In the rear view mirror, roads not taken

In particular, he finds himself pondering his decision four decades earlier to decline his managing editor’s offer of a six-week tour of duty shooting photographs in Vietnam on the grounds that he had a wife and daughter so did not belong in a war zone. (The author had been a respected war correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post in Cyprus and Vietnam, respectively, before transforming himself into one of our most keenly observant novelists.)

Alec’s decision bothered his boss and baffled his father, the latter a longtime US senator then struggling to win reelection owing to his opposition to the war. “He did not understand,’’ writes Just, “how his own son could turn a blind eye to the war, fail to take a stand, the stand being an obligation of citizenship.’’

His father had hoped Alec would follow him into politics, but Alec was not interested. “The salient truth was that the civic life of the nation held no attraction. He preferred Shakespeare’s life to the life of any one of his kings or pretenders, tormented men always grasping for that thing just out of reach.’’

Alec soon abandons news photography for artier still-life work. But not before meeting and marrying Lucia Duran, with whom he sets up a little house in Georgetown next door to a wealthy émigré couple who host frequent outdoor gatherings for fellow émigrés. Lucia and Alec have a daughter, Mathilde, and shortly after he turns down the Vietnam assignment Lucia returns to Europe and leaves Alec for a leftist Hungarian novelist she met at one of the neighbors’ parties. Alec, who had preferred sitting alone in his small rose garden or watching baseball games on television to joining Lucia next door, was surprised and hurt but did little to protest his wife’s departure.

“It did not occur to him to try to win her back,’’ Just tells us. “That door was closed and locked, no light visible from her side or his.’’