CAPITAL CONNECTIONS

By R.Z. Sheppard

"In Washington facts sometimes tend to mislead. All the facts sometimes tend to mislead absolutely." This play on Lord Acton's pontification about the corrupting effects of power appeared 24 years ago in Ward Just's The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert. Since then, Just has published more than a dozen works of political fiction that have done what journalism rarely accomplishes: dramatize the work of government through complex characters whose heavy responsibilities defy easy moralizing.

One of Just's beguiling personalities has always been the nation's capital. The mystique lives on in Echo House (Houghton Mifflin; 328 pages; $25), a novel that spans nearly the entire 20th century and sees the Federal District emerge from drowsy Southern town into frenetic center of world power.

From its stone fortress overlooking Rock Creek Park, the Behl clan has steadily gained influence since 1916, when Senator Adolph Behl aspired to become Vice President of the U.S. His failure to get the nomination left his wife doubly disappointed: first because she was denied a higher rung on the social ladder; second because her husband could not even fulfill his ambition to become second best.

Suckled on his mother's public disappointment, son Axel pursues power behind the scenes. He becomes one of the capital's gray eminences, "a fixer without portfolio" whose fusion of public and private business seems more like class privilege than conflict of interest.

Just, a Washington journalist in the early '60s, writes from experience. But there is no master clef to this roman. Axel reads like a composite rather than a copy. He has spent more than half his years in chronic pain caused by wounds suffered during World War II. His marriage to Sylvia, a wellborn New Yorker and poet, was a mismatch. "Government's the opiate of the patrician masses," she tells him shortly before walking out. Her parting shot is that Axel, former oss operative and friend of Presidents, has "too many secrets, not enough mystery."

Ironically, what sets Echo House apart from the hyperrealities of the usual Washington novel is precisely its air of ineffability. Beneath his bulletproof exterior Axel has a vulnerable emotional life. Why exactly does he carry a 50-year torch for a member of the French Resistance who gave him only unfriendly glances during the war? Were her youthful beauty and clarity of purpose an unshakable reminder of his own murky career as a political mechanic?

A novel with this much grievous personal history needs comic relief. Just obliges with Mrs. Pfister, fortune-teller to the Washington elite, whose sessions are bugged by government agents, and the "Venerables," a pair of aged columnists who "had been out of step with every administration since Eisenhower's." These geezers and other faded Washingtonians in Echo House are more than welcomed. Just is a sharp-eyed observer and acerbic commentator, but he is also a bighearted host to all the has-beens and will-bes gathered in this roomy and inviting novel.

--By R.Z. Sheppard