The Middle-Class Ghetto
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CURRENT BOOKS the almost partylike atmosphere that came with describes the killing of black men by white vigi- having survived and then rediscovered a place in lantes in New Orleans following Katrina. A virulent the community. The joyful aftermath of a disaster, mixture of racism and fear—spurred by wildly Solnit writes, “is by its very nature unsustainable exaggerated news reports suggesting that the entire and evanescent, but like a lightning flash it illumi- area had been plunged into anarchy—led middle- nates ordinary life, and like lightning it sometimes aged white men to slaughter innocent people shatters the old forms.” whom they saw as potential thieves and killers. The These ephemeral utopias raise radical possibili- murders are an open secret in the communities in ties for social rearrangement. But they go largely which they occurred: One of the vigilantes was unappreciated, due in large part to the mainstream filmed bragging, “It was like pheasant season in media’s adherence to preconceived narratives that South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” But neither have more to do with Hollywood disaster films, Sol- the police nor the media have shown much interest nit claims, than with actual events. At best, ordin- in the story. As Solnit writes, “If the facts don’t fit ary citizens are depicted as passive victims who the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely linger in the disaster area until they are rescued by unnoticed.” the authorities. At worst, they are seen as dangers The Katrina murders are meant to reinforce to themselves and to each other, prone to panic, Solnit’s claim that during disasters the underclass looting, and violence. Only one thing can head off has reason to fear privileged elites, rather than the chaos: swift and decisive action by the police, the other way around. But the crimes also undermine military, and other authorities. her thesis that human nature, as revealed in In fact, Solnit argues, the evidence does not sup- moments of crisis, should lead us to prefer anarchic port this anti-democratic paternalism. The public over authoritarian political structures. Despite its almost never panics en masse, let alone runs wild: subtitle, Solnit’s book has less to say about post- People tend instead to be calm, clearheaded, com- disaster utopias than about the forces that prevent petent, and surprisingly altruistic. Indeed, ordinary such communities from enduring, or even from citizens are not only the first but quite frequently arising at all. Readers of A Paradise Built in Hell the best responders to disaster. Official efforts can may find themselves on the same page with many go wrong precisely because they are excessively readers of Dante: It is hell, not paradise, that makes paternalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian. the more vivid and lasting impression. What elites tend to fear more than the dis- Troy Jollimore is an associate professor of philosophy at Cali- aster—given their power and wealth, they are prob- fornia State University, Chico. His book Tom Thomson in Purga- tory won the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. ably well prepared to ride out an earthquake, fire, or flood—is the social destabilization that they ARTS & LETTERS believe will follow. It is not the image of rising water, but of looters at the door, that haunts the The Middle-Class nightmares of the bourgeoisie. After the San Fran- cisco earthquake, Brigadier General Frederick Fun- Ghetto ston sanctioned his soldiers’ use of deadly force Reviewed by A. J. Loftin against looters—an action typical of the official response to disasters, and one that makes little Every Sunday, The New WHAT AMERICA sense, considering that most “looters” are not YorkTimes reviews serious, intelli- READ: thieves, but victims scavenging for food, clothing, gent books no student of literature Ta st e , Class, and the and other necessities. will read 50 years from now. Or so Nov el, 1920– 1960 . Officials aren’t the only ones who resort to vio- Gordon Hutner believes—and his- By Gordon Hutner. lence in the defense of status quo property arrange- torically, he’s got a point. Univ. of N.C. Press. 