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Rodin's Debutante
Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living 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 Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys’ school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emotionally potent new novel. Lee’s life decisions ”to become a sculptor, to sojourn in the mean streets of the South Side, to marry into the haute-intellectual culture of Hyde Park”play out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago. Just’s signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin’s Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault o
263 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
20 people are currently reading
762 people want to read
About the author
Ward Just
36 books83 followersWard Just was a war correspondent, novelist, and short story author.
Ward Just graduated from Cranbrook School in 1953. He briefly attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left journalism to write fiction.
His influences include Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. His novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. His novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997. He has twice been a finalist for the O. Henry Award: in 1985 for his short story "About Boston," and again in 1986 for his short story "The Costa Brava, 1959." His fiction is often concerned with the influence of national politics on Americans' personal lives. Much of it is set in Washington, D.C., and foreign countries. Another common theme is the alienation felt by Midwesterners in the East.
Ward Just graduated from Cranbrook School in 1953. He briefly attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left journalism to write fiction.
His influences include Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. His novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. His novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997. He has twice been a finalist for the O. Henry Award: in 1985 for his short story "About Boston," and again in 1986 for his short story "The Costa Brava, 1959." His fiction is often concerned with the influence of national politics on Americans' personal lives. Much of it is set in Washington, D.C., and foreign countries. Another common theme is the alienation felt by Midwesterners in the East.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
April 11, 2011
I wanted to like this book much more than I did. It seemed as if there was a plot just waiting to come out, but it never quite jelled for me, as most of Just's books. It is old fashioned story telling with modern twists, but the characters' characters seem inchoate and there is a surprising lack of originality. Ogden, who donates his mansion to make it a school for misfits, seems to have enormous wealth that never runs out. Not possible or realistic given his lifestyle. Lee never seems to grow either as a person or as an artist. The structure is curious, shifting between first- and third-person, which is puzzling since it doesn't seem to offer great insights when Lee is relating his own version of this story. Sorry, but it just didn't seem to work.
March 1, 2011
Ward Just is a writer’s writer, as straightforward and gritty and no-nonsense as Chicago—the city from which he hails. His solid 17th novel carries a seemingly enigmatic title – Rodin’s Debutante – a curiosity, considering the book has nothing to do with Rodin or debutantes.
But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture -- possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Similarly, Lee Goodell, the key protagonist of Rodin’s Debutante, takes his own unformed life and sculpts it, in an education that stretches from the boarding school at the Ogden Hall School of Boys to the mean south side city streets of Chicago.
The story begins in the early 20th century with the bellicose Tommy Ogden, a rough-edged Chicago tycoon who thwarts his wife Maria’s desire to travel to Paris to commission her own Rodin bust; instead, he chooses to endow a Midwestern boy’s prep school. A Rodin bust of an anonymous debutante does eventually grace Ogden Hall’s Library, but it is not the bust of Maria Ogden, despite commonly accepted wisdom. It is “just appearances” and a metaphor for what life is all about.
Flash forward many decades. The story shifts to Lee Goodell. He and his family live in New Jesper, a quiet traditional town off the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lee’s innocence is shattered after a particularly violent sex crime of a classmate. Lee – a self-described observer of life – ends up at enrolling at Ogden Hall, where he excels; he, too, wants to sculpt. In a twist of fate, he meets the now reclusive millionaire and gushes to him, “I believe Rodin’s bust of your late wife is a wonderful work of art. It’s a great thing to have in the library. It’s an inspiration. It’s been an inspiration to me.” A bemused Tommy Ogden casually shatters that illusion…the first of many illusions that will be shattered for Lee.
And that is the book’s core theme: the divergence of false appearance and reality. Whether it’s the falsity of a respectable community where the truth never sees the light of day, the appearance of harmony in Hyde Park, which is rife with class and racial distinctions, or the falsity of the legend behind Rodin’s debutante marble statue, life is never what it seems, only what you make it.
The fact that Lee becomes a sculptor, too, is also no accident. He finds comfort in a slab of unformed marble, where possibilities are infinite, and where he has the control of shaping the outcome. In this career, the ideal of art and the reality of life are finally able to blend.
Lee Goodell is a good man…perhaps, a bit too good, which translates into not enough of the pockmarks and imperfections that lead to a fully-rounded and satisfying key character. Still, this is a solid piece of work, with sparse and powerful prose, rich observations, and a meticulously crafted plot. The sense of place, the crude glamour of rough-and-ready mid-century Chicago is spot-on. Rodin’s Debutante is a very worthy addition to Ward Just’s fine craftsman-like body of work.
But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture -- possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Similarly, Lee Goodell, the key protagonist of Rodin’s Debutante, takes his own unformed life and sculpts it, in an education that stretches from the boarding school at the Ogden Hall School of Boys to the mean south side city streets of Chicago.
The story begins in the early 20th century with the bellicose Tommy Ogden, a rough-edged Chicago tycoon who thwarts his wife Maria’s desire to travel to Paris to commission her own Rodin bust; instead, he chooses to endow a Midwestern boy’s prep school. A Rodin bust of an anonymous debutante does eventually grace Ogden Hall’s Library, but it is not the bust of Maria Ogden, despite commonly accepted wisdom. It is “just appearances” and a metaphor for what life is all about.
Flash forward many decades. The story shifts to Lee Goodell. He and his family live in New Jesper, a quiet traditional town off the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lee’s innocence is shattered after a particularly violent sex crime of a classmate. Lee – a self-described observer of life – ends up at enrolling at Ogden Hall, where he excels; he, too, wants to sculpt. In a twist of fate, he meets the now reclusive millionaire and gushes to him, “I believe Rodin’s bust of your late wife is a wonderful work of art. It’s a great thing to have in the library. It’s an inspiration. It’s been an inspiration to me.” A bemused Tommy Ogden casually shatters that illusion…the first of many illusions that will be shattered for Lee.
And that is the book’s core theme: the divergence of false appearance and reality. Whether it’s the falsity of a respectable community where the truth never sees the light of day, the appearance of harmony in Hyde Park, which is rife with class and racial distinctions, or the falsity of the legend behind Rodin’s debutante marble statue, life is never what it seems, only what you make it.
The fact that Lee becomes a sculptor, too, is also no accident. He finds comfort in a slab of unformed marble, where possibilities are infinite, and where he has the control of shaping the outcome. In this career, the ideal of art and the reality of life are finally able to blend.
Lee Goodell is a good man…perhaps, a bit too good, which translates into not enough of the pockmarks and imperfections that lead to a fully-rounded and satisfying key character. Still, this is a solid piece of work, with sparse and powerful prose, rich observations, and a meticulously crafted plot. The sense of place, the crude glamour of rough-and-ready mid-century Chicago is spot-on. Rodin’s Debutante is a very worthy addition to Ward Just’s fine craftsman-like body of work.
