The Books of the States: The District of Columbia (3 electoral votes)
It's fitting, as we end our tour of the books of the 50 states with a 51st entry, that a D.C. voting rights bill, which would finally give the District of Columbia a full voting representative in Congress for the first time, is under serious consideration. (Although the price would be the loss of the greatest license-plate slogan in the country--even better than "Live Free or Die": "Taxation Without Representation." Does that mean they'll go back to the lame Barry-era tagline, "A Capital City"?) I may have had to do some extra photoshopping to concoct a D.C. quarter, but the District, with its three electoral votes, has always been part of our 538, and even though Washington has never been particularly known as a writers' town, it seems almost criminal to have to choose just three books from what turns out to be a wealth of contenders. Politics have, understandably, dominated the history of D.C. writing, but especially lately we've been blessed with brilliant fictional looks at the other Washington, the lives outside the Red Line Northwest corridor that don't turn over with each administration.
In some similarly overloaded states I've blown past the electoral limits, but maybe because, having grown up a few miles over the D.C. line, I feel a little more secure in holding a hard line, I'm sticking with the statutory limit of three. (Not that my honorable mention list isn't going to be endless, though.) Here's my long-considered selection, which I've been mulling ever since the Books of the States got going last fall:
- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam: Much as it pains an old Watergate nut like me to leave off All the President's Men or John Dean's delicious and riveting mea culpa, Blind Ambition (and much as it hurts an old Post loyalist to give the nod to a Timesman over the local boys) the most acclaimed political book of the last century remains Halberstam's investigation of how the decisions made (and not made) in Washington got us into Vietnam, and couldn't get us out.
- All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones: Jones may be best known for his Pulitzer-winning novel of slavery in rural Virginia, The Known World, but his stories in Lost in the City and this second collection are so intensely rooted in the history and geography of his home city that it's difficult to imagine that he could ever have written about anywhere else.
- The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams: Does anyone read this book anymore? I never hear about it these days, but It's one of the most stylish--and strangest--of American classics, a memoir told in the third person that spans from his grandfather John Quincy Adams to the bewildering technical advances of the 20th century. It's as much a Massachusetts book (for the bravura opening page alone: "Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple...") as a D.C. book, but he was one of the great students of the capital, in this book as well as his anonymous novel, Democracy, and his presidential histories.
And much, much more: Crime auteur (and The Wire contributor) George Pelecanos is Jones's chief rival as D.C.'s current chronicler--his 2004 novel Hard Revolution may be his most ambitious, but many fans still turn to his early D.C. Quartet, including The Big Blowdown and King Suckerman. Dinaw Mengestu's immigrant story, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is one our favorite novels of the past few years. Gore Vidal has always been drawn to and repulsed by the power of the city he was raised in as a senator's grandson, most notably in his essays and his Narratives of Empire series, including Burr, Lincoln, and Washington, D.C. And there are shelves and shelves of political thrillers set in D.C. (half of them, it seems, with a cover image of a gun sight superimposed over the Capitol), but local spooks have long praised the books of Charles McCarry, including Shelley's Heart.
And so on: there's Mailer's Armies of the Night, Katherine Graham's Personal History, Allen Drury's Senate classic, Advise and Consent, James L. Swenson's recent bestseller, Manhunt, as good on life in Civil War D.C. as on the late president, Jean Toomer's Cane (which we already put on the Georgia list), children of D.C. who have written mostly of other places (Ann Beattie, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alex Ross), Sterling Brown, Rayford Logan, and Carter Woodson at Howard, and, of course, as any '70s kid in shouting distance of those creepy stairs in Georgetown could tell you, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. But I'm still waiting for someone to unearth the definitive story on the '77-'78 Hayes-Unseld-Dandridge World Champion Washington Bullets...
Meanwhile, yes, 51 posts later, we've come to the end of The Books of the States. We couldn't quite keep up with that early pace that had us hoping we'd be done by Thanksgiving, but it has been a treat and an education. We're not really at the end, though: the nominating is still open before we put together our final list of 538, and I'll have more on that this week. --Tom
- See all of our state posts
- Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
- Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Okie on March 25, 2009 at 03:54 PM
No doubt my favorite literary blog series ever. Thanks, Man, for all your time and effort! ...