Rodin's Debutante
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A "beguiling and unnerving" novel of a young man haunted by an act of violence, from the award-winning author of An Unfinished Season (Booklist, starred review).
As a small-town boy in the early twentieth century, Lee Goodell learned about a brutal crime—and the efforts of his father, a judge, to help cover it up. Lee would go on to attend a private boys' school, become a sculptor, become familiar with both Chicago's gritty South Side and its wealthy, intellectual Hyde Park, and get married. But it is his reunion with a girl from his childhood, a victim of a sexual assault she cannot remember, that will spur him to contemplate the event that marked the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his understanding of the world, in this sprawling, powerful novel by "one of the most accomplished and admirable American writers" (The Washington Post Book World).
"An achievement . . . [that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates." —The New York Times Book Review
"Rodin's Debutante is a surprising story, never going where you expect it to, and Just's spare prose packs a solid emotional punch." —Entertainment Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ward's solid 17th novel, a boy comes of age in mid-20th-century Chicago and tries to find a way to create art in the face of the world's harshness. Lee Goodell, an adventurous youngster, lives in New Jesper, a quiet town on the outskirts of Chicago where his father and a cabal of influential locals act as a well-meaning protectorate of the town. After the coverup of a horrific sex crime at Lee's school, the young Lee's illusions are broken, and he takes this loss of innocence with him to boarding school at the Ogden Hall School for Boys. Lee's education takes place in many arenas: the classroom, the football field, his sculpting studio, the Chicago streets, a free clinic, and among Hyde Park intellectuals, but when the victim of the sex crime from Lee's childhood returns to find out the truth of what happened, Just creates an opportunity for Lee to recognize the confluence of all these influences on his life. Just's prose is clean and powerful, and while Lee is a bit flat even when he's bad, he's good his coming-of-age is filled with rich observations and finely tuned details.
