Topic A in D.C.

By J.S.

THE CONGRESSMAN WHO LOVED FLAUBERT

by WARD JUST

178 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

Gore Vidal, Allen Drury and Tom Wicker (the novelist) share with Richard Nixon a common flaw: all have failed to make our capital city believable. One explanation of why Washington fiction is so lame may be that while the stages and settings are of heroic size and the plots involve the fate of nations, the figures shouting speeches and shaking swords seem absurdly tiny.

This built-in disparity may be unavoidable for a writer who insists on dealing at novel length with the highest levels of power. But by limiting his scope to 20 pages or so and by observing Washington at its fascinating upper-middle levels, Ward Just has been able to get his hands on substance that can be worked effectively into fiction. Just's settings are the private office of a moderately important Senator, a routinely luxurious Spring Valley living room, the featureless bachelor apartment of a CIA economist. In these and similar places, a little sex occurs, a little drinking, but the truly important activity is talk.

Author Just, a Washington-based journalist and novelist, has an ear for Washington talk and a dramatist's knack for that precise moment in the flow of chatter when, although nothing important seems to have been said, the lives of the talkers change course. The Senator in his private office is busy phrasing an announcement to the press that he and his wife have separated. With his aide, not incidentally a woman, he searches for a wording that sounds statesmanlike, sober, and does not suggest loose living or the suicidal word divorce. He is a pro, and so is his aide, and they produce a satisfactory announcement on the third try. He okays it and then says lightly that he never really wanted to be Vice President anyway. Overtones resound; both know that he has indeed blown a solid chance to be Vice President. With his wife out of the picture, he now belongs in an unstated, yet clearly sexual way to the aide. But she is very ambitious, and each of them can compute the figure by which the value of her franchise has just been discounted.

The Congressman of the title story is an honorable man. He makes a sound political decision, refusing to endorse an antiwar manifesto, on grounds that it won't do any good and will only irritate his constituents. Then he discovers, when a colleague with surer instincts successfully champions the antiwar cause, that he has put a lid on his career.

The reader feels a certain sympathy for these lofty wretches. Since they are not very likable or high-minded or deserving, but simply very human, this says a good deal for Ward Just's skill. There is not the slightest hint that the author has enrolled real people under fake names and with different hair colors. A laudable break with Washington literary tradition.

--J.S.

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