Exiles in the Garden. Ward Just. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 288 pages. $25.

In reader shorthand, Ward Just is described as a consummate Washington insider, a statement that's true in the unusual way the title of his latest novel is true. Just was a journalist before turning to fiction (when the line between the two was wide as the Potomac). His theme, his dependable subject, is the effect Washington politics has on people outside of both.

Just reaches way outside the Beltway in this book. What begins as a compelling but simple-seeming story spanning the years from the Vietnam War to 2007 -- and haunted by the living memory of World War II -- takes on more and more meaning, until we aren't sure who the exiles are, what or where the garden is, how many facets there are in Just's prism. The novel is fascinatingly readable and at the same time deeper than we expect. At a casual glance we get the impression that Just soldered together two books. The story is worth more, however, than a casual glance.

We meet Alec Malone, a young photographer with a ruminant, detached existence, which Ward juxtaposes against his missing father-in-law's activist life. Andre, the father-in-law presumed killed in the war, was an anti-fascist guerrilla, captured once by the Nazis, then later and mistakenly by Soviets who imprisoned him for many years. Alec's father, a senator from the Midwest, is a sort of hybrid, a man who moved in powerful circles and exerted considerable political clout, yet never risked his health or his life, never abandoned a family for the sake of an ideology.

Alec grew up in Washington. On an assignment he met Lucia, an au pair from Switzerland, a war orphan in a sense, and in time they marry and move into Georgetown, next door to a home owned by a count and countess.

Summer evenings are long, and Alec often works late. Lucia sits in their backyard listening to the garden party conversation floating across the hedge: disagreements, memories and opinions of the exiles and refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Switzerland, Bulgaria, all the other places shattered by Hitler, Stalin, Franco.

We like to include, the count explains the first time Alec and Lucia attend a party, ``the oppressors and the oppressed, the commissars, the refuseniks, and anyone in between. . . . Unfamiliarity breeds contempt.''

Charming. Worldly. Merely a degree or two off, but with time the slant grows more acute. Those subtle, eternal differences. Like Henry James' Americans in Europe, Alec loses his balance. Lucia regains hers. She is one of the youngest wounded Europeans; she has an actual wound, a limp caused by a skiing accident, as well as a wounded spirit: her father disappeared into the war when she was 3. She thinks Americans equate ''understanding'' with ''success.'' Ultimately she leaves Alec and the United States to live in Europe with a man who writes didactic novels.

Although Alec grew up listening to his father's tales of the Senate cloakroom, of phone calls from FDR down the alphabet to LBJ, he is disengaged. He turned down a career-making assignment to photograph the war in Vietnam because he believed photography glorifies. After Lucia leaves him, he quits the newspaper, does art gallery photography, floats into a reverie, drifts into a comfortable affair with an actress whose work keeps her at a geographic remove. Aging, he suffers macular degeneration. Like Lucia's limp, a weakness with symbolic wallop.

Our thoughts return to the beginning of the novel. Alec is deep in middle age, visiting his dying father in a clean, comfortable nursing home with a view of a golf course outside the older man's window. When first we entered the book, the senator seemed to be repeating old stories. Spite. Rumors. Affairs. Favors exchanged. The unsettled scores of public life. The ruminations of a dying man who drifts in and out of sleep. But parents are never finished being parents. The older man is telling his son that nothing is what it appears to be. Simple to say, painful to accept in the bone-deep manner it deserves.

Wars and their consequences make exiles of all involved. The commando, the senator and Alec the observer form an triangle, but not an equilateral triangle. Ward Just is too astute for that. And he leaves us pondering that ageless question of where the personal becomes the political or if it is possible to maintain a distinction at all.

Betsy Willeford is a writer in Miami.

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