I went to undergraduate/college in Washington DC, at The American University. Not the best university but I wasn't good enough to get into anyplace first-rate and they offered me a full scholarship so I took it. AU is located in Northwest DC, i.e. the white part, and that part of DC is hardly represented in the twelve titles selected to represent the District within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. This book is mapped just over the border from Northeast DC, a traditionally middle-class African American area but it is one of only two books set in Northwest. Anyway, Training School for Negro Girls is a collection of short-stories.
If I had to characterize a theme for this collection it would be striving- all of these characters are trying to do something in their lives. It was refreshing after reading so many struggle n' trauma driven books. Not that these characters don't suffer their own trauma, but it's typically in pursuit of an actual goal: Winning a children's piano competition, trying to help a neighborhood business, joining an exclusive African American social club. This book by itself already distinguishes itself from the many African American titles from New York City- not one of which had an ounce of the hope or ambition of any of these characters.
Published 9/23/24
Long Distance Life (1989)
by Marita Golden
Washington DC (Northeast)
Washington DC: 2/12
Long Distance Life is another good example of the benefits of doing this kind of list-based reading. It's a really good novel about the African-American experience in Washington DC, and almost certainly a book I would never have read or even heard about were it not for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project. Long Distance Life is plot type 2, family saga. It starts out with the matriarch of the family, Naomi Reeves, who leaves behind her sharecropper husband in North Carolina for a shot at something else in 1920's Washington DC. She quickly manages to parlay work as a housecleaner into a small empire of rental properties. She falls in love with a Marcus Garvey loving school teacher and they have a daughter, Esther.
Esther, of course, makes a series of what look like obviously terrible life choices: Dropping out of Howard University in favor of having a child with a married man. Most of the book involves mother-Naomi picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Esther's bad choice, and the impact that choice has on her two children, Logan, her first child and Nathaniel, the child she has with the same man after she works through her issues by volunteering as a Civil Rights worker in the deep south.
Golden's portrayal of African American life over the decades in Washington DC is lucid and clear. She doesn't advocate or criticize her character's choices, preferring to let the narrative speak for itself. Long Distance Life is a small gem of a book.
Published 9/24/24
The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears (2007)
by Dinaw Mengestu
Logan Circle, Washington DC
Washington DC: 3/12
I certainly remember Logan Circle from my time in Washington DC, the more run down and decrepit cousin of Dupont Circle (home of the DC LGBT community) but always on the brink of revitalization and gentrification. The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears is two things: An immigrant living-in-America story, Ethiopian diaspora version and a gentrification novel. The Ethiopian immigrant story-line I found compelling, the gentrification angle, less so, but overall this book fits within the 1,001 Novels project because it is so focused on the location of Logan Circle.
The Ethiopian diaspora is the opposite from what many Americans, raised on images of starving Ethiopian children, might expect. Ethiopia is/was an indigenous African empire, with its own elites- two of them- actually, and a host of what you might call "tribal peoples"- groups not really in charge of their own destiny under the Ethiopian Empire or the governments which followed. The Emperor was deposed in 1974 by a group of Marxist revolutionaries who were largely led by the Omoro. The Emperor was Amharic. Thus, most of the Ethiopian immigrants fled in the aftermath of that change in power, and most of them were Amharic ethnicity people who were high-status Ethiopians under Selassie: Wealthy, educated business men, soldiers, scholars and government officials.
They were all people who got to the United States of their own accord, using their own resources, and most if not all of them spoke English when they arrived courtesy of their educational background in Ethiopia. In other words, the Ethiopian immigrants to America had as much to do with the starving Ethiopians of our television sets as the Pilgrims had to do with the Native Americans they destroyed.
Which all goes to say that the children of the Ethiopian diaspora were the children of educated people, and were themselves educated, even if the status of their immigrant parents didn't match their status in pre-Revolutionary Ethiopia. It's a different immigration story than the proverbial tired, huddled masses, yearning to be free. The literature of the Ethiopian diaspora reflects that background.
That difference has already been identified in the 1,001 Novels project courtesy of The Parking Lot Attendant (2018) by Nafkote Tamirat. Both books feature shadowy elders with a hidden past and mysterious present and narrators who are younger, well educated, but with a feeling that they are neither Americans nor Ethiopians, and that they are in some sense only here in America temporarily. Of course, that didn't really happen, even after the fall of the Marxists in 1991. According to a report from 2018 there are more than 3 million members of the Ethiopian diaspora and over a half a million in North America.
