What if you let the course of your life slip away? What if it is violently wrenched away?

Nearly everyone in this beautifully written novel wrestles with one of those questions, which boil down to one: How much control are you going to exert over your life?

Alec Malone, a photographer for a Washington, D.C., newspaper and the son of a career U.S. senator, "believed that life was, for the most part, involuntary."

Ward Just's new novel is deceptively slim for an ambitious work. Set in Washington from the Kennedy administration to the current war in Iraq, it also takes in the landscape of European war.

Malone's wife, Lucia, fled that landscape but also brought it with her. She and her mother escaped Czechoslovakia and the Nazis when she was 3, but her father vanished.

For all his passivity, Malone is a sympathetic and affecting character. A turning point for Malone is his refusal to do a six-week assignment in Vietnam, when covering a war would be a career-maker. (Just himself covered the Vietnam War as a reporter for the Washington Post.)

Malone explains that he has a wife and daughter, and anyway, photography is "not trustworthy." The explanation doesn't satisfy even Malone.

When he and Lucia marry, they buy a small rowhouse in Georgetown, with roses in the backyard: "When Lucia first arrived in the capital ... she noticed gardens full of roses. ... She believed, incorrectly, that Washington was a city of gardeners. She did come to understand eventually that Washington was a city of lookers at gardens, quite another thing surely."

Next door, the Count and Countess d'An entertain European exiles in their own spacious garden. The constant socializing and the heavy accents are a curiosity to Malone but a lifeline to Lucia.

Most unsettling for her is word from one of the exile regulars that he had known her father, years after Andre Duran was thought to have died.

Time and politics scatter the count and countess and their guests. Malone and Lucia's marriage falls apart, yet they are able at the end of the book to meet and hear Andre's story. He fought the Nazis and was imprisoned first by them and then by the Soviets.

He describes his days in the partisan army:

"I wanted them to know the war in the round, the atmosphere at the time, the hatred we felt one to the others. ... There were so many dead that the battlefield seemed to us like a bonfire, and the dead so many stray twigs fed into it."

Just has written often about the private lives of public people, often in politics. That's less the case here. But he continues to write startlingly real characters who look back to ponder with unease the pattern they've discerned in their lives.