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echo house BY WARD JUST HOUGHTON MIFFLIN 368 PAGES FICTION BY DAN CRYER Ward Just, it's sometimes said, is the master chronicler of the Washington political arena. To make out the jagged intersections of ambition and greed, idealism and sell-out in contemporary politics, you need only turn to such novels as "The American Ambassador" or "Jack Gance." From Washington Post reporter in the '60s, Just has ascended over the years to his present position as statesman novelist, gazing down from the heights at the capital follies. The perspective, if not outright Olympian, is haute Jamesian -- dry, ironic and pitiless. Just's new novel, "Echo House," purports to be an epic saga of three generations of Washington power players. Adolph Behl sets the stage as a Midwestern U.S. senator who just misses a vice-presidential nomination early in the 20th century. But the book focuses largely on the careers of Adolph's son, Axel, and Axel's son, Alec. Unlike the rather inept Adolph, Axel and Alec are able but unelected tribunes, behind-the-scenes fixers-without-portfolio. Echo House is the family mansion where they preside over insider luncheons and glittering soirees. They are Democrats who know how to manipulate democratic institutions, always with the best intentions, of course. Their various wives and mistresses match their talents for manipulation while lacking any pretensions to doing good. This may be promising material, but Just's literary gifts are nowhere in evidence this time around. "Echo House" is inert, dull and strangely passionless. But like the movers and shakers it tries and fails to evoke, it does take itself very, very seriously. The author seems to believe that creating a discernible plot might actually demean his work. Instead, this novel plods on and on, imploding into abstract reveries and arid discourses on the art of congressional testimony or legal negotiations heavy on "verbs that march up to a subject without quite surrounding it." "Echo House" obviously aims to underscore the poverty of pragmatism unmediated by higher principle -- the view expounded by one world-weary observer that "we give a little and get a little and out of the chaos comes an order that we can live with." But given fiction so bereft of solid plot and vivid characters, Alec might be speaking of the book itself when he remarks: "Listening to his father is like listening to an insistent drizzle, the words falling and puddling, slick under foot." And "Echo House" isn't even slick. Just a colossal bore. May 21, 1997 Dan Cryer is a book critic for Newsday. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html