Friday, December 2, 2016

Review: "The Eastern Shore," Ward Just


By Paul Carrier

Ned Ayres, the protagonist in Ward Just’s latest novel, is a small-town boy from Indiana who begins his career as an editor at his hometown newspaper and climbs the ladder through the years, moving on to newspapers in Indianapolis, Chicago and, finally, Washington, where he becomes the executive editor of a major paper in the post-JFK era.

Ayres is married to the news business, completely absorbed in his work to the virtual exclusion of everything else. Personal relationships come and go as he moves from city to city, newspaper to newspaper. He feels most at home not in his apartment but in the newsroom, even when it is empty in the dead of night.

As the decades slip by, an 80-yeat-old Ayres eventually finds himself retired and living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, trying without success to write a memoir that looks back on the glory days of the newspaper business, before the Internet and the anarchic appeal of social media decimated the industry’s readership, revenues and prestige.

Just, the respected author of 19 novels and many short stories, was born in Indiana in 1935 and began his career at a newspaper in Waukegan, Illinois, before graduating to Newsweek and The Washington Post, so he knows whereof he speaks. And he does so eloquently, as if penning a eulogy for a dear, departed friend.

“Page one, properly designed, was often a work of art,” Just writes. “The paper was fresh each day, a kind of miracle.”

Just’s description of the people who inhabited that world is equally poignant. They “became cynical early, adopting a side-of-the-mouth sarcasm owing to the base metals of what they called news, a mind-numbing hurly-burly of corrupt politicians and vicious gangsters, arsonists and sexual predators and all the rest.”

The newspapers’ ink-stained wretches plied their trade “in a milieu of continual surprise. Just when you thought you had a handle on the story something utterly strange presented itself.” The reporter “sought coherence, but there was no coherence. Instead there was whirl. Whirl ruled. And the facts fell willy-nilly from an overburdened tree, yet habitually a few facts short.”

Ayres’ career is a long one, and he’s still on the job when the Internet muscles in. Younger readers “were bewitched by the Internet, altogether more convenient and lively" than a printed newspaper. The Internet is a refuge that the publisher of Ayres' unnamed Washington paper likens to a bar where “loudmouths filled up with whiskey and half-baked opinions," use sarcasm as "the coin of the realm." It's a fact-free zone, "supervised by bullies, showoffs, and nutcases.”

Just, whose alluring novel is soothingly reflective, has more on his mind here than a fading journalistic era. Another theme involves the role that privacy plays in our lives: how hard we struggle to protect it, how it falls victim to those who would violate it, how limits are placed upon it, how we cope with the loss of it.

Before Ayres moves up to the big time, professionally, he is the city editor of a small newspaper in the fictional town of Herman, Indiana, where he grew up. One of his reporters learns that local haberdasher William Grant has a very dark secret. Would exposing it ruin Grant? Or portray him as a man who successfully overcame his past by reinventing himself as a model citizen?

Ayres agrees with the publisher that the newspaper should run the story, but the consequences of that decision, and Ayres role in it, help shape his perspective on privacy for the rest of his career. It is an issue that resurfaces from time in time in various contexts, prompting Ayres to harken back to the handling of that tip.

The pages that follow the drama of the Grant episode are more muted and sedate, which may disappoint some readers, but the understated writing is so evocative that others are sure to get caught up in the pleasurable melancholy of it all.


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