

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. Ogdens decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Justs 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 Lees boyhood and precipitates his arrival at Tommys misbegotten school Ogden Hall, where he is enthralled by the bust of a mysterious girl in the library, known only as Rodins 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 Justs masterly story—that how and what we remember lies at the heart of life.