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.

• ‘About politics’: Is it or isn’t it? Plus three political novels recced on NPR
• The Solomon Scandals: A BRIEF video introduction
• Scandals is fiction, but in real-life outrages, D.C. is catching up
• Blurbs
• ‘I write like William Shakespeare’: Paste ‘The Solomon Scandals’ into this Web form and see for yourself