ECHO HOUSE.<i> By Ward Just</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 328 pp., $25</i>

Probably 90% of Washington novels these days are thrillers like Tom Clancy’s or David Baldacci’s, in which government officials either are heroically trying to prevent some semi-plausible apocalypse or are perpetrating a dastardly crime. Very few writers try what Alan Drury succeeded with in the first of his many political novels, “Advise and Consent”--winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1960--to simultaneously tell a realistic story (in this case about the struggle over a secretary of state nomination) and evoke the life and spirit of the nation’s capital. But Drury wrote in a simpler time, before the Vietnam War and Watergate, a time when most citizens trusted their government. Ward Just, a war correspondent in Vietnam who has written 14 novels since 1970, is trying to do things in “Echo House” more difficult than Clancy or Drury have ever tried: Cover three generations of Washington life, from the 1920s to the present, and simultaneously explore the inner depths of some very complex personalities. Unfortunately, as a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate writer, he harbors such contempt for the people he’s writing about--Washington’s permanent class of lawyers, spooks, lobbyists, public relations people and journalists--that it’s hard to identify with any of them. One of his characters refers to Washington as “the city of death.” But Just never makes the place seem important enough to be a city of either life or death. Another character says that Washington has “the heart of a hangman and the soul of an accountant.” In the end, I’m afraid that a novel about shady accountants with inexplicable hang-ups just isn’t very interesting.