450 pp. $39.95 ments. By far, Solnit’s most depressing chapter Hutner, an English professor at Autumn 2009 ■Wilson Quarterly 103 CURRENT BOOKS the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Philip Roth may yet get his comeuppance, and by the founding editor of the journal American Liter- 2050 John Updike will be out on the street. ary History, spent quite a few years reading the Hutner is not saying that the unsung books are books we don’t read in English class. Not the better, exactly, although he says some of them, potboilers and thrillers, but the New York Times unsurprisingly, are very, very good. But he wants bestsellers and prizewinners, the books that were English majors to read more widely, with an eye respectfully reviewed and passed around among an toward America’s cultural history. “Like the middle educated, enlightened readership in the first half of class itself, the America that these novels amply the 20th century, then largely forgotten. His theory witness is not inert but insistently supple, always is that these books didn’t make it into the canon redefining its boundaries, redesigning its purposes, because influential literary critics and academics, rearticulating its bewilderments, reaffirming its tri- especially those who came a generation or so after, umphs, and reenacting its worries.” passed over books that described the realities of What America Read supplies a chapter for each their own middle-class decade, and (perhaps because I was born then) I lives. Instead they found Hutner’s discussion of the 1950s most inter- If Hutner’s analysis holds championed difficult esting. That was the moment, he says, when book true for the future, Philip books, books that were reviewers began losing their ability to shape Ameri- Roth may yet get his critical of the middle can cultural life. Critics openly “despised and comeuppance, and by 2050 class, or books subver- mocked the ambitions and experience of a large John Updike will be out on sive of middle-class portion of the book-buying public—the middle the street. values. class—and scholars, as a group, turned away from As a result, those the interest of middle-class social experience in fic- who wrote in “the tion and settled their attention on formal achieve- majoritarian tradition” of regionalism, historical fic- ments,” heralding the postmodern patter of John tion, family sagas, and novels of middle-class man- Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. ners are rarely studied these days. Hutner names Already the novel was said to be dead or in decline. Josephine Lawrence, John P. Marquand, Michael Two of that decade’s popular books, Allen Drury’s Foster, Ruth Suckow, George Weller, and Waters E. Pulitzer winner Advise and Consent (1959) and Turpin as once well-known writers whose Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit reputations did not endure. Well, it’s true that I’ve (1955), survived only as movies. Frederick Buech- never read Marquand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for ner’s The Return of Ansel Gibbs (1958), one of many The Late George Apley (1937), but I recognize the Washington novels of manners published in the name. Waters Turpin—now there’s a name I’ve 1950s, is rarely read anymore. heard, but OK, it’s true, I haven’t read O Canaan! Hutner says he rejected at the outset the idea of (1939), a novel about the black migration north- writing a critical monograph about some of the ward, praised for its “social and historical sweep” by books he rediscovered, in favor of a historical The New York Times. survey. And that’s the main problem with his book, Hutner concedes that feminist scholars have at least for the middle-class reader. Since we haven’t recovered some of the important women who read the books Hutner talks about, and since he wrote in the first half of the 20th century, namely doesn’t describe them in any detail, all we really get Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Fannie Hurst, and is a recitation of unfamiliar titles and authors, along Zora Neale Hurston. But where, he asks, is Helen with excerpts from the reviews published in The Hull’s Hardy Perennial (1933), “the story of a wife New York Times, The Nation, The Atlantic who helps her husband through the loss of his busi- Monthly, or Partisan Review. It’s like having a child ness position”? tell you the plot of a movie you haven’t seen. If Hutner’s analysis holds true for the future, In short, this is a very long book once we take 104 Wilson Quarterly ■Autumn 2009 CURRENT BOOKS Hutner’s point. What America Read is a legitimate onto each other and were sparsely furnished with corrective to the English department syllabus, but hard chairs that enforced bolt-upright perching. we don’t need a 450-page lecture. We probably just Regarding hygiene, ooh la la! The malodorous hall- need to read some of these books and judge for ways of Versailles were pocked with piles of human ourselves. excrement. Fed up, the Sun King’s descendants set about A. J. Loftin is the editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. changing things. Perhaps in gratitude for the new flushing toilets and bathtubs with hot and cold run- ning water at Versailles, Madame de Pompadour, How Sofas Changed Louis XV’s mistress, gave him a bidet. The young the World aristocrats riddled their stately palaces with secret Reviewed by Winifred Gallagher passages that led them to private lives in newly cozy, intimate rooms.