The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

A WASHINGTON novel

The Solomon Scan­dals blog comes out of Alexan­dria, Vir­ginia, just across the Potomac from D.C., and the novel itself is very much a Wash­ing­ton crea­ture, as well as a North­ern Vir­ginia one.

But oh how the local details can travel, so to speak. Dur­ing the Water­gate party in Scan­dals, a PR man offers boozy insights about local sub­way eti­quette on the Metro—“left-steppers” vs. “right-steppers” and “park­ers,” and the soci­ol­ogy of it all. But you could live in New York or Moscow and under­stand the nuances even if the eti­quette isn’t the same.

“Local” works for me as a reader, too. I’ve just fin­ished Pat Con­roy’s South of Broad, a tri­bune to his home town of Charleston, S.C. (that’s Alexan­dria, how­ever, to the left). Some­how I felt bet­ter about the novel and the peo­ple in it when I saw not just a bunch of street names but also detailed, heart­felt descrip­tions of, say, the area near a sea­wall, or the por­poises swim­ming in the water nearby. I can’t help but admire Conroy’s sense of place. Dick­ens had it, too, with his descrip­tions of the foul Lon­don fog in Bleak House—the per­fect metaphor, some would say, for the British legal sys­tem. Sin­clair Lewis, a not-so-in-vogue favorite of mine, cre­ated mem­o­rable descrip­tions of the Amer­i­can Midwest.

I gen­er­ally dis­like books where the set­ting sounds generic, or where the details tend to be accu­rate but still wrong. In The Lost Sym­bol, Dan Brown does not err in giv­ing the dimen­sions of the U.S. Capi­tol—I’d just like more than num­bers to help me con­nect with the peo­ple inside. Pat Con­roy can always accom­mo­date me with the right local details; Brown so often can’t.

An offer: If you buy Scan­dals and are puz­zled about a Washington-related detail, just email me, and I’ll explain it. I may even turn my reply into a post for this site, with credit to you for the ques­tion if you want me to men­tion you by name. Mean­while if you have books you’d like to rec­om­mend, based on their strong sense of place, feel free to do so.