Customer Reviews

Echo House

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I think most of the 3 and 4 star reviewers have it about right: this book is like a date with a nice but not-that-interesting person: inoffensive but not exactly leaving you hungry for more. Just is writing about Washington's lower upper class- Washington "fixers": people less well known that Presidents and Cabinet members, not as common as the Hill aides and ambitious young lawyers who cover Washington like locusts. Just makes these people seem as uninteresting as they are in reality, perhaps even more so.

Echo House has a style that is vaguely reminiscent of FitzGerald and also LeCarre. Just unfolds the story much as the characters operate, in the shadows, behind the scenes. We are denied details that would bring the narrative into focus and have to piece it together. The picture of how power operates in Washington is both fascinating and frightening. All in all, a very good read.

I have not read any other Ward JUst books, so I cannot comment as to whether or not this is his best. The writing is certainly of high quality, as are the descriptions of Washinton life and the character's love-hate relationship with the political process. The problem is that neither the story nor the characters are enamoring enough to compel you to keep reading. Politics itself is the star of this book and while for many of you that may be enough, I needed a little more substance to sink my teeth into.THe three generations of the Behl family, who play the political influence game both on and behind the scenes are not given enough depth or characterization to make you like or even dislike them. Perhaps that is part ofthe authors message, that real political power is neither evident nor in the spotlight or even really understood by the public, but by book's end we are virtually indifferent to their plight. Perhaps the same and can be said for all of us and our general apathy toward politics and the decline of the political process, but in a book I desperately wanted to like I was completely indifferent by the end. While few political novelists have Just's obvious writing skills and ability to comment on the attraction of politics, many other books have more compelling characters and stories.

There's lots of style to this story. Just is deft at creating scenes and then sliding in some major piece of the story almost as an aside. You have to wait until the next chapter to find out how and why the big event happened. I enjoyed the snippets of life in behind-the-scenes Washington. The problem is that they're only snippets. We never find out what really drives these men or how they really feel about anything or anyone. That's a shame because it's almost impossible for the reader not to care about Alex and Alec. As notied in one of the "professional" reviews above: the government players come and go but the system is forever. But that fact alone doesn't make for good storytelling. And if you don't live within 50 miles of DC, I can't imagine there would be anything in this book to keep you interested.

Ward Just might be the most underrated American writer at work today. This is his finest work (which says a lot as An Unfinished Season was so spectacular) and traces the lives of a Washington family through three generations. Just does a wonderful job of creating a world on the margins of a bigger one -- the Behls deal with the nation's capital throughout the 20th Century moving from the light into the shadows and back again. It will be hard for any reader to forget the opening pages when the book brims with such hope and the later pages when the power dynamics have changed drastically.

I only slogged through this snoozer because I had read A Dangerous Friend by Just and thought it was very good. Therefore, surely this book would eventually become interesting to read rather than the chore it proved to be. Not so.

I found this to be a book that doesn't do a good job of developing its characters or its story. Even though I'm interested in Washington and its inside baseball, this book just didn't tell enough to be interesting. Everything was vague and cloaked in secrecy and dullness. Not a very good formula for a book in my view. The author is clearly a gifted wordsmith, but he failed me as a "storysmith" in this effort. I'd recommend you skip it.

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 of
power 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.

In the Echo House, Ward Just is more skilled at setting mood and tone than he is with creating memorable characters. The best parts are his mordant and saavy insider comments on Washington as a city and politics as a way of life. There are priceless paragraphs scattered through the book that capture the changes over time, from the 40s to the late 80s, and the generational gap between the old time cold warriors and the yuppie big spenders. I didn't find the book as gripping as I had hoped I would. Ultimately it is a novel to admire but not necessarily to recommend, while I would recommend another of his novels, The American Ambassador, very highly. Ward Just is the empitome of the "serious" novelist, but he's not always an inspired one.

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.