About the Book
Harry Sanders is a young foreign service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents--ending in quiet disaster--and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman, alter the course of his life.
Absorbing the impact of his misstep, Harry returns briefly to Washington before eventual assignments in Africa, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean. He marries the captivating May, who is fleeing her own family disappointments in worn-out upper New England and looking for an escape into Harry's diplomatic life. On the surface, they are a handsome, successful couple--but the memory of Sieglinde persists in Harry's thoughts, and May has her own secrets too. As Harry navigates the increasingly treacherous waters of diplomacy in an age of interminable conflict, he also tries to bridge the distances between himself and the two alluring women who have chosen to love him.
Ward Just, returning to his trademark territory of Forgetfulness and The Weather in Berlin, delivers an utterly compelling story of Americans trying to run the world, yet failing to master their lives.
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.
Review :
"The latest from Just (Rodin's Debutante, 2010, etc.) considers the toll that a life lived upon the great stage of international politics can take on a man of substance.
Harry Sanders is from a family of Connecticut liberals, the moneyed FDR types, those with Marsden Hartley paintings, Killim rugs and Regency tables at which congressional representatives, generals and financiers dine and debate. In the period before American troops arrive en masse, Harry serves with the State Department in Vietnam. Not yet 30, Harry's asked to undertake a not-quite-official mission. It goes awry. Mired in disinformation, Harry's stranded in the jungle, injured, forced to kill. Once the "war turned into an ironist's feast, a smorgasbord of contradictions and false hopes," Harry becomes damaged goods, but State owes him, and so comes a lifetime of assignments to Paraguay, Africa, Norway. There's a comfortable, even loving, marriage to May, but Harry forever remembers Sieglinde, a German woman with whom he had an affair in Saigon. May is warm and welcoming, though never quite of a place, forever shadowed. Sieglinde is haunted by World War II's bloodletting and by Germany's history. Minor characters, especially Harry's ambassador mentor, fascinate and shine with veracity. The narrative follows Harry, albeit with a significant but short detour with Sieglinde (an episode where her character is broadened). Just writes without quotation marks, but the narrative's beautifully descriptive story is easily parsed, growing especially intense when Harry is trapped in the jungle and later when he is assaulted by grief. Just offers instances of wry, sardonic observation--as when Harry dismisses Che Guevara as a motivator of female Viet Cong--while also delivering striking imagery, exampled by his description of the jungle as wearing "the tortured face of one of El Greco's saints. A godforsaken face, morose and resigned." Just is sometimes cynical in his appreciation of diplomacy and existential in regard to God, but Harry, as much a realist as a romantic, is a man astride the American century.
Another brilliant novel from Just: wise, introspective and full of humanity."--Kirkus
"Just's 18th novel (after Rodin's Debutante) tells the sensitive, elegant stories of a young, desperately naïve American foreign service officer and the two women who love him. Harry Sanders is a low-level diplomat with the U.S. embassy in Saigon in the early 1960s. It's an exotic posting for a young bachelor, with the excitement of an emerging guerrilla war and the passion of a beautiful, restless German girlfriend, Sieglinde. Harry's budding career, however, takes a fatal turn when he is duped into a secret, unsanctioned negotiation with the North Vietnamese and his actions come back to haunt him. Years later, Harry marries May, and she follows him through 30 years of global postings and ambassadorships, during which time Harry's early career idealism becomes cynical posturing. And although he loves his wife, he cannot forget Sieglinde. In his work, he struggles to justify American interference in other countries' affairs, while in his personal life, he is torn between his feelings for the two women. Only after he retires does Harry finally understand something about his life. Just's clever plot reveals a man conflicted by duty and loyalty, adroitly playing the State Department career game, but always wondering what might have happened if he had just made one or two different choices in his life. It's also a fascinating portrayal of American embassy operations and the treacherous shoals of international diplomacy and duplicity."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
"Just's writing in American Romantic is so good it makes any writer jealous...American Romantic is the cat's meow as it moves to a surprise ending."--Buffalo News
"If Ward Just were a painter, he might be a figurative artist like Stone Roberts, whose Old Masterly polish gives his contemporary images a spooky resonance. "American Romantic," Mr. Just's 18th novel over four decades, is an excursion into the near past--this time, the early days of the war in Vietnam--that leads to wise and elegiac recognition of the fading of American confidence and competence in ordering an unruly world."--Wall Street Journal
