Exiles in the Garden.

Just, Ward (author).
July 2009. 288p. Houghton, hardcover, $25 (9780547195582).
REVIEW. First published June 1, 2009 (Booklist).Photographer Alec Malone is losing sight in his right eye, and he’s about to lose his elderly father. Senator Malone served nine terms, worshipped Franklin D. Roosevelt, and has never understood his only child. Given to reverie and moved by beauty, Alec falls instantly in love with Lucia, a Czech. They marry quickly, unaware of the undertow of her hidden homesickness until she becomes a regular at the Washington parties in the walled garden next door. There she meets exiled Eastern Europeans still reeling from World War II and recovers her true self. Alec, meanwhile, jeopardizes his newspaper job by refusing to go to Vietnam to photograph the war. As their marriage comes undone, Alec wonders how to photograph a “civilization in decline” and what to make of a remorseless exile who participated in humankind’s worst crimes. Master novelist Just continues his commanding inquiry into the complexities of inheritance, politics, bloodshed, art, fame, and fate, taking measure of the everlasting wounds of war and moral compromise. A virtuoso writer of graceful wit and offhanded gravitas, Just tells this elegant yet harrowing tale of the entanglement of the personal and the geopolitical in sentences infused with the tensile strength of suspension bridges spanning earthly fire and the dark tides of the psyche. — Donna Seaman