Exiles in the Garden - Hardcover

Just, Ward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0547195583 ISBN 13: 9780547195582

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009

Synopsis

"One of the most astute writers of American fiction" (New York Times Book Review) delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senator’s son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose émigré gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War — a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent.

 

At the center of the novel is Alec’s unforeseen reckoning with Lucia’s long-absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duran’s career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alec’s is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things — "terrible things, terrible things" — happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all.

Once again, "Ward Just writes the kind of books they say no one writes anymore: smart, well-crafted narratives — wise to the ways of the world — that use fiction to show us how we live" (Joseph Kanon, Los Angeles Times).

About this title

About the Author

WARD JUST's 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.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley For nearly a century the received wisdom in political Washington has been drawn from the famous speech Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," he said. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood . . . ; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of his achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory or defeat." Three and a half decades ago those words served as epigraph for "Facing the Lions," Tom Wicker's fine if now regrettably forgotten novel about ambition and power in Washington as seen through the story of a senator transparently based on the late Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The words never appear directly in Ward Just's even better novel, "Exiles in the Garden," but they always lurk just beneath the surface as Just examines, with subtlety, sensitivity and empathy, the lives of two men: Alec Malone, his protagonist, now about 70 years old, for whom "the civic life of the nation held no attraction," and his father, Erwin Harold "Kim" Malone, 95 years old, who "had been a senator for nine terms, fifty-four years, retired now for a decade and still alert on good days." Just, who himself was very much in the arena for Newsweek and The Washington Post during the 1960s (he left the paper a dozen years before I arrived, and we have never met), most notably as a correspondent in Vietnam, said farewell to that arena upon his departure and has been a writer of fiction ever since. "Exiles in the Garden" is his 16th novel and is, for my money, one of his three best, the others being "A Family Trust" (1978) and "An Unfinished Season" (2004). He summarized the preoccupations of his fiction in the title of a short story collection published in 1979: "Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women," though fathers and sons certainly should be added to that list. His books have never had spectacular sales, but most of them are still in print, impressive evidence that he has a loyal following even in this difficult time for the book industry. Like most of the rest of Just's fiction, "Exiles in the Garden" is deceptively quiet. It moves at a leisurely, reflective, even pensive pace, but the reader never loses sight of an undercurrent of tension. Alec is an only child whom his father envisioned going into politics, "commencing a dynasty; state attorney general, his father thought, then governor, and after that anything was possible." Alec, though, "preferred Shakespeare's life to the life of any one of his kings or pretenders, tormented men always grasping for that thing just out of reach." He became a photographer, went to work for a newspaper in Washington and did well, was asked by the managing editor if he'd like to do a six-week tour in Vietnam and responded with a "no thank you, he had a wife and young daughter," a choice that derailed his career but was true to his conviction that "photography glorifies," that "it's not trustworthy." The choice derailed his marriage as well. Lucia, his wife, born Czech but reared by her mother in wartime Switzerland, ran off with Nikolas, a dashing Hungarian, "a prodigy, a full professor of literature, a