March 16, 2012
Very well-written, butI didn't feel that the book fulfilled its promise. The descriptions of Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood--home of the University of Chicago--at mid-century seemed to be true, but most of the rest of the novel is vague and ill-formed. A good deal of the book is about Ogden Hall, the slightly disreputable private boy's school that the protagonist, Lee Goodell, attended, but ultimately, except for one event from his school days, the presence of the school as a character in the novel isn't particularly successful. Likewise, one event from Goodell's youth in the town of New Jasper, a declining lakefront town, is obviously important to the coming of age of Goodell, but the full implications of this event aren't really explored. Just returns the focus to this event towards the end of the book by having the victim return to Goodell's life, but again, this doesn't seem to add much either to the development or understanding of his character.
March 8, 2011
This is an "emotionally potent novel," says the dust jacket, but the opposite is true. Like all of Just's novels, which are often about a young man coming of age in midcentury America, this one is emotionally dead, its characters remote. Just's style is distant, so we always feel at a remove. Has anyone ever cared what happened to one of these characters? They always seem to be sleepwalking through life. His habit of not using quotation marks adds to the sense of dialogue being spoken by ghosts. I was hoping to at least find out who raped the poor amnesiac Magda Serra, so she could get some closure, but Just disappears her, into the Midwestern ether.
February 22, 2011
Lee Goodell grows up in a tiny town just outside Chicago in the 1940’s. His father is an influential judge and an unofficial elder of the town. A tragedy occurs to one of Lee’s classmates and he secretly listens as a cabal consisting of a policeman, the owner of the local paper takes place in his father’s study. This group decides how to handle, or not handle, the situation. They gloss it over and the immigrant mother and daughter quietly leave town. Problem solved! Consequently Lee’s mother becomes scared for her son, believing the town and school is no longer safe. They send Lee to an Eton wannabe school and his life changes. There is a Rodin bronze in his school’s library that fascinates him and helps lead to his becoming a sculptor rather than a judge/lawyer as his father had wanted. Through the eyes of Tommy Ogdon, the founder of Lee’s new school we catch glimpses of turn of the century events. After Lee’s winning football season he and the aged Tommy meet briefly and exchange thoughts. Just makes clear that the earlier part of the 19th century was not the idyllic place we assume it was.
This review was based on an ebook galley supplied by the publisher.
3.5/5
This review was based on an ebook galley supplied by the publisher.
3.5/5
May 24, 2021
I like Ward Just and really enjoyed this. He's great at depicting a specific time and place, and I learned a lot about American culture through it, things that help put today's issues into perspective. I loved the sculpture parts, getting to see how a sculptor might think, and I loved the main character. He was good and strong but not too good, real. The central question of the novel is left to the trader to decide. I like that too.
March 13, 2011
Chicago and its outlying areas exert a crisp emotional current and brooding tension in this assured and shimmering coming-of-age story of bygone days. Rodin and his (fictional) Debutante sculpture provide both a specific and totemic significance as well as a mythical fever to the book and its themes, its force being largely symbolic. In the years before WW1, Tommy Ogden, a wealthy industrialist with a passion for hunting and a penchant for a brothel, spitefully denies his wife the money to commission a Rodin bust of herself. Instead, he turns his lavish mansion and estate, just outside of the city, into the Ogden School for Boys.
Years later, during the Cold War era, Lee Goodell is a student at Ogden and later the University of Chicago. Lee aspires to be a sculptor and a world traveler, eschewing his ancestral heritage of practicing law. The ambitious desire was ignited partly by the Debutante sculpture that stood in the school's library, and fueled further by some truly cutting incidents in his life. If you think about sculpture as something that forms out of removal, a shape and dimension that emerges from a formless origin, and a meaning that comes out of chiseling and whittling, then you will arrive at a parallel for much of the book's thesis.
Lee is that formless youth who lived in the provincial, sheltered town of New Jesper on the shores of Lake Michigan. His father, a judge, was a titan in the community and a governor of suppression. He was instrumental, along with his secret committee, of stifling the full story of a vicious sex crime and quelling the murder of a hobo from the wrong side of the tracks. Judge Goodell had honorable but misguided intentions, and Lee overheard these secret meetings, which became a defining moment in his life. Soon after, he moved with his parents to the tony and suburban North Shore.
Once Lee goes off to college, he meets a worldly, sophisticated group of students that open his eyes to life's more expansive possibilities. Another defining moment occurs when he becomes the victim of a crime on the gritty South Side. Rather than turning him away, he became more enriched and dedicated to establishing himself in this rich city of turbulence, truculence, and diversity.
This is my first Ward Just book, and yet over the years I have collected several of his novels, now beckoning me from my bookcase. I look forward to more of his silky, supple, chiseled writing. His depiction of Chicago is superb, rousing me with its teeming, provocative nature. Just's ability to portray the city occasionally eclipsed his less rounded characters. You read him for the stately prose, and for the themes that come alive through the heartbeat of Chicago. Allusions to Melville's Omoo and Balzac's Old Goriot are prevalent in the book, and parallel this novel by shoring up a lot about class distinction and locale.
The characters and plot are efficiently portrayed, and at times they are subverted by the themes. Just was occasionally expeditious in turning points that I would have wanted to see more fleshed out, some landmark moments in Lee's life. However, I think Just intended for the characters to be less individual than a product of a political landscape, a locale and a time--an homage to Chicago's twentieth century, and to those tumultuous memories. In Just's story, the city inhabited the people as much as the people inhabited the city.
Years later, during the Cold War era, Lee Goodell is a student at Ogden and later the University of Chicago. Lee aspires to be a sculptor and a world traveler, eschewing his ancestral heritage of practicing law. The ambitious desire was ignited partly by the Debutante sculpture that stood in the school's library, and fueled further by some truly cutting incidents in his life. If you think about sculpture as something that forms out of removal, a shape and dimension that emerges from a formless origin, and a meaning that comes out of chiseling and whittling, then you will arrive at a parallel for much of the book's thesis.
Lee is that formless youth who lived in the provincial, sheltered town of New Jesper on the shores of Lake Michigan. His father, a judge, was a titan in the community and a governor of suppression. He was instrumental, along with his secret committee, of stifling the full story of a vicious sex crime and quelling the murder of a hobo from the wrong side of the tracks. Judge Goodell had honorable but misguided intentions, and Lee overheard these secret meetings, which became a defining moment in his life. Soon after, he moved with his parents to the tony and suburban North Shore.