The center of the diaspora in North America is Washington DC and the surrounding suburbs- something that was very clear to me during college. This book talks about entire apartment buildings in the Maryland suburbs filled entirely with Ethiopians and DC is chock a block with Ethiopian restaurants. So, again, The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears, with its Logan Circle location, is very classically Ethiopian diaspora. The gentrification angle- about a white lady with a young daughter who buys and renovates a decrepit old mansion, with sad and predictable results, was less compelling for me.
Published 9/27/24
All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006)
by Edward P. Jones
Washington, DC
Washington DC: 4/12
Edward P. Jones was the highest (#3\4) listed author on the New York Times Best 1001 Books of the 21st Century who I had never read (or heard of! Sad!). His novel, The Known World was a Pulitzer Prize winner and general all-around banger. It was preceded by one book of short stories and followed by a second book of short stories (this book). Jones has the most iconic artistic biography I've ever seen- something approaching perfection in terms of the concerns of this blog.
Jones left school in 1981 after he got his MFA. His first collection of short stories was published in 1992, and I'd imagine he was working towards that since before he graduated from school, a decade long process of getting his short-stories published wherever and then convincing a publisher to take a chance on the collection. That's a very standard first step for almost all the writers of literary fiction in the modern era. Were one to pursue a path towards being a published author you would have to say, "OK, I'm going to spend at least five years actually writing short stories that possess some awareness of the market for short stories, I'm going to have to write more than one story, send them out to more than one publication, accept that people are going to be uninterested, keep going AND have some idea that this is going to work out and at the end of that I'm going to have to produce a novel."
So Jones publishes Lost in the City in 1992 and it gets good marks. Enough to get his publisher, which gets purchased by HarperCollins in 1999- to put out his debut novel, The Known World, which is published in 2003, meaning that he completed it in 2002- a decade after the Lost in the City comes out, which, I think is the absolute limit for a reasonable length of time to elapse between publications. There is no question that there is an ideal length between publication dates in all areas where market capitalism and artistic production intersect- a year between albums, two or three years between books, 3 to 5 years between films for a director, etc.
The Known World was a big bet- taking a decade to write and publish. However, it was a hit. He wins the Pulitzer Prize. He starts teaching at George Washington University and then in 2010 he gets a full professorship. In 2006, he published this book, another collection of short-stories connected to his first collection. And that, my friends, is all he wrote.
After
The Known World placed number four on the best books of the 21st century list the Times sent A.O. Scott out to
track him down and let him know. It's just about a perfect interview- that of an artist who has said what he had to say and doesn't feel a need- either financial or psychological to continue to attract attention to himself. Perfect! That is the perfect artistic career.
Published 9/30/24
King Suckerman (1998)
by George P. Pelecanos
Washington DC
Washington DC: 5/12
Pelecanos was eking out a career as a moderately succesful writer of crime fiction when David Simon showed up and asked him to work on The Wire. Since then he's been reinvented as an HBO affiliated writer/producer with credits on 'Treme, Bosch and The Deuce. Of course, I was excited to reach a title on the 1,001 Novels list that isn't YA fiction, the story of an underprivileged young woman and her struggles or a set of inter-connected short stories about life in a small town.
King Suckerman brings heavy Tarantino flavor to crime-fiction story: It's the week of the Bicentennial celebration in Washington DC. Marcus Clay is a black Vietnam veteran who runs a DC record store with a side of drug-dealing. His buddy is Dimitri Karras, small-time weed dealer and childhood friend, mostly interested in playing basketball and selling his weed to high school students. Shit gets complicated when the cross paths with Wilton Cooper, a genuine badass who doesn't see much of a difference between life outside and life inside, maybe he prefers the situation inside- and behaves accordingly, laying waste to all his cross his path. Pelecanos can be forgiven for making Cooper into a kind of philosopher-god of death, making a hugely appalling character into the most interesting part of the book.
Suckerman is a hard "R" with grotesque, gun-inflicted violence, rampant drug use and a side of rape. I raced through the Audiobook once I got a handle on the case of characters- it was a genuine good time. Pelecanos is worth checking out.
Published 10/1/24
Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City (2015)
by David Nicholson
Washington DC
Washington DC: 6/12
David Nicholson looks like one of those writers you would call a "writers writer" or "artists artist" which means that people in the know, people in the field, know who he is- the field being writers and teachers of literary fiction in the US. He has quotes from people who have won major prizes for this, his only collection of fiction (He just published a family history, The Garretts of Columbia, in January of this year and those are his only two books.) I'd never heard of the publisher either, Paycock Press- which is a very small independent press in Virginia.
Flying Home is, yes, a set of interconnected short stories about one neighborhood in Northeast DC, the home of the African American lower middle class, and these stories reflect that milieu. Youthful mischief, jobs gained and lost, the lore of baseball are all covered and Nicholson maintains the distinctive, low stakes tone throughout. These folks are deeply rooted in the DC environment and it's hard to imagine their neighborhood changing.
