Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 1, 2011

I give this unusual, meandering novel credit: I had no idea where it was going yet it held my interest throughout its circuitous journey. More than that, it made me think. What starts as a story about a wealthy rogue at the end of the Nineteenth Century segues into a World War II-era story about a young man who invigorates a prep school football team before he begins collegiate life and pursues an interest in sculpture. The story takes seamless detours into tales of small town violence (a vicious assault upon a female student) and big city violence (a mugging on Chicago's South Side) while exploring questions of perspective and memory. Tying together the stories of the rogue and the intellectual are a boarding school, a cathouse, and a bust sculpted by Rodin.

Rodin's Debutante focuses on two characters. Tommy Ogden, the son of a wealthy railroad baron, has no need to work and so indulges his passions: hunting, sketching, and sleeping with the women provided by the "social club" that leases him a space for his engagements. To the dismay of his wife, Ogden converts their estate into a boarding school for boys who can't fit in elsewhere. The bulk of the novel follows Lee Goodell, the son of a small town judge, who attends Ogden Hall before pursuing an intellectual and artistic life at the University of Chicago and in Chicago's Hyde Park. Like Rodin, Goodell becomes a sculptor. Two episodes of violence are central to the story: the vicious assault of a girl who is Goodell's classmate before he attends Ogden Hall and Goodell's own mugging years later. The two attacks have very different consequences for the two lives ... and that, I think, is one of the novel's points: you never know how your life will turn out. You may or may not be able to shape your future; you may or may not be able to remember your past -- and you may or may not want to do either one.

Although most of the novel is narrated in the third person, Goodell tells his story in the first person in a couple of segments, a jarring shift in point of view that at first puzzled me. This may have been one more way for Ward Just to illustrate the importance of perspective, an issue that lies at the novel's heart. Sometimes perspectives differ and the truth of the matter is hard to know: A headmaster believes that people learn only from their defeats, while Ogden thinks that defeat teaches nothing: it "stays with you and becomes the expected thing."

The differing perspective of urban and rural America is one of the novel's most intriguing themes (small town America, according to one of the novel's voices, provides the country with armies while urban America provides governance) but the larger theme is how people view similar events in different ways, and how the truth, whatever it might be, often remains concealed -- just as the hidden interior of a sculpted stone may never be entirely revealed. At the same time, some perspectives in the novel parallel each other, leading to the same result for different reasons: the small town leaders don't want to publicize the assault of the school girl while residents of the South Side Chicago neighborhood want to keep a lid on Goodell's mugging. In each case, the community believes that airing the truth will lead to harm (the loss of a sense of communal safety in the small town, retributive police action in Chicago). From their perspectives, it is the community that stands to suffer the greatest harm from the crime, not the victim. Of course, the victims see it much differently.

While these ideas make the novel well worth reading and thinking about, the book might not appeal to readers looking for a conventional plot-driven story. Ward Just tells the story in a nonlinear style, resulting in the meandering feeling I mentioned; events trigger memories of other events, stories beget more stories. That didn't bother me but I suspect some readers will be put off by it. A more significant criticism to me is the novel's tone. I rarely felt an emotional connection, either positive or negative, to the characters. I don't necessarily need to like the characters to enjoy a novel, but I want the novel to make me feel something, and about all I felt while reading Rodin's Debutante was curiosity about what might happen next and admiration for Just's writing style. There's little dramatic tension; conflict, when it comes, is usually low key, often described in a voice so detached as to drain it of vitality. A couple of scenes involving Lee and a mugger and one involving Lee and the assault victim are exceptions, as is a wonderfully written scene in which young Lee overhears his father meeting with town leaders in the aftermath of the girl's assault. If the novel had reached that level of intensity more often, I would give it five stars and recommend it highly. I recommend it nonetheless, but for different reasons: the sureness of the writing style and the ideas it explores.

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