Ward Just
Echo House
Houghton Mifflin, 328 pp., $ 25
Ward Just’s new novel Echo House repeatedly invokes Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880). In Adams’s black comedy, Washington’s leading power- broker, Senator Ratcliffe, needing a wife for his coming presidential campaign, conveniently falls in love with Madeleine Lee, a rich, young New York widow who has moved to Washington to learn how the town functions. Madeleine is disgusted by Ratcliffe’s gaminess, but she’s also fascinated by it, and while she keeps him at a distance she doesn’t reject him outright. At length Ratcliffe proposes marriage, outlining with hilarious bluntness the practical rewards that will be Madeleine’s if, with her help, he can get elected president. Initially inclined to accept, she learns at the last moment that he once gave a quid pro quo for a large corporate contribution to his party’s national committee. Appalled at Ratcliffe, at Washington, and at herself for being tempted, Madeleine flees, never to return.
Echo House is about what would have happened to a mid-twentiethcentury incarnation of Democracy’s protagonists if they had gotten married. Just focuses on Sylvia, a poet from New York who gets involved with Axel Behl, a shadowy Washington insider. Sylvia, unlike Madeleine, receives no last-minute intelligence that nerves her to flee. More believably, she and the insider wed.
Within a few years, Washington becomes unbearable to Sylvia. The couple divorce, and she returns to New York. Axel soldiers on to the top of the Washington establishment. It’s difficult to tell exactly what he does, although it is clear that he serves as an independently wealthy eminence grise of the “intelligence community,” integral to the operation of a complicated spy network. In the 1940s and 1950s, he hosts weekly lunches for CIA operatives at his Rock Creek Park mansion and sets up a money-laundering operation; in the seventies, he helps throw a congressional committee off the scent of it; in the late eighties, he helps pull the wool over the eyes of an ambitious investigative reporter trying to put the pieces together. Just depicts Axel’s quietly triumphant career in great detail, and with such intense admiration that at times Echo House reads like Hemingway on toreadors. For Axel’s calling is, in its own way, an instance of the same macho cult of elite professionalism:
He saw his chores literally as building bridges [and] identified with the agile and imperturbable New York Indians, the Mohawk who balanced on the footwide beams, a thousand feet to the treacherous river below. . . . If you were successful, your labor and the elegance with which you went about it were noticed only by your fellow aerialists, those who shared the heights. The danger was a given. And the danger was not the point. The bridge was the point, and the applause, when it came, would never be heard by the spectators below. That was its value.
Meanwhile Sylvia pursues her own career with some success. But she can never quite figure her exhusband or Washington out, and her appalled fascination with them persists. So she comes back from time to time, not visiting her ex, but poking around in his house (their son lets her in) and moving in what used to be their common milieu. Finally, when they are both in their eighties, she materializes at a party for him. The insider’s self-image and career have depended on his thinking that right and wrong were categories irrelevant to his daily “chores,” and he discovers too late that those categories are very relevant indeed. In an instant he infers her judgment on his life and realizes that he shares it. The denouement is brutal and public.
Echo House is often irritating. Consider this terribly cute exchange, between the poet and a colleague of the insider’s:
Sylvia managed a smile and shook her head. “Elizabeth Bishop says that this is our worst century so far, and I think I agree with her.”
“Bishop. Isn’t she over at the Democratic National Committee?”
“She’s a poet, Ed.”
Equally annoying is that Just is an irrepressible punster. (Two lovers, one of whom is French, are named “Alec” and “Sandrine.”) And he has packed into Echo House all the tics he’s displayed in his previous books: functionaries who ironically bear the surnames of artists (in an earlier book a lawyer was called Mozart; here a banker is named Longfellow); references to The Great Gatsby; men in danger humming show tunes; tight-lipped middle- aged men carrying torches for long-dead foreign girls; the glory of acrobats (or in this case, Axel’s Mohawks on the bridge). Just has shown the reader all of this many times before. (Maybe that’s why he called the book Echo House.)
And yet, despite these problems, Echo House is not only a riveting novel but also a timely examination of the “inner Washington.” It shows that the correlation of forces in a divorce is rarely what it seems — or even what the parties believe it to be. It also shows that, in a Washington career like Axel’s, conventional morality is a trauma that has to be repressed if the career is to go forward. When this repressed morality reasserts itself, the consequences won’t be benign.
Axel’s repression of his values may be necessary if he is to render optimal service to the state. His confronting this dilemma, selecting the wrong option, and repenting too late is what gives the book its tragic heft. Macbeth comes to mind. But a more precise parallel is to the well-known words of Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII:
Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal
I serv’d my King, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
Morality as a trauma; a return to traditional values as a personal catastrophe-these timely jokes are of a blackness well beyond anything in Henry Adams.
James Mann is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.