Once Lee goes off to college, he meets a worldly, sophisticated group of students that open his eyes to life's more expansive possibilities. Another defining moment occurs when he becomes the victim of a crime on the gritty South Side. Rather than turning him away, he became more enriched and dedicated to establishing himself in this rich city of turbulence, truculence, and diversity.
This is my first Ward Just book, and yet over the years I have collected several of his novels, now beckoning me from my bookcase. I look forward to more of his silky, supple, chiseled writing. His depiction of Chicago is superb, rousing me with its teeming, provocative nature. Just's ability to portray the city occasionally eclipsed his less rounded characters. You read him for the stately prose, and for the themes that come alive through the heartbeat of Chicago. Allusions to Melville's Omoo and Balzac's Old Goriot are prevalent in the book, and parallel this novel by shoring up a lot about class distinction and locale.
The characters and plot are efficiently portrayed, and at times they are subverted by the themes. Just was occasionally expeditious in turning points that I would have wanted to see more fleshed out, some landmark moments in Lee's life. However, I think Just intended for the characters to be less individual than a product of a political landscape, a locale and a time--an homage to Chicago's twentieth century, and to those tumultuous memories. In Just's story, the city inhabited the people as much as the people inhabited the city.
April 7, 2011
http://knowthyself-mb.blogspot.com/20...
I finished Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante two days ago and I can't even remember the last name of the protagonist. I think his name was Lee Goodell. The other main character, I can't remember his first name, but his last name was Ogden. Here's my problem with the book, I never understood the point of it. The first part was about Ogden and his hunting and and his fights with his wife and his creating a school for boys, called Ogden. This Ogden is an ass to everybody and he likes to kill animals, but he paints. Then out of nowhere he decides to create a school for boys out of the estate that he and his wife were presently living in. Years later, in the second part of the book, Lee attends the school, becomes a fairly good football player, ends up attending University of Chicago and becomes a sculptor.
Not for one minute did I feel any sympathy, empathy, or compassion for Lee or Ogden. How can one enjoy a book when the characters are flat and uninteresting?
In the past Just books that I've read, they've had heart and an endearing quality, especially the incredible An Unfinished Season. That was akin to the Great American Novel. Whereas Rodin's Debutante is just a novel by an American. And not a very good novel at that.
*Advanced Reading Copy of Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante provided courtesy of NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
I finished Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante two days ago and I can't even remember the last name of the protagonist. I think his name was Lee Goodell. The other main character, I can't remember his first name, but his last name was Ogden. Here's my problem with the book, I never understood the point of it. The first part was about Ogden and his hunting and and his fights with his wife and his creating a school for boys, called Ogden. This Ogden is an ass to everybody and he likes to kill animals, but he paints. Then out of nowhere he decides to create a school for boys out of the estate that he and his wife were presently living in. Years later, in the second part of the book, Lee attends the school, becomes a fairly good football player, ends up attending University of Chicago and becomes a sculptor.
Not for one minute did I feel any sympathy, empathy, or compassion for Lee or Ogden. How can one enjoy a book when the characters are flat and uninteresting?
In the past Just books that I've read, they've had heart and an endearing quality, especially the incredible An Unfinished Season. That was akin to the Great American Novel. Whereas Rodin's Debutante is just a novel by an American. And not a very good novel at that.
*Advanced Reading Copy of Ward Just's Rodin's Debutante provided courtesy of NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
August 8, 2011
Rodin's Debutante is not up to Just's high standards in such novels as An Unfinished Season and The Weather in Berlin. Rodin lacks focus. Is it about a Rodin bust of Marie, Tommy Ogden's wife or someone else? Does the answer show that you can't believe what everyone else thinks?
Tommy Ogden is the scion of a railroad baron and, as such does not work but hunts. He deciders to turn the huge family mansion into a boys' school. The school, at best, is mediocre plagued by high turnover in the staff and administration and boys who do not study. Is the message here that education depends on more than money?
Rodin is also a coming of age novel about Lee Goodell.
Still another theme is the affects of violence on towns and neighborhoods. Lee encounters life changing violence in his home town New Jasper, Illinois and the areas surrounding Hyde Park in Chicago.
A disappointment
Tommy Ogden is the scion of a railroad baron and, as such does not work but hunts. He deciders to turn the huge family mansion into a boys' school. The school, at best, is mediocre plagued by high turnover in the staff and administration and boys who do not study. Is the message here that education depends on more than money?
Rodin is also a coming of age novel about Lee Goodell.
Still another theme is the affects of violence on towns and neighborhoods. Lee encounters life changing violence in his home town New Jasper, Illinois and the areas surrounding Hyde Park in Chicago.
A disappointment
June 17, 2014
Another book with an overly gruesome and detailed account of sexual violence. Completely gratuitous. The young girl who was raped was only briefly mentioned and then appeared later in the novel to meet with someone who knew about it, to try to bring closure to what happened. This processing of her trauma did not require a detailed accounting of the violence. Also, a cringing romanticization of Hyde Park area in Chicago and a newly married couple's trip to Italy. What was this book about anyway?! I gave this a 2 instead of a 1 because of a few nicely written passages.
December 28, 2019
Learning of Just's passing I pulled his Rodin's Debutante off my physical TBR shelf.
"Tell me this, she said. Has your life worked out the way you thought it would?"~from Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just
A small town is shocked by the violent attack of a teenage girl in the local school and the leaders of society convince the local newspaper editor to bury the story.
Teenage Lee's mother convinces his father to leave the town of his ancestors for a safer neighborhood.
Odgen Hall School of Boys is Lee's chosen school, housed in the private home of Tommy Odgen whose wealth allowed him the luxury of pursuing his love of shooting--and his love of the local cathouse. One of the most chilling scenes I have ever read occurs when a young Tommy, hunting on his father's grounds, sees an interloper hunting. He gets the man in his sights, justifying his intended action. Tommy establishes the school to spite his wife. His lawyer Bert Marks handles the business for him.
Lee helps the school team to have a winning season and is noticed by Tommy, who upon meeting the boy warns that "you don't learn a damned thing by defeat." Tommy then goes on a rage about newspapermen, "They'll take everything if you let them," he growls.
In the house remained a sculpture by Rodin of a Chicago debutante. Lee was enchanted by the sculpture and it impels him to pursue the art of working in stone.
Lee goes to university, renting a South Chicago room for his studio. Resisting a knife attack leaves him with a scar. Lee meets a girl, he becomes successful.
The victim of the attack that drove Lee's family from their home returns, seeking answers. She has no memory of what happened and hopes Lee will prompt her memory.
"You mean a thing's better not known than known."
"It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown."
"She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose?"
