Echo House

by Ward Just

Book Overview

"Ward Just is not merely America's best political novelist. He is America's greatest living novelist."--Susan Zakin, Lithub A Finalist for the National Book Award An epic chronicle of three... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395901383
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Elegiac splendor

One of the most memorable and distinctive reads in a long time. In an era when we are contemplating how politics has failed the nation, here is a nuanced, provocative, ambivalent vision of the past. Great for book club discussions.

Melancholy in Washington

Melancholy in Washington is a good description of this very well done novel by Ward Just. It sets a very accurate tone in chronicling the adventures of a multigenerational family ofpower brokers and their families and especially their women. Having lived in Washington for nearly 40 years, I see many of the characters in real people I have known here.

Ten stars

This is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century. It is brilliant in concept and spans generations in a fascinating and compelling story. It helps to bring some political knowledge to this story -- if you don't know who Joe McCarthy, McGeorge Bundy, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Rusk and others are and were, you will miss some of the book's subtler themes and dimensions. A powerful and beautifully written story about the permanent overclass of Washington DC -- the men who run the country from behind the scenery and their conflicts with their women. This is an elegaic and sad book, and a subtle one -- not for Harold Robbins fans. Just's finest book and he is one of America's finest authors -- a great place to start to get to know his many fine novels.

Good book if you're interested in off-the-record politics

This book was an interesting read, but it is quite specific in content and may not be appealing to the masses. I personally found it to be entertaining and believable. I recommend it to those who are interested in the "behind closed doors" facet of federal political transactions. Ward Just does not travel in a specific direction with this work; he simply documents the lives of three generations of the Behls, and he does so very well. A reader who liked "Primary Colors" (by "Anonymous" Joe Klein) would probably like this book as well

Just's chef-d'oeuvre

Ward Just has finally returned to Washington, his richest mine of fictional ore. This he transmutes into a potent multi-generational narrative, deploying techniques he has perfected over a generation of experiment. In a prologue rivaling any of Balzac's, Just infuses a rich historical and architectural particularity with metaphors invented and placed to suggest the essence of what follows: not only the motivation, contours, and meaning of events, but the plight of characters, who can neither escape the world of power they have embraced nor overcome their arrogant self-delusion. Like Edith Wharton, Just displays this world as a closed, dense, but imperfectly integrated culture, isolated from its dependencies and tragically narcissistic. Unlike Balzac or Wharton, however, Just dispenses with the full telling of his story, and zeros in on key, often widely separated dialogues in which his creatures choose, ventilate and rationalize, or tortuously reflect. The reader must reconstruct intervening actions, passions, and thought from the narrator's references-or from the characters' remembrance and commentary, which are frequently limited or unreliable. Hence the dust jacket copy is ludicrously wrong: Echo House is anything but a "huge, sprawling, panoramic epic about dubious deeds in high places." Instead, it is the highly distilled, introspective account of a flawed collective moral disposition, its tangled causes and its checkered effects. Echo House is also the masterwork Ward Just's late maturity. David Lee Rubin, Charlottesville, Virgini