On the cusp of maturity, he straddles the world

Ward Just's new novel, "An Unfinished Season," is a strange act of historical ventriloquism. A 60-year-old narrator in the early 1990s recalls a summer in the 1950s in a voice that sounds like F. Scott Fitzgerald memorializing the 1920s. It's not so much that you can't put it down, but that you shouldn't put it down because the moment you stop reading, the spell breaks and you're left with the aftertaste of pretentious insight.

For Wilson Ravan, the summer before college was a time of momentous change. His wealthy family lives in a rural town on the North Shore of Chicago, removed from both the high society and the industry of the city. His father is a powerful man who owns a printing company. His mother is a brittle woman with nothing to do but cook and knit.

After years of paternalistic management, the printing plant suffers a strike that shocks Mr. Ravan and breaks his confidence. Cold-war paranoia quickly transforms a dispute about salaries and bonuses into a cosmic battle, a face-off between a hardworking American owner and godless strikers controlled by their evil bosses in the Soviet Union.

With his liberal prep-school education, 19-year-old Wilson sees all this as political hyperbole, but when his father starts carrying a gun and a brick flies through their window, his amusement is displaced by awe. "I was watching him," Wilson says, "in order to learn what it was to be a man, with a man's burdens, how to behave in adversity."

That's a typically slippery comment from this maddening narrator, who oozes earnest sincerity and weighty import. Yes, he watches his father to learn what it is to be a man, but only the way Jane Goodall watches gorillas. No matter how much Wilson admires the man's strength or cherishes his advice on alcohol and women, he remains fundamentally superior. Even when he laments his own ignorance, it's in such grandiose terms that he sounds burdened with special wisdom.

Wilson is that most treacherous of friends (and narrators), the humble, self-effacing observer who wants only to witness and understand the challenges other people face. Through his father's connections, he gets a summer job at a scrappy downtown newspaper where he relishes the wheeling and dealing of city life, soaking up the secret details of stories that never make it into print.

But there's a craving, unseemly quality to how much he loves this job, watching the "carnival of love nests, revenge killings, slumlords, machine draft, and Communists deep in the apparatus of state and national government."

After work, he lurks around city bars, listening to jazz with soulful sensitivity no other white man could match.

And in the evenings, he adopts his bon vivant persona, dons a tuxedo from Brooks Brothers, and attends an endless stream of debutante balls lifted from "The Great Gatsby," complete with a revival of the Charleston.

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