Forgetfulness: A Novel [Hardcover]

Which has done more to retard the upward progress of humankind, nationalism or religious fundamentalism? Both exert their malign influence in Ward Just's masterful new novel. This story of post 9/11 America is told in a refracted way that brings in subtle truths, sets them down, and gives you space to absorb them.

Thomas Railles is a portrait painter of some renown, an American expatriate living with his French wife Florette in a small village high in the Pyrenees. One autumn Sunday Florette goes out for a walk while Thomas entertains Bernhard and Russ, two old chums from his Wisconsin boyhood. She's found in the woods the following morning with her throat slit.

Bernhard and Russ work for one of America's intelligence agencies. While Thomas reels with shock, Bernhard calls in some chits from his French counterparts, who soon bring four Moroccan Arabs into custody. The French think the four men slipped across the Spanish border into France to carry out a terrorist mission. They murdered Florette because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bernhard brings Thomas to Le Havre to watch their interrogation. Thomas has no interest in the Moroccans' politics; he only wants to know what happened to his wife and why. Thomas asks for and gets permission to spend time alone with Yusef, the group's leader. What occurs between Thomas and Yusef in the interrogation room provides an unexpected and profound moral center to the story.

Thomas knew an old Spanish communist who introduced him to the German word "lebensluge," which translates as "the lie that makes life bearable." For the Spaniard, it was the belief that Communism is moral, even if the men who practice it aren't. For Russ and Bernhard, it's that American know-how and righteousness will force the world back into its proper alignment. For Antoine, the French interrogator who becomes Thomas' friend, it's the importance of doing things in the proper way, being "comme il faut." For Thomas, it's believing that a return to painting will get him past Florette's death.

Drinking doesn't dull Thomas' pain. Work doesn't lead to normalcy. Bringing the four terrorists to justice, so important to Bernhard, seems irrelevant. What finally offers redemption to Thomas are particularity and patience - making the effort to see the unique humanity of other people, even your enemies, and having the patience to find and inhabit small moments of grace when the world makes them available. Just offers this up as a more courageous path than the hollow machismo and expedient morality of Bernhard and the current US political leaders that he serves.

This is the wisest book I've read about the true ramifications of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Just gives us adult talk about the damage done when the world regresses to primitive, bloodthirsty tribalism. You can choose to meet it head on, inflicting more damage, or choose to retreat from its burgeoning evil. Either way you're diminished, and there's no clear path back to where you were before.

I haven't read any other novels by Ward Just. I can't recommend this one highly enough. If this is the level at which he writes, I'm eager to read more.

This novel succeeds beautifully in the opening scenes; Florette, suffering from a broken ankle due to a Sunday walk gone bad, is slowly freezing at the base of the Pyrenees. These opening pages get into her mind as she drifts in and out of time, recalling her life and wondering about the four strange men are who have half-heartedly come to her rescue, or what at first apears to be a rescue. Just's descriptions of the little things in Florette's memories are so vivid, you can feel the cold air coming over the mountains. Unfortunately, once Florette's story is done (and she exits the tale all too soon), I found the novel less captivating. There are later bright spots with the memories of the neighbor, Sir Thomas Granger, but Granger is also dead, having passed away soon before the story begins, and we have a novel where the dead are more interesting than the living. The main character of the story is Thomas, Florette's husband, an American expatriate, sometime espionage agent and one of the most passive characters to come along in some time.

When Just's novel focuses on the everyday effects of loss, it's devastating and moving. The story is much less successful at conveying American's attitudes in the contemporary world. Though the novel takes place within the past year (a mention of the London subway bombings provides this clue), many of the American characters have an immediate post-9/11 mindset and, sadly, seem to be possessed of one mind. The dialogue in these sections is clunky, forced and doesn't sound anything like the way real people speak. Obviously Just does know how to write dialogue as he shows us in other sections of the book; it's when he's trying to show us contemporary response to events that Just fails, as if he can't quite make it seem natural - and that's because it isn't. There are characters that seem to come from central casting, such as the Wisconsin policeman who says, "You'd better be on your way" and a Pennsylvania matron who, as much as I tried to think otherwise, came across as a Judi Dench character with an American accent. I was very captivated by the French village where the main characters lives, but now wonder if that may ring as falsely with the French as the American characters did with me.

This book is an interesting entry into the current cultural and political climate, but not a wholly satisfying one.

This book finds sixtyish Thomas Railles, an expatriate, a portrait artist, and sometimes participant in intelligence work for the US, living in a small French village in the Pyrenees with Florette, his French-born wife of five years. But his relaxed life takes an abrupt hit as Florette does not come back from a typical walk and is found the next day frozen to death with her throat slit.

One might think that the book would mainly consist of tracking down the perpetrators and imposing a suitable punishment. But Thomas is a man that is more accepting of life's turns, seeking to understand rather than exact revenge. The book is largely composed of Thomas' reflections and observations of life, where forgetfulness is both a positive and negative factor.

Thomas' artistic eye enables him to notice nuances in people whether it is the reclusive old gentleman living next door on the mountain, the village café operator, or the alleged perpetrator of the crime against his wife as he is being interrogated by the French intelligence service.

The book moves slowly - fortunately it is rather short - yet it never drags. Thomas' recalling of his past life from his boyhood in Wisconsin, to his life as a struggling artist in New York City, to his painting of a Spanish rebel as an exercise in intelligence gathering - all of these scenes interleaved with reflections on the present take the reader on a journey of understanding the subtleties of life right along with Thomas.

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