It’s impossible to avoid describing this slim gem of a novel as “elegiac,” but if that’s a turnoff, maybe “wistful” would also fit.

However, there’s no denying a mournful quality to this story --- which is, after all, about a newspaper editor facing the slow but inexorable decline of his industry, and himself. Ward Just, a one-time reporter and editor who once worked for the great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, writes of journalists with such empathy that the reader can feel both the pull of the newsroom and the sense of powerlessness that its inhabitants experience as social media threatens to rob them of long-held authority.

The opening chapters are set in the early 1960s, when the novel’s protagonist, Ned Ayres, was a young boy in Herman, Indiana. It becomes clear that two experiences from those early years profoundly influenced his outlook on his life’s work. The first was visiting his infirm uncle, to hear his uplifting stories about his time in the war, which Ned’s father sternly reminds him “are not factual,” though he relents by telling the young boy to “believe them if you want to.”

"Ward Just...writes of journalists with such empathy that the reader can feel both the pull of the newsroom and the sense of powerlessness that its inhabitants experience as social media threatens to rob them of long-held authority."

Much against his father’s wishes, an adult Ned goes into the newspaper business, and the second experience, which haunts him until the end, takes place while still in Herman. Now the editor of the local paper, he is asked to decide whether or not a local businessman’s unsavory past should be revealed. In the interest of the truth --- and the story --- he votes to go ahead, with devastating consequences.

Ned eventually lands in DC, managing an influential paper. His publisher is the third generation owner, and ill-suited to the business, but he and Ned make their peace for 30 years, through scandals, the rise and fall of politicians, and the eventual sale of the paper.  None of this is closely documented, with very few cameos (though Alger Hiss makes it in) and glancing references to national events. This is impressive in itself, given the years the book covers, which include Watergate, the Vietnam War and the introduction of the personal computer. In fact, the first mention of the internet takes the reader aback, as everything in the book, including Ned’s own career (there’s not much of a personal life), has a timeless, almost dreamlike quality to it.

But eventually the sale of the paper, and Ned’s own sense of having outlived his usefulness, catch up with him. He retires to a large house on the Eastern Shore, where he proceeds to write his memoirs. Here the reader begins to understand that the book’s free-form narrative resembles the very memoir Ned is attempting to compose. Much to his surprise, he finds that writing is harder than editing: “The edit was the live heart beating against the skin, essential yet concealed, created to endure. It was the mirror of the sea.”

So this book reads in some ways like an editor’s version of a life --- not the facts so much as the story, rendered in its essentials. Stripped away of many signposts and diversions that distract us from larger themes, Ned’s life becomes an elegy to 20th-century American media in its decline. What makes us hopeful is that regardless of the frustrations he encounters, Ned continues to embrace (as he describes the arc of his career) his “forward fall.”