The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Washington novels: A few uppity observations, plus a guide to D.C. fiction guides

Wash­ing­ton, D.C., is a per­ilous place about which to write fic­tion. In more than a few of the guides to D.C. fic­tion, a major premise is that the Great Wash­ing­ton Novel has yet to be writ­ten or has already been writ­ten. Uh-oh. And no pleas­ing every­one. One stu­dent of the genre holds up Allen Drury, of all peo­ple, as the best Wash­ing­ton nov­el­ist of the past sev­eral decades.

I’ll let oth­ers judge the worth of The Solomon Scan­dals, which actu­ally is both a D.C. novel and a North­ern Vir­ginia Jew­ish one. But mean­while I’ll find a lit­tle solace in a Sean O’Casey’s ver­dict on P.G. Wode­house, what­ever O’Casey’s intent: “Eng­lish literature’s per­form­ing flea.”

Wash­ing­ton itself is a flea cir­cus in var­i­ous respects, a place full of fun­gi­ble drones, often lorded over by Hol­ly­wood­ish ego­ma­ni­acs. Some of the back-bench pols and scribes may not even be up to pulling minia­ture carts, whether hitched solo or in groups. With luck, maybe I can budge mine at least a few inches.

The cur­rent hope of cer­tain lit pun­dits is that with a more lit­er­ary pres­i­dent in the White House, the town’s fic­tion will improve. I’m not so cer­tain. Did JFK really inspire a lit­er­ary Camelot?

Found­ing Fathers of the genre

Henry Adams (photo), author of Democ­racy, pub­lished in 1880, is often depicted as the George Wash­ing­ton of D.C. nov­el­ists, the Found­ing Father, the first one who counted, even though an obscure New Eng­land writer named John W. De For­est and a not-so-obscure Mis­sourian with the pen name of Mark Twain were work­ing D.C. turf in the pre­vi­ous decade. I have no doubt that oth­ers came before these three and will wel­come names from readers.

Adams him­self was a descen­dant of the Adams fam­ily and writes with accom­pa­ny­ing snob­bery and anti­semitism, com­plete with a depic­tion of an Evil Jew from Europe, the leer­ing Baron Jacobi.

In Democ­racy, Adams’ real pro­tag­o­nist is Made­line Lee, a neu­rotic socialite, relo­cated from New York and caught between a wor­thy and not-so-worthy suitor. But along the way we meet many D.C. arche­types, includ­ing a provin­cial Bush-like pres­i­dent. Of course, dis­tinc­tions abound even among the arche­types. George W. Bush is is dumb-pseudo-provincial despite his Yale degree, for exam­ple, while LBJ was smart-genuine-provincial even though he had grad­u­ated from only a small teachers-college.

Today’s stars

Who are the stars of D.C. fic­tion today? Many would place Christo­pher Buck­ley (photo) in the top tier of pop­u­lar nov­el­ists. I myself have enjoyed such works as Booms­day regard­less of our dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal beliefs. For what it’s worth, Buck­ley did not begin pub­lish­ing his D.C. satires until the 1986, years after I com­pleted the first draft of The Solomon Scan­dals, orig­i­nally titled The Cover-Up.

Many insid­ers would rate Ward Just as the pre-eminent author of con­tem­po­rary D.C. fic­tion, in terms of both the qual­ity and quan­tity of his pro­duc­tion. You sup­pos­edly can’t find his nov­els in Bal­ti­more, but per­haps peo­ple out­side The Belt­way will catch up.

The detec­tive writer George Pele­canos is also rid­ing high right now with many crit­ics because of the skill with which he is said to write about D.C. as a series of neigh­bor­hoods. His Wash­ing­ton isn’t sim­ply an incon­se­quen­tial back­drop for the maneu­ver­ings of—well, the kinds of char­ac­ters you’d find in Allen Drury’s books.

The rep­u­ta­tion of Gore Vidal, author of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and other books in his Empire series, lives on. Some crit­ics would point out, he is far more inter­ested in the élite than in the city as a whole, but Vidal is more inter­ested in writ­ing for Vidal than in fit­ting any­one else’s cri­te­ria for D.C. lit­er­ary greatness.

Susan Richards Shreve, in Chil­dren of Power, set in the McCarthy era, made an impres­sion on me years ago, but appar­ently on not enough others—the Ama­zon rank is in the mil­lions. Too bad. Haven’t I read some­where that pol­i­tics is like the Mafia? You can’t sep­a­rate job from Family.