"I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said."~from Rodin's Debutante
I love Ward's writing.
"Tell me this, she said. Has your life worked out the way you thought it would?"~from Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just
A small town is shocked by the violent attack of a teenage girl in the local school and the leaders of society convince the local newspaper editor to bury the story.
Teenage Lee's mother convinces his father to leave the town of his ancestors for a safer neighborhood.
Odgen Hall School of Boys is Lee's chosen school, housed in the private home of Tommy Odgen whose wealth allowed him the luxury of pursuing his love of shooting--and his love of the local cathouse. One of the most chilling scenes I have ever read occurs when a young Tommy, hunting on his father's grounds, sees an interloper hunting. He gets the man in his sights, justifying his intended action. Tommy establishes the school to spite his wife. His lawyer Bert Marks handles the business for him.
Lee helps the school team to have a winning season and is noticed by Tommy, who upon meeting the boy warns that "you don't learn a damned thing by defeat." Tommy then goes on a rage about newspapermen, "They'll take everything if you let them," he growls.
In the house remained a sculpture by Rodin of a Chicago debutante. Lee was enchanted by the sculpture and it impels him to pursue the art of working in stone.
Lee goes to university, renting a South Chicago room for his studio. Resisting a knife attack leaves him with a scar. Lee meets a girl, he becomes successful.
The victim of the attack that drove Lee's family from their home returns, seeking answers. She has no memory of what happened and hopes Lee will prompt her memory.
"You mean a thing's better not known than known."
"It depends on what you fear most, the known or the unknown."
"She offered a ghost of a smile. Do you have to choose?"
"I imagine it's chosen for you, Lee said."~from Rodin's Debutante
I love Ward's writing.
March 10, 2011
FIRST SENTENCE: This is a true story,or true as far as it goes.
The novel opens with the story of an anonymous debutante whose home is Astor Street in Chicago, traveling through Europe with her mother, who visits Rodin's atelier in Depot des Marbres, where the artist sculpts a bust of her for her eighteenth birthday.
We then meet Tommy Ogden near the start of the first World War, a wealthy man whose first love is shooting and the thrill of the hunt, at his dinner table, in a heated argument with Marie, his wife, who insists that she MUST have her own bust made. In front of their guests, including Bert Marks, the man who would continue to be his long-time attorney, Tommy finally breaks the news to Marie that he is donating the house his father built; and that she will need to clear out her things before he gets back from his shooting trip to Idaho. Ogden Hall, with 42 rooms, a vast library, a solarium, garden room, and a kitchen the size of a tennis court, becomes The Ogden Hall School for Boys, designed to be a prep school that will accept even those boys that other prep schools turned out or away.
Flash forward In New Jesper in the 1940's, a mill town whose main industry is the Bing Factory, turning out tennis rackets by the thousands. Lee Goodell's father is a probate judge and part of the circle of small-town power, including Mayor Bannerman, Walter Bing, Police Chief Grosza, and Alfred Swan, who make the decisions that keep the town going. When a hobo is brutally murdered, Lee is forbidden to wander and play down by the tracks. When a girl named Magda Serra is brutally raped at the high school, the power circle decide to downplay the publicity, and eventually Magda and her mother move away.
The rape is the final straw for Lee's mother, however, and she finally convinces her husband to move away from his New Jester roots and take up residence in North Shore. The search for a good boy's school ends up with Lee attending Ogden Hall, where Tommy Ogden and his wife Marie have achieved legendary status, and the Rodin bust in the dining hall is rumored to be that of Marie.
The reader follows Lee throughout his Ogden time, with a headmaster named Gus who feels that the lessons in Melville's Omoo are good lessons for the boys to learn, but who eventually leaves for Patagonia with his mistress Anjelica. Lee has a short encounter with Tommy himself, who encourages his dream to be a sculptor.
We continue to follow Lee through his university life, his marriage, his travels to Europe, and his eventual meeting with Magda years after the event that shaped both of their lives.
The novel is low-key, but with some larger-than-life characters, and a cathouse tying it all together. The writing is superb, but, for this reader, the novel lacked a cohesive plot or meaning. It flows, but it ends up flowing into a wall of nothingness. I personally like to see more concrete meaning, more of a point, more of a connection with the characters.
QUOTES (from an eGalley; may be different in final copy):
Tommy Ogden was unpredictable to say the least of it and an atmosphere of violence followed him wherever he went.
They were serious people, the jazzmen. They had gravity. There was not a mill on earth they had not been through time and again. That was the source of their music and while you wouldn't wish the mills on anyone, something good came of it, this original American art form imitated everywhere but never duplicated because it rose from a specific condition.
Fact is, the saint needs the devil more than he thinks he does. Without the devil, the saint's just another old fart standing on a soapbox talking to himself.
. . . where he came from secrets were treasured. They were the coin of the realm. If it wasn't a secret it wasn't serious.
Writing: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Plot: 3 out of 5 stars
Characters: 3 out of 5 stars
Reading Immersion: 3 out 5 stars
BOOK RATING: 3.375 out of 5 stars
The novel opens with the story of an anonymous debutante whose home is Astor Street in Chicago, traveling through Europe with her mother, who visits Rodin's atelier in Depot des Marbres, where the artist sculpts a bust of her for her eighteenth birthday.
We then meet Tommy Ogden near the start of the first World War, a wealthy man whose first love is shooting and the thrill of the hunt, at his dinner table, in a heated argument with Marie, his wife, who insists that she MUST have her own bust made. In front of their guests, including Bert Marks, the man who would continue to be his long-time attorney, Tommy finally breaks the news to Marie that he is donating the house his father built; and that she will need to clear out her things before he gets back from his shooting trip to Idaho. Ogden Hall, with 42 rooms, a vast library, a solarium, garden room, and a kitchen the size of a tennis court, becomes The Ogden Hall School for Boys, designed to be a prep school that will accept even those boys that other prep schools turned out or away.
Flash forward In New Jesper in the 1940's, a mill town whose main industry is the Bing Factory, turning out tennis rackets by the thousands. Lee Goodell's father is a probate judge and part of the circle of small-town power, including Mayor Bannerman, Walter Bing, Police Chief Grosza, and Alfred Swan, who make the decisions that keep the town going. When a hobo is brutally murdered, Lee is forbidden to wander and play down by the tracks. When a girl named Magda Serra is brutally raped at the high school, the power circle decide to downplay the publicity, and eventually Magda and her mother move away.
The rape is the final straw for Lee's mother, however, and she finally convinces her husband to move away from his New Jester roots and take up residence in North Shore. The search for a good boy's school ends up with Lee attending Ogden Hall, where Tommy Ogden and his wife Marie have achieved legendary status, and the Rodin bust in the dining hall is rumored to be that of Marie.
