Joint Book Review: Class, by Paul Fussell

Summary

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (1983; Touchstone, 1992).The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.Jane: People are always saying that Americans don’t like to talk about social class. In some sense this is true: we’ve never had a legible and clearly-articulated class system along English lines, and we pride ourselves on our society’s mobility. (Well, we pride ourselves in the ease with which people can move up. The corresponding and inevitable movement down, which is logically required lest everyone should be above average, is sometimes a matter for schadenfreude but never pride. “Ah, America, land of failsons,” said no one ever.) Still, we do have a system of social status — and attempting to limn its details makes people just as uncomfortable today as it did forty years ago, when Paul Fussell opened this book by saying that people reacted to the project as if he had said “I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.” But in another sense “Americans don’t like talking about social class” is dead wrong. We love talking about class. We just don’t realize we’re doing it.Classes are just cultures, and like all cultures they are rich in ideas about how one behaves and what one values. Traditionally they run in parallel, fairly siloed from one another — if you’re the sort of person who reads The New York Review of Books you can be pretty sure that the things you read there are addressed to people like you, and ditto People Magazine for quite a different sort of person. With social media, though, we’re suddenly talking across those parallel lines far more than we did before, to great confusion all ‘round. Perennial topics of stupid online debate like “who should go to college and what should they study there?” or “should mothers have paid employment?” or “what should you look for in a spouse and how should you make yourself appealing to your ...