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...
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