Like many novels about Washington, ["Nicholson at Large"] is both an attack on the abuses of power and a skillfully camouflaged roman-à-clef…. (p. 92B)

There is about Just's work an ironic detachment, a gelid intelligence. Like Harold Pinter, whom he admires, he knows how to achieve artistry through cryptic ambiguity. The reader has to peer hard at the spare, lean prose: his characters deceive each other—and themselves—not by what they say but by what they don't say. And while self-deception may be the book's apparent theme, Just, as in his previous novel, "Stringer," works on other levels. Allegorically, "Nicholson at Large" is also an understatement about the deferred dreams and fore-closed possibilities of post-Camelot America. With this book we can drop the adjective "promising" about Ward Just as a novelist. He is rapidly moving into the heavyweight class. (p. 96)