fixture in the lecture halls and at the many discreet protest meetings in Prague and Budapest and beyond." Taking their daughter Mathilde with her, she swept off to Europe, leaving Alec alone in a little house in Georgetown. Alec was startled and saddened by the letter he received from Lucia, telling him of her decision, but he got on about the business of life. He has since fashioned a career as freelance photographer and has developed "the usual habits of one who lived alone: a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour." He also has occasional liaisons with Annalise, a lovely and talented but second-tier actress in movies and television. He is faithful to her and she, apparently, to him, but theirs is a sometime thing; Alec is content with his bachelor life, his freelance assignments, his visits with Mathilde, who is now in her 40s and working, successfully, for the State Department. Thus "Exiles in the Garden" is not a "Washington novel" as the term is commonly understood, but it is very much in and of this city. Just deftly and sharply portrays the Washington that Alec had known as a boy and young man, the Washington in which his father had flourished as "a cloakroom man, his arm around someone's shoulder, a whispered confidence, a promise, often a threat." The Washington of the 1960s was still a quiet Southern city, having a rigid social structure with blacks firmly kept at the bottom, modest Fords and Chevys parked on Georgetown's streets, a palpable sense of promise and excitement as the young Kennedy Administration settled in. Now, though: "The grandes dames were gone. The elder statesmen were gone. The small town of [Alec's] youth was now a metropolis spilling over into the Virginia and Maryland countryside, farther each year. When you looked at the downtown, with its barriers and snipers on the roof of the White House, you could believe you were living in a garrison state. Alec noticed that his street was crowded with German automobiles, the large versions." In that lost Washington, when Alec and Lucia lived on the quiet Georgetown street, next door to them lived an elegant émigré couple who had regular cocktail parties in their rear garden, parties for other "displaced Europeans." Lucia was drawn to them, "finding something indomitable about them because they had lived through terrible times and had survived," and was delighted when she and Alec were invited to the parties. He, on the other hand, saw the partygoers as "damaged goods, a second-rate theatrical troupe giving nightly performances of the heartbreak of central Europe." Then, long after his divorce, he meets Lucia's father, Andre Duran, who "had fought bravely in the war and been imprisoned first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets for what appeared to be decades." Alec is "all but overcome with admiration for Andre Duran, whose endurance seemed to him all but superhuman," in contrast with his own life and his "knack for making beautiful pictures." Andre tries to explain that he "had no choice" except to go to war and fight as bravely as he could, but Alec remains unconvinced. Alec tells Annalise that Andre "reminded me of my father," because "those in the arena lived by the arena's rules, always opaque to outsiders." She replies, "Let up on yourself, Alec. You're an honorable man," but he remains unconvinced. Ward Just knows, though, that he is wrong, that there is honor outside the arena as well as in, that Alec's quiet life has had more than its share of dignity, accomplishment and resonance. It is not necessary to be a senator or a resistance warrior in order to make a contribution to the larger world. yardleyj@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Although several of his novels have been short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Ward Just is relatively unknown to readers. It is a shame, critics note, because the former Washington journalist and Vietnam War correspondent is particularly adept at conveying the unique brand of narcissism and ruthless ambition seen in Washington, D.C., political circles. One exception to the bountiful praise came from the Los Angeles Times critic, who felt that the passive, one-dimensional characters and weak storyline hampered the narrative. Overall, however, critics hailed Exiles in the Garden as an understated and compassionate, but no less powerful, account of a man questioning his life choices.

