Locked within almost every first-rate journalist there seems to be a third-rate novelist fairly shrieking to be let out. It is a familiar phenomenon, rather along the lines of an occupational disease, and if I pause here for a moment to dwell on it, I do so in part to put off the dread moment when [Nicholson at Large], Ward Just's second third-rate novel in five years, will have to be discussed. It is not a prospect to be looked forward to….

They have such high hopes—the Ward Justs, the Joe Flahertys, the Harrison Salisburys, the Jimmy Breslins, to name but a few. Their earnestness, their dedication, their devotion is graven large on every opaque sentence they write, on every paragraph that never seems to come out right, on every lugubriously cumbersome chapter as their books shamble on toward a Bethlehem forever beyond their reach. There is a kind of ghastly aura about such novels that reduces the reader to a state bordering on stupified pity. (p. 24)

As for Nicholson at Large, about the best that can be said for it is that it occasionally rises to the level of Michael Mewshaw on a bad day. As a novel it begins in the air, proceeds to Maine, and ends up in Maryland. In the course of these wanderings we are treated to a feast of clichés, a plot that could be comfortably inscribed on the back of a postage stamp, and a single burning question that I seriously doubt will set tongues to wagging from the Sunrise Highway to the Golden Gate. To wit: what the hell is going on here, anyway? A middle-aged reporter quits his job and takes up with a younger woman. Just is at pains to suggest that the two events are unrelated; unfortunately, he is at no pains whatever to tell us why not, and he never gets around to doing so. The affair ends for reasons similarly shrouded in mystery (Just's explanation for this event being about as clear as the words of a man strangling on false teeth) and so, for all intents and purposes, does the book, although it lingers on for a chapter or two in a kind of twilight sleep. We are also treated to quite a lot of garbled vaporing on the nature of journalism, government and Che Guevara. There is also a reasonably competent description of a funeral. It does little to clear the air.

The desire to write a novel may very well be a valid excuse for producing one. It is, however, no excuse for publishing it. Ward Just by any other name would be nothing but another addressee on a form-letter rejection slip. It would have been a mercy to us all.