Pulished 10/2/24
Grief (2006)
by Andrew Holleran
Dupont Circle, Washington DC
Washington DC: 7/12
Andrew Holleran taught at American University, my alma mater, and I recognized a similar world in this book, Grief, about a socially isolated gay academic who comes to Washington DC to teach an undergraduate course and rents a room from an older gay bureaucrat in the Federal Government who has a lot of things to say, mostly about the joys of loneliness and social isolation in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Holleran is well known for his books about gay life- starting with Dancer from the Dance, which chronicles the hedonistic ways of pre-AIDS, late 1970's New York City and Fire Island.
As one of the rare LGBT authors who was nationally recognized pre-AIDS epidemic, it's not surprising that all of his post epidemic writing has focused on questions of loss and loneliness, with an emphasis on family relationships and the strains illness causes. Although the characters in Grief are marked by their surviving the epidemic, they function in a somewhat ghostly fashion, leaving DC itself to provide vibrancy. Vibrant Dupont Circle in the fall, I can remember it well. Like the characters in this book, I spent time in Dupont Circle just hanging out- amazed that one could do such a thing.
Published 10/3/24
Eighteen Acres (2010)
by Nicole Wallace
The White House, Washington DC
Washington DC: 8/12
Nicole Wallace grew up in the next suburb over from me in Northern California and she went on to serve as Press Secretary under George W. Bush before working on the McCain/Palin Presidential Campaign, where she was singled out as being responsible for the Sarah Palin fiasco. Her professional experience is what Wallace brings to Eighteen Acres a "you are there" novel about the first female (Republican) President, her husband, his affair with a television journalist and the author-based press secretary who has to deal with all of it.
I'm not sure if this was intentional on the part of 1,001 Novels editor Susan Straight, but I couldn't stop laughing over this book set at the exact point in time when the Blackberry was THE communication medium for high ranking public officials. The protagonists' Blackberry is mentioned at least 30 times over the three hundred pages of the book. I loved my Blackberry and remember the era fondly.
Aside from the constant Blackberry references there was amusement to be found in the pre-Trump Republican party, which now seems like a distant fantasy compared to our polarized present. It's almost hard to fathom how angry pre-Trump Republicans like George W. Bush and John McCain made people- they seem like genuinely nice people after a decade of Trump and his operation.
Published 10/7/24
Henry and Clara (1994)
by Thomas Mallon
Ford's Theater, Washington DC
Washington DC: 9/12
I have a vague memory of touring Ford's Theater, perhaps on my Junior High trip to the capital. It couldn't have been during college, when I eschewed all "touristy stuff" in favor of undergraduate ennui. The 1,001 Novels project has this book mapped at the theater because the couple in the title- He: A Union Army soldier returned from the just completed Civil War and She: A friend and confident of the largely friendless and confidant-less Mary Lincoln were, in fact, in the box with Lincoln and Mary when John Wikes Booth shot him, Henry also being stabbed by Booth before he(Booth) jumped out of the theater box to the stage below.
Writing books about actual historical people is Mallon's schtick and Henry and Clara is a good choice for a chapter on books about Washington DC because the protagonist is Clara, wife of Henry, and she describes Civil War Era DC like a character out of Vanity Fair. The reader really gets a sense of the place circa 1860 onward. Henry and Clara is chock a block with historical detail but the plot itself: Henry's slow decline into madness after surviving the assassination attempt is hampered because Clara, like most people of that era, doesn't understand much about the process of mental illness.
Published 10/8/24
Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
by George Saunders
Georgetown, Washington DC
Washington DC: 10/12
Of course I read Lincoln in the Bardo the year it came out. Before it won the Booker Prize, even. It looks like I listened to the Audiobook back in 2021- that must have been a covid thing. I really enjoyed this book. Saunders got three books onto the recent New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century, including this book, which is in line with his position as a writer who has established himself as a short story writer who is treated like a novelist and then as a prize winning novelists once he decided to actually write a novel. It's a close call between this book and All of Aunt Hagar's Children for best DC title in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. Here is the post from 2017:
Published 9/18/17
Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
by George Saunders So here I am, more or less caught up with contemporary fiction. The
1001 Books Project originally ended in 2006, so "the present" means the period between then and 2017. Reviews of contemporary books will focus on their potential for canonical status, with the understanding that it is unknowable whether I am correct or not. Unfortunately, the single best indicator would seem to be those books that either win major literary prizes or are nominated for such. This criterion will take into account the sales record of each title, since simply looking at the best seller for canon candidates (while efficient) is simply too depressing to contemplate.
