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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 mid-century 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 of which she has no memory. It was a crime marking the end of Lee's boyhood and the beginning of his understanding - so powerfully under the surface of Just's masterly story - that how and what we remember add up to nothing less than our very lives.
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Stealthily meshing the gothic with the modern, the feral with the civilized, in this mordantly funny yet profoundly mysterious novel, Just asks what divides and what unites us." - Booklist
"An understated and delicate offering by a master." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Rodin's Debutante] is a somewhat uneven coming-of-age story...A far cry from tales of an artist's tortured angst or of youthful erotic yearnings, this enjoyable book will appeal more to adults nostalgic for the 1950s than to today's teenagers." - Library Journal
This information about Rodin's Debutante was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ward Just's sixteen previous 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.
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