The reader follows Lee throughout his Ogden time, with a headmaster named Gus who feels that the lessons in Melville's Omoo are good lessons for the boys to learn, but who eventually leaves for Patagonia with his mistress Anjelica. Lee has a short encounter with Tommy himself, who encourages his dream to be a sculptor.
We continue to follow Lee through his university life, his marriage, his travels to Europe, and his eventual meeting with Magda years after the event that shaped both of their lives.
The novel is low-key, but with some larger-than-life characters, and a cathouse tying it all together. The writing is superb, but, for this reader, the novel lacked a cohesive plot or meaning. It flows, but it ends up flowing into a wall of nothingness. I personally like to see more concrete meaning, more of a point, more of a connection with the characters.
QUOTES (from an eGalley; may be different in final copy):
Tommy Ogden was unpredictable to say the least of it and an atmosphere of violence followed him wherever he went.
They were serious people, the jazzmen. They had gravity. There was not a mill on earth they had not been through time and again. That was the source of their music and while you wouldn't wish the mills on anyone, something good came of it, this original American art form imitated everywhere but never duplicated because it rose from a specific condition.
Fact is, the saint needs the devil more than he thinks he does. Without the devil, the saint's just another old fart standing on a soapbox talking to himself.
. . . where he came from secrets were treasured. They were the coin of the realm. If it wasn't a secret it wasn't serious.
Writing: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Plot: 3 out of 5 stars
Characters: 3 out of 5 stars
Reading Immersion: 3 out 5 stars
BOOK RATING: 3.375 out of 5 stars
December 11, 2013
This one was disappointing. I had never read anything by Ward Just before, but the story sounded interesting and I expected to like it. I had a hard time getting into it and even set the book aside for a while to read something else. When I came back to it it was a little better, but I couldn't find the focus: I didn't know who or what the story was about. Tommy Ogden and Lee seemed two vastly separate stories despite the connection of the school and their meeting at the football game, and which one is the main character? It would have been better to pick a guy and tell his story from beginning to end instead of starting with Tommy, jumping to Lee, giving us more dirt on Tommy, going back to Lee, leaving holes in Tommy's story, such as what happened with his wife Marie, and never fully realizing Lee, who just seems to react to the situations around him and get carried along by the currents of life. And did I miss what Lee was sculpting all this time? His artwork seemed very vague; aside from the scar he gave one of his pieces, I never really knew if he was sculpting people or abstract stuff. I also wondered why was it necessary to keep switching back and forth from third to first person narration. This choice did not strike me as aiding the story in any way. The interesting material was there in this book, but I think it was poorly presented; it lacked aim and impact and was an altogether unsatisfying read.
April 7, 2011
“What a masterful storyteller Ward Just is!” exclaimed the Minneapolis Star Tribune, mirroring general sentiment. All critics appreciated Ward Just’s realistic prose and the themes that run through much of his work, such as the alienation of characters who move from small towns to cities. They also thought the characters dreamed up for Rodin’s Debutante were superbly realized. However, they expressed different feelings about the book’s plot structure. Some reviewers thought Just had brilliantly reconceptualized the Künstlerroman (or a novel about the maturation of an artist) by abandoning many of the clichés of the coming-of-age narrative. But some, while appreciating what Just was trying to do, felt that the relationships between the various people and places in the book were just too confusing to enjoy. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
August 17, 2012
I think Ward Just has set out to explore the political and personal idiosycreses of Americans in the twentieth century. At any rate, this one is about the mid-west and the loss of innocence of the people of a small town outside of Chicago. After having read an inordinate number of novels this year about old men trying to make sense out of their lives, it was a relief to have the protagonist be a young man finding his way in life(not an original plot line either, I know). I liked this one very much, and I'm becoming a fan of Ward Just.
March 7, 2011
Here’s my review of Ward Just’s “Rodin’s Debutante”
Crazy as he is, Tommy is the sort of oddball who could usurp Just’s novel. But in part two, Just dexterously melds Tommy’s story with Lee Goodell’s. Lee begins his life in fictitious, blue-collar New Jesper, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago. Times are tough in New Jesper, and Just vividly portrays out-of-work men knocking on back doors looking for handouts.
http://ow.ly/4cQPm
--Joe
August 23, 2012
This is the first book by Just that I have read, surprising because it's his 17th novel. The books strikes me as more form than substance. The prose is stylish, but the plot seems contrived and the characters are somewhat flat. For instance, I was puzzled by why Lee, the protagonist, or perhaps his parents, would choose a school as peculiar and substandard as Ogden Hall, and the whole plot hinges on this choice. It doesn't help that none of the characters appealed to me very much.
September 3, 2011
This is a strange one. The writing is exceptional, but the structure is basically unsound, and the narrative voice reels around like a folk dance. I think the point was to contrast 2 artistic types, and that the contrast may have had something to do with empathy. Beyond that, I'll have to peruse the reviews here and see if someone's willing to clue me in.
September 9, 2011
Read this on vacation last week. Very good. Involves issues of power and conscience and how memory is shaped by one's experiences. Involves lawyers, Chicago's South Side, crime, coming-of-age of a young boy. Confession: picked it because it was on the President's summer reading list.
September 7, 2022
Ward Just tends to write two types of novels: either a page-turning, inside look at government and journalistic intrigue, or else a beautifully evoked sense of a young man growing up in small-town, Midwest America in the middle of the twentieth century (often with a local newspaper somewhere in the story).
"Rodin's Debutante" is an example of the second type, but not one of Just's best. In this case, the young man is Lee Goodell, the only son of the probate judge of New Jesper, a fictitious distant suburb of Chicago. Goodell's father is one of a handful of town leaders (also including the mayor, the bank president, the corporation counsel, the owner of the dominant local company, and the newspaper publisher) who determine where streetlights are placed and what the public knows of what happens in the town. After a high school student is raped in a particularly vicious manner, and the leaders essentially cover up the crime, Goodell's parents decide that their bucolic little hometown is no longer a safe place to raise Lee, and they move to one of the classier neighborhoods of Chicago. Lee's horizons widen somewhat when he enrolls at the University of Chicago and sets up a sculpture studio in a largely Black and poor section of the city.
I've always been a fan of Just's understated -- almost newspaper-esque -- style, in which he lays out the facts without drumming into readers' heads what the characters are thinking or feeling. Unfortunately, in his small-town novels, Just has another tendency, which I like less, of writing plots that meander. He establishes what seem like significant "ledes" (to continue the newspaper metaphor) -- in this case, the rape and also the founding of Ogden Hall, the odd boarding school that Lee attends. But then ... nothing much comes of them. Lee establishes his career, marries, has kids, maintains good relations with his parents and in-laws despite disappointing his father by not becoming a lawyer...