Lincoln in the Bardo is the second 2017 book I've read in this category- the first being Colson Whitehead's
The Underground Railroad. Both books were selected based on their low odds on the
Ladbrook's table for Booker Prize shortlist nominees.
Lincoln in the Bardo DID make the short list,
The Underground Railroad did not.
Lincoln in the Bardo also has the top odds to win the prize- currently at 2/1. Author George Saunders is well known as a short-story writer and an essayist- I actually saw him speak last year in Los Angeles because my girlfriend is a fan and I left saying, "Well, he should write a novel." (He alluded to the fact that he was doing so during his talk.)
So here is that novel, and yes, he did do an amazing job writing his first novel, with critical plaudits and an appearance at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. It is a very appealing package: First time novel by a known quantity, combines historical fiction and the supernatural, popular United States President (Abraham Lincoln) appears as a major character (though not the Lincoln of the title.) AND- AND- it's is very, very easy to read, written in a format where each statement is written in citation format, whether or not it takes the form of actual dialogue or a quote from a historic text about the Lincoln administration.
The Bardo of the title refers to the Tibetan spiritual concept which roughly equates to "purgatory"- neither heaven nor hell but a kind of supernatural waiting room, where unresolved issues may cause spirits to linger in the corporeal world as spirits, their issues reflected in their "physical" demeanor. The Lincoln of the title is the President's son, William "Willie" Lincoln. He died at the very beginning of the Civil War, and the story is "based" on two subsequent visits that the President made to Willie's tomb.
Saunders manages to pack an astonishing number of voices into the 300 pages- over 100 by most accounts. The other voices are other left behind spirits, and each of them adds some value to Saunders vision of Civil War era America. The grave yard in which Willie is laid to rest stands next to a paupers grave where African-Americans and vagrants were unceremoniously dumped, and thus Saunders is able to inject more social concern into a novel about ghosts and Abraham Lincoln than one might initially consider possible.
It is this extra level of plot- the white graveyard next to the black graveyard, which I think really pushes Bardo into canonical territory. Also, the fact that is both clearly a work of "experimental" fiction AND fast/easy to read and understand- that is a rare quality, and a canonical quality. I think, weighing against it is the fact that it lacks the "weight" that often marks a canonical novel. The technique of writing an entire book as a series of quotes from other sources detracts from the over-all impact, and may directly alienate less serious readers- a key component of the audience for a newly canonical text.
Surely, the winning or losing of the Booker Prize will be a huge factor. The prize, like the winnowing of the long list to a short list is notoriously unpredictable, but with 2/1 odds,
Lincoln in the Bardo is the odds on favorite.
Published 10/9/24
Thank You For Smoking (1994)
by Christopher Buckley
Capitol Hill, Washington DC
Washington DC: 11/12
I read Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley's satire(!?!) of the lobbying industry when it came out- or shortly thereafter, when I was actually living in and attending school in Washington DC. A comic novel is a rare thing these days. I didn't re-read it for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, but it 's about a tobacco lobbyist who is kidnapped by anti-tobacco activists. Very 90's plot.
Published 10/10/24
Children of Men (1991)
by Jeanne Schinto
Southeast, Washington DC
Washington DC: 12/12
That's a wrap for Washington DC! Children of Men, not to be confused with the PD James dystopian-future novel that was made into a very good movie, this book is about a member of the white economic underclass- the daughter of a father who moved out of the Appalachian region for work after World War II. Cathy "Bird Legs" Ashwell has the deck stacked against her from day one. She lives in a run-down rental in a bad part of town. Her dad is a flag-operator on construction sites who drinks himself to sleep every day after work. Her mom left. Her younger brother is a drug-addict after returning from Vietnam, her sister is a whore-in-the-making. Cathy makes one decision for herself in this book- to pursue a young African American guy from her neighborhood, which, of course, works out poorly for her. She talks her way into joining her paramour and her drug-addict brother on a criminal enterprise that ends with her brother dead, her paramour in jail in Virginia and herself gang raped. She gets back home, finds out she is pregnant, has the kid, gets another boyfriend, has two more kids before she is 21 under what can only be described as horrific circumstances and spends the rest of the book trying to get her act together.
Children of Men is so dark it actually warrants comparison to the PD James novel- the presence of any kind of light in this novel is so dim that one wonders why write it at all. This was the first and only novel by Jeanne Schinto, who was born in Greenwich Connecticut but graduated from George Washington and the Johns Hopkins creative writing program. Presumably, Cathy Ashwell is based on someone she met while doing some kind of social work in the District. Kudos to editor Susan Straight for giving some attention to this book, which otherwise has disappeared from the public consciousness.
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