If you want a clear understanding of life in the places where powerful people's decisions, in their slow accretion, shape the course of history, you would do better to read anything written by Ward Just than spend an hour watching one of the 24-hour cable news channels. In his novels and short stories, Just has created one memorable portrait after another of world-weary actors impelled by character and duty to make choices that indelibly mark their lives. AMERICAN ROMANTIC, his 18th novel, is of a piece with these other works in its portrayal of one such man’s public career and private loves.

Though one wouldn’t know it from the amount of attention paid to the shuttle diplomacy of American secretaries of state, most of the real, unglamorous work of diplomacy is carried out by career foreign service officers like Harry Sanders, the protagonist of the novel. Harry’s career is defined by his service in Vietnam before the first American combat troops arrive in 1965. “It is not dangerous now, but it will get dangerous,” he explains to Sieglinde, a German woman with whom he has a brief affair whose memory echoes through the story like the notes of a Chopin adagio she plays on their last morning together.

"It would be a fine thing if AMERICAN ROMANTIC serves to impel readers who aren’t familiar with [Just] to explore more deeply his impressive body of work."

The turning point in Harry’s Vietnam service, a place he realizes is a “house of cards built on quicksand,” is a clandestine mission deep into the jungle to meet with a communist captain in hopes of initiating backchannel peace negotiations. The folly of that meeting, with a man who “gave the impression of filtering everything through the ideology and then leaving it to age like fine whiskey, growing deeper and richer, more profound, a whiskey without impurities,” quickly becomes clear. And instead of the safe passage he’s been promised, Harry has to negotiate his perilous way back to civilization, a trip that Just seasons with vivid detail. In the course of Harry’s journey, he encounters a young insurgent soldier. Their confrontation, in what Harry will think of as “my war,” haunts him forever.

In postings that take him from Paraguay to a country in central Africa “at the far margins of significance” to the Balkans, most of them in the company of his wife May, a woman raised in rural Vermont who never fully acclimates herself to the diplomatic life, Harry carries out his diplomatic duties with unassuming diligence. The product of an upper class Connecticut upbringing that emphasizes an attitude of noblesse oblige toward public service (sketched by Just with his customary economy in one scene of a typical Sunday lunch at Harry’s parents’ country home), Harry “thought of diplomacy as Sisyphus thought of his wretched stone.” In that attitude he displays both the competence and the fatalism of the classic Just protagonist. “What other business is there for me?” he asks the now-retired ambassador who sent him on his ill-fated mission. “A connoisseur of the counterfeit and the inexplicable.”   

Though Harry overcomes his Vietnam service to become a successful and admired careerist, Just, through him, sees in that experience a distinct foreshadowing of the American hubris, the “worm of triumphalism” that “began its laborious crawl” after World War Two, and that led to our costly engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan: “Americans lacked modesty,” Harry muses at the end of his diplomatic service. “Americans did not set a good example. Americans cast a long shadow of self-righteousness, and if you didn’t like it they sent the Sixth Fleet and a squadron of warplanes.”

But Just understands these impulses are not far removed from the ones that allow Americans to view ourselves through the charitable lens of romanticism that Harry never fully forsakes in the course of his long public service. Sieglinde, haunted by the death of her father, a German soldier killed only a week into his service in World War Two, has an acute grasp of this character trait: “Americans can be anything. They take pride in their makeovers, a nation of actors, or should I say playwrights, each examining her own story. That’s the myth, anyhow. A nation in an eternal state of rewrite.”

Ward Just’s novels will always appeal to mature readers because gray is a prominent shade in his literary palette. Though he’s not yet spoken of in the same breath as Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene, his writing springs from a sensibility he shares with them and merits those comparisons. It would be a fine thing if AMERICAN ROMANTIC serves to impel readers who aren’t familiar with him to explore more deeply his impressive body of work.