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Synopsis
“One of the most astute writers of American fiction” (New York Times Book Review) delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senator’s son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose émigré gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War—a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent.
At the center of the novel is Alec’s unforeseen reckoning with Lucia’s long-absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duran’s career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alec’s is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things—“terrible things, terrible things”—happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Ward Just is our great Washington writer. Taking up where Mark Twain and Henry Adams left off, and alone among his contemporaries, he has held the field since the publication of his 1973 short story, "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert," which dealt with the ambiguities of power and conflicts of conscience in the nation's capital during the Vietnam era. For Mr. Just, Washington is an atmospheric place of shadows and intrigue where larger-than-life characters, mostly grand old men, plot out the country's destiny in backrooms and the halls of Congress, at dinner parties and over the bodies of beautiful women.