The guide to the guides

So what do spe­cific guides to Wash­ing­ton fic­tion say—either stand­alone guides or those buried within reviews? Here is a quick sampler:

• Intrigue for Wonks, a National Review essay by Andrew Fer­gu­son, dated Jan. 23, 1995. He takes the oblig­a­tory digs at fel­low jour­nal­ists and says real-life D.C. is duller than the sex­ier fic­tion­al­ized kind. Yawn.
• Alean Drury and the Wash­ing­ton Novel, by Roger Kaplan, in Pol­icy Review, October-November 1999, pub­lished by the con­ser­v­a­tive Hoover Insti­tu­tion. Watch those “devi­ous lib­er­als”! Drury shows ‘em up. “Forty years on,” Kaplan writes, “Advise and Con­sent is the only book of this genre that a literary-minded per­son really ought to read. Indeed, as Sat­ur­day Review noted in August 1959, ‘It may be a long time before a bet­ter one comes along.’ Forty years so far.”
• Col­laps­ing of the National and Indi­vid­ual in the Wash­ing­ton Nov­els of the Gilded Age, a PDF-format paper by Jef­frey Charis-Carlson at the Uni­ver­sity of Iowa, writ­ten in or after 2002. He praises The Gilded Age (1873) for show­ing how Wash­ing­ton scan­dals affected the rest of the country—a still-timely approach, I might add, given the dam­age that a com­pro­mised SEC, EPA and other agen­cies have inflicted on Amer­ica. Twain coau­thored the book with Charles Dud­ley Warner. Charis-Carlson also shares reflec­tions on De For­est, author of Hon­est John Vane (1875) and Play­ing the Mis­chief (1875), both of which fic­tion­al­ized “one of the U.S. government’s worst fed­eral scan­dals of the late nine­teenth cen­tury.” DeFor­est, by the way, is said to have been the first writer to use the expres­sion Great Amer­i­can Novel (in a Nation arti­cle). Addi­tional trivia: Charlis-Carlson writes that the genre of “Wash­ing­ton novel” didn’t even receive a name until the 1950s.”
• Why Amer­i­cans can’t write polit­i­cal fic­tion, by Christo­pher Lehmann, in the Wash­ing­ton Monthly of October-November 2005. In a nut­shell, Lehmann wants Wash­ing­ton  nov­el­ists not to be “besot­ted with its fash­ion­able ges­tures of despair, reflex­ive irony, and ter­mi­nal purism.” Wow. I won­der what unfash­ion­able “ges­tures of despair” and the rest are like. Lehmann is a fan of a nuanced book about LBJ, Billy Lee Bram­mer’s The Gay Place (gay in the old fash­ioned sense), which even con­tains a novella titled The Flea Cir­cus. It’s really set in Texas, not D.C., thereby either com­pli­cat­ing or sim­pli­fy­ing the “Who’s the great­est?” ques­tion for stu­dents of Wash­ing­ton fiction.
• Build­ing the Great D.C. Novel, by Mark Athi­takis, in the D.C. City Paper, April 2, 2008. Accord­ing to Athi­takis, “it may sim­ply be harder to write a great D.C. novel than it is to write a great Chicago novel or a great San Fran­cisco novel. After all, any Dis­trict novel that claims to cover the whole city needs to tell a story about bureau­cracy, and, as Charis-Carlson says, ‘It takes a great novel to make bureau­cracy inter­est­ing.’” But wait! Isn’t bureau­cracy com­posed of bureau­crats, who can be humans at times? In Scan­dal, my reporter pro­tag­o­nist falls in love with one and watches another, his foe dur­ing a cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tion, get drunk at the Water­gate. Along the way we read of the sig­nif­i­cance of Form 2-A at the Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion. Ide­ally Scan­dals has bro­ken a few square inches of new ground in its depic­tions of fed­eral con­tract­ing offi­cers as well as of the real estate tycoons who vie for their favor.
• Des­ti­na­tion: Wash­ing­ton, D.C., by Lorin Stein, in Salon, Aug. 14, 2008. As Stein sees it, Democ­racy is “still the great Wash­ing­ton novel,” though he is respect­ful toward other writ­ers such as Vidal, Pele­canos, and Christina Stead, author of The Man Who Loved Chil­dren—about the fam­ily of a minor bureau­crat. Now that’s a neglected group in D.C. fic­tion: the peo­ple who get paid to carry out the bosses’ orders. “Most so-called Wash­ing­ton nov­els,” Stein observes, “are short on local his­tory or geog­ra­phy.” He also observes: “There has never been a Wash­ing­ton novel of ideas. These are books about careers, money and sex—usually in that order.” Hmm. Scan­dals actu­ally has sev­eral ideas embed­ded within the plot and the satire—including a por­trayal of Wash­ing­ton as a hier­ar­chi­cal white-collar fac­tory town, an impres­sion rein­forced by my old expe­ri­ences in a blue-collar one. A related con­cept revolves around the con­flict at times between life and prop­erty rights. Yet another is the belief that politi­cians and cor­po­rate exec­u­tives use per­sonal moral­ity issues as a way to reign in trou­ble­mak­ers and also deflect crit­i­cism of polit­i­cal and finan­cial moral­ity (details in the book).

Note: This is a liv­ing doc­u­ment and con­tains infor­mal impres­sions, as opposed to being a schol­arly work. I may be mak­ing changes later on, and mean­while I’ll wel­come con­struc­tive feed­back. — D.R.

(The above item orig­i­nally appeared on Feb­ru­ary 20, 2009, and is revived for the ben­e­fit of latecomers.)