You could say, of course, that that's exactly what life is like. Fair enough, but novels are supposed to be lifelike, not carbon copies of our (mostly boring) lives.
Perhaps Just saves his narrative excitement for the insider novels, which really are engrossing and unique.
"Rodin's Debutante" is an example of the second type, but not one of Just's best. In this case, the young man is Lee Goodell, the only son of the probate judge of New Jesper, a fictitious distant suburb of Chicago. Goodell's father is one of a handful of town leaders (also including the mayor, the bank president, the corporation counsel, the owner of the dominant local company, and the newspaper publisher) who determine where streetlights are placed and what the public knows of what happens in the town. After a high school student is raped in a particularly vicious manner, and the leaders essentially cover up the crime, Goodell's parents decide that their bucolic little hometown is no longer a safe place to raise Lee, and they move to one of the classier neighborhoods of Chicago. Lee's horizons widen somewhat when he enrolls at the University of Chicago and sets up a sculpture studio in a largely Black and poor section of the city.
I've always been a fan of Just's understated -- almost newspaper-esque -- style, in which he lays out the facts without drumming into readers' heads what the characters are thinking or feeling. Unfortunately, in his small-town novels, Just has another tendency, which I like less, of writing plots that meander. He establishes what seem like significant "ledes" (to continue the newspaper metaphor) -- in this case, the rape and also the founding of Ogden Hall, the odd boarding school that Lee attends. But then ... nothing much comes of them. Lee establishes his career, marries, has kids, maintains good relations with his parents and in-laws despite disappointing his father by not becoming a lawyer...
You could say, of course, that that's exactly what life is like. Fair enough, but novels are supposed to be lifelike, not carbon copies of our (mostly boring) lives.
Perhaps Just saves his narrative excitement for the insider novels, which really are engrossing and unique.
December 19, 2021
I’ve seen Just referred to as “a writer’s writer” and the description fits. This is a very dense book - every word and paragraph is carefully chosen. A sort of coming of age story concerning Lee Goodall and told in the first and third person. Lee is guided and even haunted by events, people and thoughts both internal and external. The characters who enter and exit his life - Tommy Ogden, Magda Serra, the assailant who leaves him permanently scarred, a black physician, his father and others are all there for a reason.
Some May quibble with the time jumps which occur without knowledge of what happened in the interval but for me, this book is a character study in which the plot is pushed into the background in favour of the message.
Just is a wonderful and under appreciated writer.
Some May quibble with the time jumps which occur without knowledge of what happened in the interval but for me, this book is a character study in which the plot is pushed into the background in favour of the message.
Just is a wonderful and under appreciated writer.
December 15, 2017
3.5***
While I found nothing to like in 1890s wealthy hunter, Tommy Ogden, apart from his penchant for drawing, the boys school he founds outside of Chicago, Ogden Hall, introduces us to student Lee Goodell who is quite interesting as an observer, traveler and sculptor. Through Lee, Ward shares nuances of race relations and social order in 1920s Chicago, I appreciated that history.
While I found nothing to like in 1890s wealthy hunter, Tommy Ogden, apart from his penchant for drawing, the boys school he founds outside of Chicago, Ogden Hall, introduces us to student Lee Goodell who is quite interesting as an observer, traveler and sculptor. Through Lee, Ward shares nuances of race relations and social order in 1920s Chicago, I appreciated that history.
May 24, 2020
I love Ward Just quite a bit, and this wasn't bad by any means, but it just wasn't that interesting to me.
April 30, 2012
Ward Just's newest novel, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, is a fascinating and absorbing read however you want to interpret it. It is, perhaps more than anything else, a coming-of-age story, but it is also very much about "the enigma of class in America."
The story of young Lee Goodell, only child of a judge in the small town of New Jesper, north of Chicago, is one of privilege, private schools and university with a generous "allowance." The town has it's own "Committee" of upper class citizens who make the decisions about how the town will operate and exactly what the working class should know. Lee's father is the unofficial head of this group, which also includes the banker, the newspaper publisher-editor, the mayor, and a few other wealthy townsmen. The story pivots around two shocking unsolved crimes in the town, the details of which are squelched by the Committee 'for the good of the community." Nevertheless, these events mark the end of innocence for Lee and the end of the era of prosperity for the town. Soon after these events, Lee's family moves to the more prosperous and prestigious North Shore and Lee finishes his high school years in the private academy, Ogden Hall School for Boys, a struggling still-new institution already steeped in myths and lies which has its own dark secrets regarding its founder and its origins.
Lee, a serious student, makes the best of his years there, despite the school's doubtful pedigree and makeshift faculty. He finds an ally in the departing headmaster, August 'Gus' Allprice. (I couldn't help but wonder if 'Gus' was somehow meant to reflect some aspect of Auguste Rodin, whose rushed and imperfect sculpture of the nameless Chicago debutante graced the school's library.) With Allprice's aid (and funds from the founder), Lee helps to fashion a winning football team his senior year, one that would become legend as "the undefeated season." This accomplishment arose several times in the course of the narrative, prompting me to think often of Just's earlier novel, AN UNFINISHED SEASON, also a coming-of-age tale.
Lee Goodell goes on to the University of Chicago where he takes up sculpture, and, like Rodin, he works single-mindedly to his own vision, and also like Rodin, finds his work panned and written off by the Chicago critics. (But his first showing of his marbles are commercially successful.)
There are so many things to think about here it is hard to summarize them all. Allprice's seafaring background and his fascination with Melville's lesser-known South Seas novel, OMOO, and the headmaster's subsequent escape to Patagonia and the South Seas, along with his paramour, Anjelica. And then there is Lee's own discovery of Chicago's South Side with its own particular charms and dangers.
There is a Jamesian quality to the richly descriptive passages of the Chicago milieu of the early 1950s, and yet the dialogue between Lee and Laura is often clipped and Hemingwayesque. Just also indulges his obvious interest in music with his frequent allusions to the jazz and blues scenes of Chicago in the McCarthy era. These musical interludes made me remember another fine Chicago novel I read recently, Robert Hellenga's BLUES LESSONS.
One device which puzzled me here was the shift in point-of-view, from omniscient narrator to first-person, Lee's voice. The first time was when Lee described his childhood and early adolescence, up to the point of the shocking atrocities of rape and murder, the details of which the "Committee" suppressed, but which nevertheless changed the community forever. The second time Lee's voice surfaces is when he is older, married and has a meeting with the girl who had been raped. The change in POV is certainly effective, but I just couldn't figure out why it was implemented. Something to ponder for a while.
