A Dangerous Friend

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. First Printing. Hardcover. very good/very good. 256 pages, Signed by the author. Ward Just's twelfth novel penetrates deeply into America's role in the world. Set in Indochina in 1965, A DANGEROUS FRIEND tells a story of "the devolution of an innocent American crusading for democracy" (VANITY FAIR), a man living the conflict of so many Americans caught in a political and spiritual crossfire. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign-aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters people who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood, and in Saigon the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. This "fabulous, tense and dramatic" (LOS ANGELES TIMES) narrative needs neither combat nor bloodshed to tell its tale. A DANGEROUS FRIEND is the beautifully constructed story of civilians who want to reform Vietnam -- but the Vietnam they see isn't the Vietnam that is. Ward Just is the author of 11 other novels, and a finalist for the National Book Award for the novel Echo House. This book is a novel about the early days of the Vietnamese conflict. Ward S. Just (born September 5, 1935 in Michigan City, Indiana) is an American writer. He is the author of 17 novels and numerous short stories. He started his career as a print journalist for the Waukegan (Illinois) News-Sun. He was also a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post from 1959 to 1969, after which he left journalism to write fiction. His influences include Henry James and ernest Hemingway. His novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. His novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997. He has twice been a finalist for the O. Henry Award: in 1985 for his short story About Boston, and again in 1986 for his short story The Costa Brava, 1959. He was Spring 1999 Rome Prize fellow. His fiction is often concerned with the influence of national politics on Americans' personal lives. Much of it is set in Washington D.C. and foreign countries. Another common theme is the alienation felt by Midwesterners in the East. According to Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, Just's finest novels are A Family Trust, An Unfinished Season, Exiles in the Garden, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert, and American Romantic. Yardley recently wrote that "American Romantic may well be the best of them all." In May 2013, The AMerican Academy of Arts and Letters at its annual induction and award ceremony inducted Ward Just as a new member of the Academy and honored his lifetime achievement in the field of Literature, along with an exhibition of his manuscripts.