Forgetfulness
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin
258 pages
$25
By Alexander C. Kafka
Well, he said finally, what do you think?
Oh, she said. It’s beautiful.
I’m pleased, then, he said.
Do you mean that?
Oh, yes, he said. Of course.
Naturally I wonder, she said.
Why would you wonder?
You’ve made me look so sad, she said, and burst into tears, her hands over her eyes. She made gasping sounds as though she were short of breath.
He was astonished. … He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. They argued the matter all that night and the next night, and in the end there was no resolution. God, she was stubborn. So the portrait had not been a success, at least with Florette, and he never forgot the sound of her weeping, a moan that seemed to reach to the heavens.
That’s Thomas Railles, an American expatriate artist in his mid-60s living near a remote village in the French Pyrenees, describing his late wife, Florette, and the way she reacted to his portrait of her. Railles, the focus of Ward Just’s latest, and 15th, novel, Forgetfulness, could also be describing Just’s writing, which also has a melancholy aspect, but one that leads to empathy and musing, not nihilism, because its basis is also sympathy and knowledge. Like his artist protagonist, Just has an economy of line, a spot-on sense of perspective, and the practiced observer’s suspension of ultimate judgment that shows the most profound kind of worldliness—nuanced rather than cynical.
Florette is taking a winter walk near their mountain home while Railles entertains two of his regular guests, Americans both—the mysterious and somewhat sinister Bernhard, and the more vulnerable but cagey Russ. When Florette injures her ankle, she is rescued, but in a strangely rough and ungracious manner, by a group of Moroccans. Soon their ostensible aid turns to rude neglect and then to violence.
When she succumbs to their assault and the cold, Thomas is left to his loneliness, feeling not just the loss of his wife, a proper but sweet and candid village local, but of his longtime friend, the reclusive older and larger than life British World War I deserter St. John Granger, the Railles’s neighbor and Thomas’s confidant and billiards partner. Thomas indulges in the company of their ghosts, in his Billie Holiday albums, and in his booze. His mental and physical health are unsteady, and he’s losing his artistic momentum, though he tries to recapture it by sketching the churches of nearby towns.
Interrupting this solitude are Bernhard and Russ, who it turns out grew up with Thomas in Wisconsin and entrusted him with occasional odd and delicate assignments after Bernhard and Russ joined the CIA. Though Thomas’s assignments entailed no direct violence, one especially—the befriending of a cosmopolitan Spanish communist with important connections—ended in betrayal and murder and haunts Thomas along with his more recent specters. Now Bernhard, seeking an unlikely “closure” and suspecting that Florette’s murder may be connected to Thomas’s tangential intelligence work, urges Thomas to observe the interrogation of the captured Moroccan suspects by a shadowy French official (and, interestingly, a sometime actor) named Antoine. Skeptical that vengeance is desirable, or even possible, Thomas reluctantly trudges along to the violent interviews in the port city of Le Havre.The book’s title contains ironies within ironies. Forgetfulness is a book of memories—not just of Florette and Granger, but of Thomas’s Wisconsin childhood; of his friends Bernhard and Russ as boys; of Thomas’s physician father and his waiting room, where he and Bernhard started exploring the various kinds of intelligence that can be gleaned from the faces of a doctor and his hopeless patients; memories of history writ large; of 9/11; of European culture; and of painting in particular. Forgetfulness is the result of aging, of mental decay, and yet also the necessary precursor to creation and artistry. It is the loss of the lost intimates’ companionship, but also the imperative of moving on and living as they would have wished. Forgetfulness is the failure to heed history, but also the element required to escape history’s petty bonds and make new history.
Art, too, is a coiled concept here—salvation for Thomas’s soul, and maybe ours, but also a weapon he yields when he’s at last left alone to confront the Moroccan ringleader, whose name may or may not be Yussef. Thomas begins that interview of the poker-faced suspect by confronting him with a portrait of Florette. And Bernhard—and perhaps Thomas and the reader too, in a perversely voyeuristic way—appreciate the artistry of Antoine’s interrogation techniques.
Just has long probed the unpredictable workings of power and its effects not just on the world at large but on the often hapless and well-meaning people who wield it. Here he does so through an artist’s poetic and unvindictive eyes, even as those eyes are starting to lose some of their acuity in the mists of mountains and harbors and age, and the philosophical mists of earthly chaos. The mists of twin tower debris, of Iraqi bomb smoke and sand storms, and of Abu Ghraib rage are also suggested here. But with the possible exception of the unredeemed Yussef—and even he is all too human, suffering at the violence against a younger comrade who may be son or may be lover—Just gives us no thoroughly good or bad guys. Russ is forced into retirement and mourns after the suicide of his mentally ill one-time golden girl daughter. Bernhard reinvents himself as head of a high-end international security outfit, only to suffer a debilitating heart attack that no bodyguard could shield him from.
But if Thomas’s potential soul salve is art, it’s art with a deep appreciation of the worldly, of grand technique where it intersects with inspiration and fundamental speculation as to our purpose, our desires, our worth. The kind of art that can be distressing, but in a way quite different from personal sadness, as Thomas might say. Art that's also beautiful, as is this melancholy but vivid and most involving tale.
Photo of Ward Just by Nina Bramhall from Houghton Mifflin's Web site
