Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Class pervades American life. Each day people judge and rank others by appearance, manners, language, and "taste" in a great societal pecking order. Some of this happens by reflex. For certain people a man in a tank top carries a high "ewww" factor. Others wince at anything monogrammed (a sure sign that the wearer seeks attention). Some may even take offense at compliments while others find the lack of a compliment an affront. It's a complicated game, and not everyone chooses to participate. But for many the game goes unnoticed. This small book provides a good overview of the rules of the American class game. Paul Fussell delineates the choices people make that cause others to judge and categorize them (since people don't choose their race that subject doesn't appear). Everything from clothes, cars, diction, consumption (conspicuous or inconspicuous), education, housing styles, and physique to pets, reading material, jewelry, food, words, sports, interior decorating, grammar, and entertainment receive brutally honest coverage. These characteristics get evaluated through an objective eye and not through the filter of a specific class. For Fussell has nasty things to say about all of the classes, even the uppers. Though the middle class receives the majority of his invective, being the class of snobbery (due to class insecurity). Regardless, none of the classes come out ahead, and none are ranked as "better" or "superior". The book doesn't aim to judge in the way the classes furtively judge each other. It more delineates while it attempts to expose the rules. And in this it excels. While the tabulating of pros and cons continues through the first seven chapters, it slowly becomes clear that Fussell isn't condoning class climbing. "Class" won't help anyone "go up". It also doesn't belong in the "self help" or the "self improvement" section. In fact, it argues that class climbing and dropping remain rare and difficult feats. We're pretty much doomed to stay in the class, regardless of money, that we're weaned into. But that only applies to those that play the game. Readers who wonder just where Fussell stands on the issue of class will find some answers in the final two chapters. In the end, he seems disgusted by the entire game. The cumulative effect of his sardonic comments pointed at all classes suggests this. The final two chapters almost confirm this suspicion. Chapter eight deals with climbing and sinking. He argues that even those that appear "to rise" still retain much of the behaviors of their birth class. But he emphasizes that sinking requires just as much effort as climbing. Nonetheless, we all seem to be sinking. A cultural progression towards the lowest common denominator has occured over the last century. As capitalism inevitably aims for the largest market share, pleasing proles - arguably the largest market sector - has become a national obsession. This results in, Fussell argues, "mass culture" and the homogenization of culture.

Loved this book, very funny and true.

CLASS offers an unflinching lowdown on where your allegedly "classless" fellow Americans really stand. From the "top out of sight" ultra-rich through the middle classes and down to the destitute "bottom out of sights," Fussell has everyone pegged. Clothes, consumption, speech and leisure give us away much more thoroughly than politics or money. Fussell is not only eloquent and sharp-tongued, he is plain-spoken: in spite of a misstep when he creates a highly eccentric "X" class, his warts and all viewpoint is the kind only gifted social commentators and satirists can get away with For instance, Fussell's core characteristics of class are on clear display in the 1957 novel PEYTON PLACE, set in small-town New England in the 1940s. In the opening chapters, shrewd and blunt author Grace Metalious points out that the top out-of-sight mill owner Harrington's house, the largest in town, is "screened from the street by tall trees and wide lawns," a perfect description of Fussell's top-out-of-sight class. Harrington's neighbor the newspaper owner/editor inherited a fortune and can treat his editorship of the paper as something of a lark, an exact example of Fussell's upper class which, to use Fussell's words, "inherits a lot of money [and] earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed." Also on the street lives the mere upper-middle-class, for example family doctor Matt Swain with his colonnaded, if bogus, "Southern-type" house. Middle-class dress-shop owner Constance MacKenzie and daughter Allison live on the town's second-best street, whose houses were "simple, well-constructed one-family dwellings, most of them modeled on Cape Cod lines and painted white with green trim." Connie, in her prudery and her despair over her "dark" New York past, epitomizes what Fussell calls the middle class's mixture of "earnestness and psychic insecurity." And so it goes--Ted Carter, the town's high-school athletic hero, lives in a lower-middle-class area, his father a bookkeeper. Selena, Allison's best friend, lives in the "shacks," an unimproved area with no mod. cons. outside the town proper and thus immune from its statistics and politics. (Consider Fussell's "destitute" and "bottom out-of-sights".) Of course, politics and technology do create a few changes: Fussell's middle class, which "used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place," had by the Eighties become "the most rootless," shuttling from one bland suburb to another at the behest of their huge corporate employers (and perhaps today to establish any career, period). Fussell opines that "[b]ack in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to 'planning' and 'saving' maintained it in a position above the working class." But it was "pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class," which is "in bond

Can you tell if your fiancee is really upper-middle class or just faking it? Is the metric system vulgar? And once you sink in class, can you ever rise again? Don't worry, English professor Paul Fussell explains it all for you. Faster and funnier than any government report, more accurate than a busload of sociologists, "Class" will give you the lowdown on where your allegedly "classless" fellow Americans really stand. From the "top out of sight" ultra-rich through the middle classes and the "proles" down to the destitute "bottom out of sights," Fussell has everyone pegged. Clothes, consumption, speech and leisure give us away much more thoroughly than politics or money.I introduced this book to two different book-discussion groups and noticed the same phenomena at each: (1) most people loved it and no one disliked it; (2) the funniest parts were the people we recognized at one remove ("suburbanites," "yuppies," "old money," etc.); and (3) the book will draw blood at least once when Fussell deals with YOUR case! You can count on it, so you'd better be a good sport!Many of the reviewers found "Class" dated; I didn't. Although "Class" was first published in the Reagan Eighties, the Clinton Nineties seem to me just a more genteel version of the same old social jockeying. As Fussell says, there is very limited "room at the top" but all too much "room at the bottom." About the biggest criticism I have of the book is that his descriptions of bohemian "X" types are so individualistic that they seem to have been drawn from his circle of friends."Prole drift," by the way, is the tendency for "mass" to drive out "class." When the checker at your local discount house makes a mistake on your order and you have to stand in line to get it fixed at an overcrowded "Customer Service" center--that's prole drift. Likewise when your town loses the last grocery store that delivers. Fussell tried to expand on mass vs. class later on in "Bad: The Dumbing Down of America" which isn't a bad book, but it isn't a gem like "Class." Yes, "Class" has an acid tone, but it's also very right-on and laugh-aloud funny. And it does my heart good to see an academic who is interested in communicating with non-academics--rare in these deconstructed times.