The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

The IRS as fodder for David Foster Wallace and me

In my lit­tle overview of D.C. fic­tion, I quoted Jef­frey Charis-Carlson, a spe­cial­ist in this area: “It takes a great novel to make bureau­cracy inter­est­ing.” But how about writ­ing about indi­vid­ual bureau­crats? That’s what I did with the love inter­est of Jonathan Stone, my reporter pro­tag­o­nist in The Solomon Scan­dals. Margo Daniel­son is a young GS-7, an Ober­lin grad, a medieval stud­ies major stuck at that most déclassé of agen­cies, the scandal-wracked Gen­eral Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion, the head­quar­ters of which appears in the left photo.

For the main ten­ant of Sey­mour Solomon’s rick­ety build­ing, where Margo her­self works for the GSA, I chose another agency with a hum­drum mis­sion, the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice, about which we’ll all be think­ing plenty as April 15 looms. “Just briefly,” I write, “I imag­ined the bureau­cracy pun­ish­ing Solomon not for the col­lapse but for vio­lat­ing the sanc­tity of tax forms.”

Well, along come some fresh hints that the fed­eral bureau­cracy, or at least the IRS, just might turn out to be more fash­ion­able than I counted on. None other than the late David Fos­ter Wal­lace, one of the stars of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can fic­tion, as well as the topic of a just-published New Yorker pro­file, has writ­ten about life in an Illi­nois office of the IRS. And to go by an excerpt, he hasn’t spared us any bureau­cratic details:

“Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rub­ber pinkie fin­ger, sat at his Tin­gle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wig­gle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his but­tocks and held to a count of ten and imag­ined a warm pretty beach with mel­low surf, as instructed in ori­en­ta­tion the pre­vi­ous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visu­al­ized and bore way down and did four with­out look­ing up once, except to put the com­pleted files and memos in the two…”

In Moby-Dick, Melville piled up details on details about whal­ing, and maybe Wal­lace, in his own way, has got­ten away with pas­sages like the above. No Great White, alas. But inside-such-and-such’s-head is Wallace’s forte, and his bureau­crats, like Cap­tain Ahab, go on chases—not of whales, but of dead­beat tax­pay­ers. Fin­gers crossed.

The Solomon Scan­dals is a dif­fer­ent book from Wallace’s unfin­ished IRS novel of sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand words (titled The Pale King, set in the 1980s and expected to appear in 2010 from Lit­tle, Brown & Com­pany). I wrote about D.C. as a white-collar fac­tory town. But to keep the pace up, I avoided an account of any bureaucrat’s job except as per­ceived by an out­sider, Jonathan Stone. Rather, Scan­dals is an inti­mate look at Stone’s work and delves into his head, not the bureaucrats’.

Along the way, how­ever, you’ll run across some grubby GSA forms (PDF alert)—genuine doc­u­ments of the kinds that fig­ured in my actual inves­ti­ga­tion of Sen. Abe Ribi­coff. Despite the con­gres­sion­ally related ban in the forms, Ribi­coff was a secret investor in a CIA-occupied build­ing in Arling­ton, Vir­ginia. Per­haps Wallace’s explo­ration of bureau­cratic life can add to the time­li­ness of Scan­dals. As described in James Fal­lows’ com­ments to Twi­light Times Press, Scan­dals “broad­ens the cast of the stan­dard Wash­ing­ton novel beyond spy­mas­ters and politi­cians to include real estate barons and fed­eral con­tract officers.”

• Crooked politicians mean tumbling buildings—in countries from Egypt to China, not just U.S.
• Overview of ‘The Solomon Scandals’
• Plot
• Heart troubles: Fact-checking in the cardiac ICU, post-bypass
• Martha N. Johnson: GSA’s new leader vs. dirty politics—the ‘Solomon Scandals’ angle