A rich and thought-provoking work, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, no question. If there is a moral, it might be found in a sentiment from Victor Hugo mentioned toward the end - "a just government encouraged the rich and protected the poor." There's that matter of class in America again. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with Hugo, but it's something to think about.
The story of young Lee Goodell, only child of a judge in the small town of New Jesper, north of Chicago, is one of privilege, private schools and university with a generous "allowance." The town has it's own "Committee" of upper class citizens who make the decisions about how the town will operate and exactly what the working class should know. Lee's father is the unofficial head of this group, which also includes the banker, the newspaper publisher-editor, the mayor, and a few other wealthy townsmen. The story pivots around two shocking unsolved crimes in the town, the details of which are squelched by the Committee 'for the good of the community." Nevertheless, these events mark the end of innocence for Lee and the end of the era of prosperity for the town. Soon after these events, Lee's family moves to the more prosperous and prestigious North Shore and Lee finishes his high school years in the private academy, Ogden Hall School for Boys, a struggling still-new institution already steeped in myths and lies which has its own dark secrets regarding its founder and its origins.
Lee, a serious student, makes the best of his years there, despite the school's doubtful pedigree and makeshift faculty. He finds an ally in the departing headmaster, August 'Gus' Allprice. (I couldn't help but wonder if 'Gus' was somehow meant to reflect some aspect of Auguste Rodin, whose rushed and imperfect sculpture of the nameless Chicago debutante graced the school's library.) With Allprice's aid (and funds from the founder), Lee helps to fashion a winning football team his senior year, one that would become legend as "the undefeated season." This accomplishment arose several times in the course of the narrative, prompting me to think often of Just's earlier novel, AN UNFINISHED SEASON, also a coming-of-age tale.
Lee Goodell goes on to the University of Chicago where he takes up sculpture, and, like Rodin, he works single-mindedly to his own vision, and also like Rodin, finds his work panned and written off by the Chicago critics. (But his first showing of his marbles are commercially successful.)
There are so many things to think about here it is hard to summarize them all. Allprice's seafaring background and his fascination with Melville's lesser-known South Seas novel, OMOO, and the headmaster's subsequent escape to Patagonia and the South Seas, along with his paramour, Anjelica. And then there is Lee's own discovery of Chicago's South Side with its own particular charms and dangers.
There is a Jamesian quality to the richly descriptive passages of the Chicago milieu of the early 1950s, and yet the dialogue between Lee and Laura is often clipped and Hemingwayesque. Just also indulges his obvious interest in music with his frequent allusions to the jazz and blues scenes of Chicago in the McCarthy era. These musical interludes made me remember another fine Chicago novel I read recently, Robert Hellenga's BLUES LESSONS.
One device which puzzled me here was the shift in point-of-view, from omniscient narrator to first-person, Lee's voice. The first time was when Lee described his childhood and early adolescence, up to the point of the shocking atrocities of rape and murder, the details of which the "Committee" suppressed, but which nevertheless changed the community forever. The second time Lee's voice surfaces is when he is older, married and has a meeting with the girl who had been raped. The change in POV is certainly effective, but I just couldn't figure out why it was implemented. Something to ponder for a while.
A rich and thought-provoking work, RODIN'S DEBUTANTE, no question. If there is a moral, it might be found in a sentiment from Victor Hugo mentioned toward the end - "a just government encouraged the rich and protected the poor." There's that matter of class in America again. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with Hugo, but it's something to think about.
December 2, 2011
Spoiler alert - I have written about the few events that actually occur in this book, and given away the ending, such as it is.
The opening sentence of Rodin's Debutante is, "This is a true story as far as it goes." Prophetic. The story doesn't actually go anywhere at all. I don't know if the main character was supposed to be the small town young sculptor Lee Goodell was raised in or the school the very wealthy Tommy Ogden founded. Ogden's wife Marie had returned from a trip to France where her traveling companion had commissioned Rodin to make a bust of her daughter. Marie wanted to return to Paris to have her own bust made, but Tommy would not agree. Tommy was an unpleasant man who loved only for hunting and spent good deal of his free time at a Chicago whorehouse where he kept a luxurious room. To spite his wife and her demand for a Rodin, he suddenly announced in front of friends at dinner one night that he would endow a boys' school. He would call it Ogden Hall, and build it on ancestral land in the countryside north of Chicago. Marie never got her bust, but the Rodin that started all the trouble ended up at Ogden Hall, where the students believed it to be Marie.
Meanwhile, in nearby New Jesper, Lee Goodell was growing up. His father was a judge, one of the informal group of men who gathered to run New Jesper from behind the scenes. Lee had a perfect childhood. The only sour note were the tramps who sometimes camped out by the railroad tracks. Lee and his friends would explore the area and often met the men who rode the rails---until there was a murder, and all contact was forbidden. Several years later, another crime was committed in New Jesper, one so heinous that the city fathers decided to keep it quiet. There were no witnesses save the victim, who had amnesia for the crime, and no one was ever even suspected, let alone convicted.
One follows Lee as his parents move from New Jesper, that suddenly dangerous town, to the North Shore, and on to Ogden Hall, the University of Chicago, and beyond. He takes a job, he marries, he works on his sculptures, he is mugged, but still nothing doing in the plot department. One waits and waits for somebody to find the perpetrator of the stunning crime, one even imagines that Lee is involved (if one has a good imagination), but one waits in vain. The perpetrator is not revealed. The victim returns, but does not regain her memory. The story ends. Thank God my Kindle actually displayed a page that said I had finished the book or I would still be looking for the rest of it.
The opening sentence of Rodin's Debutante is, "This is a true story as far as it goes." Prophetic. The story doesn't actually go anywhere at all. I don't know if the main character was supposed to be the small town young sculptor Lee Goodell was raised in or the school the very wealthy Tommy Ogden founded. Ogden's wife Marie had returned from a trip to France where her traveling companion had commissioned Rodin to make a bust of her daughter. Marie wanted to return to Paris to have her own bust made, but Tommy would not agree. Tommy was an unpleasant man who loved only for hunting and spent good deal of his free time at a Chicago whorehouse where he kept a luxurious room. To spite his wife and her demand for a Rodin, he suddenly announced in front of friends at dinner one night that he would endow a boys' school. He would call it Ogden Hall, and build it on ancestral land in the countryside north of Chicago. Marie never got her bust, but the Rodin that started all the trouble ended up at Ogden Hall, where the students believed it to be Marie.
