Rodin's Debutante

January 3, 2011
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-meaning protectorate of the town. After the coverup of a horrific sex crime at Lee's school, the young Lee's illusions are broken, and he takes this loss of innocence with him to boarding school at the Ogden Hall School for Boys. Lee's education takes place in many 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 from Lee's childhood returns to find out the truth of what happened, Just creates an opportunity for Lee to recognize the confluence of all these influences on his life. Just's prose is clean and powerful, and while Lee is a bit flat—even when he's bad, he's good—his coming-of-age is filled with rich observations and finely tuned details.