I mentioned last week that I had read Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which I finished a few weeks ago. It is a book that manages to insult almost everyone in a rather snide and wickedly funny manner. It is also probably a fairly accurate description of class in America as it still stood in 1980. I'm not saying that class has changed in the intervening years, just that its expression is somewhat different now than it was then. I am sure Fussell would attribute some of this to proletariat creep in a population with much greater multicultural diversity, as well as the widening influence of what Fussell calls "category x". I remain convinced that class I still with us, although like everything else, it has evolved and perhaps become more convoluted. Even class X is suspect in my mind, not that I don’t believe it is there, but because I believe it is very difficult to completely escape the influence of class and it seems to me that much of category x is not so much outside of class as a special subset of the highly educated classes with its own sets of bias and anxieties.
Still, dated as I believe the book is, it is informative and useful in ferreting out one's own history and biases, some of which may be so well ingrained and a part of our very natures that we never really thought about their cultural repercussions. Reading the book also made me address some of my own issues, biases, and reservations about the move from our sequestered house overlooking the Hudson River to our planned community in Knoxville.
On a whim, I followed Fussell with John T. Molloy's Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others, not because I am looking for a husband or even am all that interested in the subject, but because of a recommendation. It is an engrossingly quick read but also a good solid piece of social science research. I ended up being fascinated by the research and by the stats. Highly recommended.
Lastly, I just finished Dan Wells' Partials although I am afraid I was somewhat underwhelmed. Basically, my reservations revolve around the characters, even the main characters, who seem superficial and oddly character-less. The adults are extremely narrowly rendered, and they seem like shells of ideas. Perhaps this is intended, but I would hope that the few adults who survived the loss of everything they new would be more than husks of what I can only assume to be their former selves. But even though the younger characters were more fully realized than the adults, even they seemed more like shells, especially the protagonist, Kira. By the end of the book I was willing to conceded that this may have been planned, and that this incomplete development of Kira as a person may play into the development of the story and tie into future volumes, which, in turn, may make them more interesting. Still it is a long slog, getting through one volume in the hopes of a greater payout in the next volume. I am not yet sure if I am interested enough to read the next volume when it is released
Comments
4 responses to “Reading Update”
I keep hearing references to Fussell’s book and should get to it some day, if only to see if there’s any relevance to our Canadian situation. I’m no more willing than you are to believe we’ve evolved beyond class, and I’m fascinated with understanding how it manifests.
I look forward to reading this–one of my favorite books is Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.
I agree that Fussell’s book is slightly dated, but I see evidence of class every day in my classrooms. My students are solidly working class and below, yet each one will say they are middle, even upper-middle class. Alain de Botton’s Social Anxiety is a more updated consideration.
I was hoping you would review Fussell’s book! I had similar insights and questions. I wish he were still alive to write a new revision. The Botton book Terri mentioned sounds really interesting.