Meanwhile, in nearby New Jesper, Lee Goodell was growing up. His father was a judge, one of the informal group of men who gathered to run New Jesper from behind the scenes. Lee had a perfect childhood. The only sour note were the tramps who sometimes camped out by the railroad tracks. Lee and his friends would explore the area and often met the men who rode the rails---until there was a murder, and all contact was forbidden. Several years later, another crime was committed in New Jesper, one so heinous that the city fathers decided to keep it quiet. There were no witnesses save the victim, who had amnesia for the crime, and no one was ever even suspected, let alone convicted.
One follows Lee as his parents move from New Jesper, that suddenly dangerous town, to the North Shore, and on to Ogden Hall, the University of Chicago, and beyond. He takes a job, he marries, he works on his sculptures, he is mugged, but still nothing doing in the plot department. One waits and waits for somebody to find the perpetrator of the stunning crime, one even imagines that Lee is involved (if one has a good imagination), but one waits in vain. The perpetrator is not revealed. The victim returns, but does not regain her memory. The story ends. Thank God my Kindle actually displayed a page that said I had finished the book or I would still be looking for the rest of it.
November 29, 2011
Coming of age story grappling with memory and how different characters view the same situation, as well as how it shapes their lives. Lee Goddell tries to find meaning in life, much as he tries to discover form within marble as a sculptor. When he is a boy in small town New Jesper, Illinois, a heinous crime happens to one of his classmates and he witnesses how his father, the Judge, and other leaders deal with the issue, more concerned with how the crime will affect the town’s reputation than on how the victim is faring. Years later he again encounters his classmate and learns how the incident affected her. Also central to the story is Ogden Hall, where Lee went to school. It was founded by an unlikeable, rich, big-game hunter. It is never entirely apparent why he would endow a school when he seems to have little interest in education or people generally, much less children. Probably he is getting revenge on his wife, who wants to go to Europe and have Rodin sculpt her likeness. Years later a bust of Rodin’s creation serves as the centerpiece of Ogden Hall’s library and is a constant inspiration to Lee. The common mythology among the students is that the bust is of Ogden’s late wife. This turns out to be false, the sculpture instead being that of an unknown Chicago debutante. The school is full of misfits and always struggles to retain qualified and respectable faculty. When it burns down in the end, the previous headmaster’s declaration that Ogden Hall is cursed seems to be true after all. Rodin’s Debutante illustrates how everyone views the past differently, and the way we view of our memories informs our future.
August 27, 2011
Lovely language, thoughtful descriptions, some puzzling sentences (thank you book club members for helping unravel one part of speech mystery). This book is very much of the momement or lived in, I am stumbling for words here, but you get a sense that the places and people are very authentic, very right for their time. The problems I have with this book and with some other books by Mr. Just are 1) that the protagonist is removed a bit from the drama, not a first-hand participant, but an observer, and 2) perhaps as a consequence of 1) we don't really find out what happens to key characters. In this book there is a major crime, which remains unsolved, there is the model of the title whose name we never find out (and I am not sure why the book is named Rodin's Debutante other than as a way of loosely connecting the stories of Tommy and Lee), also, we never find out what exactly happened to Marie, Tommy's wife. So, even though I really enjoyed reading the book, at the end I feel cheated, because either the author withheld information or I was not smart enough to figure it out.. And I do not like feeling not smart enough! :)
May 19, 2015
I have had to use this rating a lot lately. This book left too many loose ends, in my opinion. I don't require a completed bundle at the end, but this tale was more scattered than real life.
Just is a really good author and I enjoy his characters and his manner of narrative, but the strands of this story just didn't blend well enough for me to discover the pattern of his cloth. I had read two of the four parts before I began to feel comfortable with the journey the author had me on. Nevertheless, I did care about the characters. One important message the author had for the reader was ... "I understood the American system, the country so various, so large and unruly, poised to fly apart at any moment. The system was founded on compromise and reconciliation, an infinity of checks and balances but always the willingness to look the other way until the world forced close focus... The small towns of America played no role in this except to supply the votes and the armies... others...were the authorities ... I thought of them as Homer thought of the Fates...."
Just is a really good author and I enjoy his characters and his manner of narrative, but the strands of this story just didn't blend well enough for me to discover the pattern of his cloth. I had read two of the four parts before I began to feel comfortable with the journey the author had me on. Nevertheless, I did care about the characters. One important message the author had for the reader was ... "I understood the American system, the country so various, so large and unruly, poised to fly apart at any moment. The system was founded on compromise and reconciliation, an infinity of checks and balances but always the willingness to look the other way until the world forced close focus... The small towns of America played no role in this except to supply the votes and the armies... others...were the authorities ... I thought of them as Homer thought of the Fates...."
March 21, 2011
Set in twentieth century Chicago, this coming of age story is well written and I especially enjoyed the Hyde Park setting. Lee Goodell is a sheltered child the child of a judge in a small city on the lake north of metropolitan Chicago. A rape and a hobo's death changes his life, his perspective of his family, and he ends up attending a boarding school founded by a strange industrialist named Tommy Ogden. Ward Just uses sculpture as a means to present the growth and devlopment of Lee. The school was founded because of the Rodin sculpture, Lee is entranced by the bust in the library as he studies, and eventually makes his living as a artist working in marble and wood. The myth behind the sculpture serves as the theme of illusion vs. reality which pervades the book. The novel carefully illustrates the fact that how one person evolves in his life is due not to careful planning but random happenings.
May 30, 2012
By the time I was halfway through the book and well into "Part 3" I realized this book has no idea what it wants to be.
The main character isn't even introduced until well into the novel, by which point we've been through what feels like a hundred jerky POV shifts, including a foray into first person to let the main character narrate (though it is not obvious by this point that he is, indeed, the main character).
As a side note, before giving up on this book I thought I'd check out the NYT review. The paper had suggested an excerpt of this book back when it was published, which is why I added it to my to-read list to begin with, but I'd never actually read the review. I assumed that doing so would let me make a decision about whether to continue. Instead, it was a total summary of the plot (spoilers included). WTF, NYT? Since when do book reviews read like a fourth-grader's report?
Disappointing, but not as disappointing as this book.
The main character isn't even introduced until well into the novel, by which point we've been through what feels like a hundred jerky POV shifts, including a foray into first person to let the main character narrate (though it is not obvious by this point that he is, indeed, the main character).
As a side note, before giving up on this book I thought I'd check out the NYT review. The paper had suggested an excerpt of this book back when it was published, which is why I added it to my to-read list to begin with, but I'd never actually read the review. I assumed that doing so would let me make a decision about whether to continue. Instead, it was a total summary of the plot (spoilers included). WTF, NYT? Since when do book reviews read like a fourth-grader's report?
Disappointing, but not as disappointing as this book.
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