This week's geek assignment - "Take us on a literary tour of your hometown! Do you live in a place where a famous author was born? Does your town have any cool literary museums or monuments? Does Stephen King live at the end of your street? Was Twilight set in your hometown?'
Dozens of ways to approach this topic went through my head. I live in the Washington DC metro area where more than a few great books have been set or written. But Thursday night I popped over to my favorite independent, Politics and Prose, to hear George Pelecanos read from and take questions on his new novel, The Way Home. A main topic of conversation was why his books are all set in DC and if he ever considers writing about another place. But essentially, he writes not only what he knows but what he sees, and has no plans for straying from his DC home.
Pop over to his blog and hit the Washington tab if you want to see what I mean about writing what he sees. Thursday night, he told everyone how he photographs (with his iPhone now he offered) the various locations and markers about town that will appear in his stories, the visual cue of the image presumably supplying the sharpness of detail for which his prose is praised. Really important to take note of the Washington he photographs for this is the subject matter of his books. Gritty portraits of the residents of the nation's capital who arrived pre-gentrification, of the marginalized, of the displaced and the struggles that mark their daily existence.
The Way Home examines a difficult relationship between father and son, a relationship challenged by both the son's incarceration and subsequent efforts at redemption and the hit the father's working class presumptions and values take because of his son. The juvenile detention center featured in the novel is actually Oak Hill here in the district. The author's visits there lend stark realism to the dialogue in the those sections of the book. The neighborhood where the working class father has lived his whole life is Friendship Heights, now a neighborhood for the well-heeled, a neighborhood that does not remember its decidedly middle class roots. Read through and perhaps you will recognize other places in DC with which you are familiar. And many places a typical tourist never sees. But the father and son dynamic here could have occurred anywhere. Click here for more info on The Way Home.
Here is George Pelecanos signing your new book last Thursday night. Comment with a reason why you would like to take this particular trip to DC, and I will pick one out I especially like next Saturday. If they are all so compelling that I cannot possibly choose, it will be a random draw for one signed copy of The Way Home. And don't forget the author's website for more info on the novels, the author (including his huge success with The Wire), and, of course, Washington DC.
Photo credit for first image to Andrew Councill of NYT in 2006.