Starred Review. Few if any novelists have captured Washington politics with the astute insights of Just, who here casts his dispassionate eye on a man who comes to question whether one can achieve a well-lived life on the outskirts of political action. Born and bred to the political arena, Alec Malone, son of a powerhouse U.S. senator, becomes an outsider twice removed, first by choosing photography as his profession and then by turning down an assignment in Vietnam. Content with his wife Lucia, the daughter of a Czech refugee, Alec dislikes the neighborhood cocktail parties, where a cosmopolitan mix of émigrés and exiles makes Lucia aware of the cultural chasm running through her marriage. Alec is devastated when she leaves him and bemused when, much later, his daughter follows in Senator Malone's footsteps, though it's the sudden appearance of Lucia's long-lost father that provokes Alec to question the meaning of an existence that has avoided the barricades. Just writes with confidence and authority as he works through larger themes of politics, history, war and historical judgment. This intellectually rigorous narrative is absorbing, timely and very Washington. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Especially when he was alone Alec Malone had the habit of slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be confused with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while his reveries presented a kind of abstract grandeur, expressionist canvases in close focus, untitled. That was how he thought of them, and not only because of the score in the background, German music, voices, trumpets, metronomic bass drums, and now and again the suggestion of a tango or a march. The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old friends paying a visit. The friends aged as he did, becoming increasingly abstract now that he had begun to lose sight in his right eye, a hole in the macula that began as a pinprick but was now the size of an o. That eye saw only the periphery of things with any clarity. The condition was annoying, not disabling, since sight was a function not of one eye but of two and Alec’s left eye was sound. However, driving at night was an adventure. He did not permit himself to drive in fog because objects had a way of vanishing altogether. And there was some amusement — when he closed his left eye and looked at a human face with his right, that face appeared as an expressionist’s death’s-head, an image very like Munch’s The Scream.
     Alec had the usual habits of one who lived alone: a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour. He worked when he felt like it. He described himself to himself as leading a chamber-music sort of life except for the Wagnerian reveries. They were neutral fantasies, meaning they had nothing to do with the life he wished he had led — Alec was quite content with the one he had — or might lead in the future. He did not count himself a prophet. He returned often to his childhood but rarely lingered there. His childhood was so long ago that the events he remembered most vividly seemed to him to have happened to someone else and were incomplete in any case, washedout colors side by side with ink-black holes, a half-remembered country governed by a grim-faced man with a long nose, a figure from antiquity, perhaps a bildnis from Dürer’s sketchbook. Alec considered the long-nosed man a family heirloom, grandmother’s silver or the pendulum clock on the mantel, the one whose ticks and tocks sounded like pistol reports. He lost his footing in those early years in which the domestic life of his own family was usurped by the civic life of the nation. That was the life that counted. The Malone dinner table, his father presiding, was a combination quiz show and news conference.
     Quick now, Alec. How many congressional districts in Iowa? Which nations were signatories to the Locarno Pact? Who wrote “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears”?
     What was Glass-Steagall? Who was Colonel House?
     Where is Yalta?
     Question: What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference?
     Answer: I don’t know and I don’t care.
     Hush, Alec. Don’t disturb your father when he’s talking to Mr. Roosevelt. Don’t you know there’s a war on?
     À la recherche du temps Roosevelt. The president inhabited the house in Chevy Chase like a member of the family or a living god, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Alec’s father called him the Boss. The Boss wants this, the Boss wants that. The Boss sounded a little tired today but he’s leaving for Warm Springs tomorrow. In his reveries Alec conjured the president in his White House office, talking into the telephone in his marbled Hudson River voice, commanding an entire nation — its armies, its factories and farms, all its citizens great and small. Yet Alec had no sense of him as a man — not then, not later — and when he tentatively asked his father, the reply was bromidic. He was great. He was the greatest man his father had ever met, and he had met many, many of the highest men in the land, shaken their hands, spoken tête-à-tête, worked with them, worked against them. The Boss was different. The Boss lived on a different level, deriving his strength and his courage from — and here his father faltered, uncomfortable always in the realm of the mystical. Finally he said, His legs are useless, you know. He can hardly walk. But he likes a martini at the end of the day just like the rest of us, and there the comparison ends. Alec, I’d say he’s Shakespearean. That’s the best I can do.
     Alec nodded, wondering all the while which of Shakespeare’s kings his father had in mind — Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus? Henry V, no doubt, though that comparison did not seem apt. Shakespeare’s kings suffered the consequences of their will to power. The will to power was the evil in them, not that they did not have ample assistance from others — wives, false friends, rivals, the Fates. When the president died Alec’s father was inconsolable. Washington was suddenly a darker, lesser place. Then he was summoned by Harry Truman — they had never gotten along — who extended his hand and asked for help, not an easy thing for him to do. Mr. Truman was a prideful man, often vindictive. Of course Senator Malone agreed to do whatever Mr. Truman wanted done. There was a war on. Each man did his part willingly. But it wasn’t the same.
     For years Franklin D. Roosevelt figured in Alec’s reveries but eventually faded as Alec drifted upward, forward to his young manhood and early middle age and beyond, what he considered his meridian years — when he was out of his father’s house, out of his orbit, out from under, married to Lucia Duran and working in what his father dismissively called “snapshots” but which everyone else called photography. His father wanted his boy to follow him into politics, commencing a dynasty; state attorney general, his father thought, then governor, and after that anything was possible. The Boss had been a governor.
     No, Alec told his father.
     But — why ever not?
     I don’t believe in dynasties, Alec said, which was the truth but not the salient truth. The salient truth was that the civic life of the nation held no attraction. He preferred Shakespeare’s life to the life of any one of his kings or pretenders, tormented men always grasping for that thing just out of reach. Deluded men. Men adrift on a sea of troubles, some of their own making, some not. In any case, the Fates were in charge, part of the human equation along with ambition and restlessness. Alec was satisfied with his photography and his reveries, including the mundane, the look of ordinary things and the time of day, what the weather was like outside and who was present at the occasion, a cat slumbering in a splash of bright sunlight, red and yellow roses proliferating. Life’s excitement lay just outside the frame of reference, grandeur felt but not seen yet grandeur all the same. Alec’s reveries were his way of bringing life down to earth, so to speak.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0547195583
• ISBN 13: 9780547195582
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288