Books: Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones

Shaw may be the new gayborhood, as TNG has discussed here, here, and elsewhere, but its streets, rowhouses, churches and corner stores have a long history, one mostly inaccessible to us whiteys-come-lately. Ok, we're certainly not all white, and we're definitely not all gay, but most of us are new, and our histories are elsewhere. I've been here 11 years, and I still feel like a shallow-rooted transient. And of Shaw, my playground all this time, I know little more than what I've seen and heard myself. I didn't know until I just consulted Wikipedia that Shaw "grew out of freed slave encampments." Though of course I know that it's lightening up in a hurry: "According to Census records from 1970, 92% of Shaw's residents were black; in 2000, 56% were black. Shaw's notable place in African American history has made the recent influx of affluent professionals particularly controversial."

But D.C.'s "history" problem, our cloudy origins and confused identity, isn't all black and white: it comes from the lack of loving treatment granted by books and movies to other cities...even Baltimore has The Wire. We're stuck here in the shadow of the Capitol, and the political thrillers that generates have nothing to do with us. To the point: I hadn't read anything truly about the people of D.C. until Lost In the City by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edward P. Jones.


The collection is a street-level view of the African American experience in our city all over the latter half of the 20th century. Yes, these are fourteen relentlessly bleak stories. Sometimes I can't tell if I actually like them. But they're all here, on our Battleship-grid of quadrants: 13th, O, 9th, F, 12th, S....Northwest, Northeast, Anacostia, Chevy Chase, Petworth, and mostly, Shaw. And that's kind of awesome. And they're filled with indelible scenes and characters.

As Mr. Jones said in a Q&A with the Washington Post, "I had read James Joyce's Dubliners, and I was quite taken with what he had done with Dublin. So I set out to do the same thing for Washington, D.C. I went away to college and people have a very narrow idea of what Washington is like. They don't know that it's a place of neighborhoods, for example, and I set out to give a better picture of what the city is like--the other city."