Ward Just's latest novel, Rodin's Debutante,
is available March 1, 2011, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His 16 previous
novels include Exiles in the Garden; Forgetfulness; 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.
On your nightstand now:
A Happy Death by Albert Camus, Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri, and a two-week-old copy of the London Economist.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Hardy Boys series by Franklin W. Dixon, wonderfully goodhearted yet exciting boys' stories. Some skullduggery and derring-do by boys a few years older than you are. Best thing about it, the parents are virtually absent, leaving the boys room to maneuver. Also, they drove fast cars.
Your top five authors:
Oddly enough, three of us were debating that very subject the other evening round about midnight well into a third bottle of Bordeaux. My own selections were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Melville and W.G. Sebald. Much dispute concerning number 5. I myself swung to and fro among Phillip Roth, the early John le Carré and the short stories of Mavis Gallant.
Book you've faked reading:
Purgatorio by Dante.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The novels of Kent Haruf, a writer from the American Plains; his books are written in a wonderfully austere manner about people only barely hanging on. Also, A Very Long Engagement by the French novelist Sebastian Japrisot, a tremendously vivid story of a romance cut short by the First World War. It was made into a movie which, while not bad, does not approach the original.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Anais Nin's rompish bit of pornography called The Birds.
Book that changed your life:
When I was 13 years old, living on the north shore of Chicago, my mother gave me a copy of the just-published collected short stories of F. Scot Fitzgerald. It was a revelation. I think I never thanked her properly, but it was an inspired selection. A book just a bit above my head but not so far as to be unreachable.
Favorite line from a book:
There are so many of these. The last lines from Joyce's The Dead; the last few sentences from Gatsby; "Mother died today, or was it yesterday," from The Stranger, a reference--I always thought given the date of publication--to the death of Europe. Hemingway's "Isn't it pretty to think so?" from The Sun Also Rises. And of course: "For a long time, I went to bed early," or whatever translation of Proust you prefer, there being a dozen or more.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Great Gatsby, hands down.
Your favorite place to write:
Paris, hands down, despite the very many distractions--long lunches, late nights, celebrated museums, street demonstrations, visiting firemen, the euro. Or, perhaps, because of all of these things--with the exception of the euro.