Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class: A Guide through the American Class System was well-reviewed in its time, and remains influential. It also has plenty of critics. David Brooks, likewise a strong prose stylist prone to grand pronouncements, accurately described it as “insufferably snobby.” In the grand tradition of H. L. Mencken, the book is filled with bons mots, literary allusions, and anecdotes, seasoned with occasionally brilliant insights.
Have you ever seen that New Yorker cartoon where a father tells his son “if you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating?” Fussell must have been raised on that ethos to grow up and write this kind of book.
It’s got value, but to access it you have to excuse the way the author can’t seem to help but denigrate everything he sees, and his particularly vicious distaste for the middle class. It’s as though he’s made it a deliberate challenge to read his book without turning around to call him a pretentious dickhead. His attitude is infectious, and I found myself growing more cruel and disdainful as I wrote this review.
You also have to discount the era, not just of the book, but of the man. I expected a book from the 80s to show its age, but Fussell was born in 1924, and his worldview seems firmly postwar, quite different from what I recognize of my own 1980s upbringing. It’s a world of men and their wives rather than of individuals, of clearly-defined suits and uniforms rather than our rather more malleable dress codes.
To the extent that the book acts as a time-traveler’s guide to the way people believed they ought to act, it is inevitably dated. It’s only natural that just a handful of the specific class markers Fussell points out have retained the meanings he assigns them, like particular styles of lawn care or religious expression. Others are gone entirely, like pocket protectors and slide rules. Even the emphasis he places on spelling and pronouncing things correctly seems quaint today. Now that it’s easy to look up, it’s no longer a signal of good breeding to be able to pronounce words like salutary, genre, Ruscha, or Proust. Other markers are still around, but carry new meanings: ballcaps, denim, and clothes with words on them no longer carry strong class connotations at all — it’s down to the specific style of those things now.
But it’s not just out of date. Fussell also seems to confuse things he dislikes with things that are markers of class. His chapter on “prole drift” is almost unreadable, filled with outraged descriptions of the popularity of popular fiction, magazine covers that use the dirty trick of having visual appeal, the insufficient deference of clerks in stores where he must wait in line, and ads for things he doesn’t want appearing in his reading material.
Does he describe any of these things as signs that class markers are changing even as class remains? Of course not. He describes them as the death-knell of things that are good and wise and correct. Spend fifteen minutes in any bookstore and you’ll recognize him: he’s the old white guy outraged that he must place a special order for a title that’s not currently in stock, holding up the line as he harangues the cashier about how the greeting card rack is taking up space that should be reserved for philosophy.
It’s an even greater failure that Fussell describes social standing as operating along a single axis, without any discussion of code-switching or intersectionality. It’s no excuse that the term “intersectionality” wouldn’t be invented for another six years: he certainly would have read Baldwin, Mailer, and Freidan, but he draws no insights from any of them. Instead, he writes of “the prole and his wife” as though the man were the person with the class, and his wife a mere accessory.
Or consider this claim, from his brief chapter on social mobility:
Ambitious male homosexuals, at least in fantasy, aspire to rise, and from humble origins to ascend to the ownership of antique businesses, art galleries, and hair salons. The object is to end by frequenting the Great. They learn to affect elegant telephone voices and gravitate instinctively toward “style” and the grand. Lesbians, on the contrary, like to sink, dropping from middle-class status to become taxi drivers, police officers, and construction workers. The ultimate male-homosexual social dream is to sit at an elegant dinner table, complete with flowers and doilies and finger bowls, surrounded by rich, successful, superbly suited and gowned, witty, and cleverly immoral people. The ultimate lesbian social dream is to pack it in at some matey lunch counter with the heftier proles, wearing work clothes and doing a lot of shouting and kidding.
Even for the 1980s, that’s a ridiculous set of stereotypes masquerading as analysis, and it undermines every other assertion he makes. After reading that nonsense, can the reader trust his similarly broad claims about bowling leagues, country clubs, regional accents, newspapers, mail-order shopping, or the Sun Belt?
That’s especially important when it comes to assertions I can’t evaluate from my own experience. For example, he says that shopping in supermarkets is a middle-class activity. Perhaps he’s right that 20th century upper class types found supermarkets vulgar, but if so, it’s news to me. Similarly, he has quite a lot of opinions about indigestion and constipation being middle-class ailments. For some reason he even applies scare quotes to the words “antacid” and “laxative.” Is it because he regards those terms as euphemisms, a linguistic folly he attributes to the middle class with its fear of vulgarity and desire to be seen as more sophisticated than it is? Or does he think that only the middle class suffers from digestive trouble? I sincerely can’t tell, and I find his derisive style too tedious to spend any more time interpreting it.
I do understand what he means when he uses the same punctuation around the word “college:” he means any sort of school he doesn’t respect. He spends a great deal of time discussing the class connotations of American higher education, which is to say, he devotes an entire chapter to insulting lesser colleges and the people who attend them.
Yes, he’s right that as high school and college degrees became more common, they became less prestigious. Yes, he’s right that more college access could never raise the class status of everyone who got a degree. He might even be right that as it’s become more necessary and more common to have a degree, the intellectual rigor of the traditional university curriculum has declined. But he could make that point without being a colossal asshole. He could certainly do without a lengthy digression — I hesitate to call it a joke — about how the word university is higher-class simply because it is longer than the word college.
It makes sense that he’d feel the section about higher education so deeply, though: he taught at Penn and must therefore have been continually terrified that his peers wouldn’t respect him as much as someone who taught at one of the real Ivies. Perhaps the perfect portrait of Fussell’s own class position is that he derides The New Yorker as irredeemably middle class, accusing it of mealy-mouthed fear of controversy… and that The New Yorker later featured selections from his wife’s memoir discussing the unsurprising collapse of their marriage.
At any rate, I’m sure he’s right about quite a few things. For example, he’s right that expensive and useless are the province of the rich. But we’ve known about that, and had an analytical framework for it, since at least the era of Thorstein Veblen.
And he’s right that wealth and class intersect and interact but are not the same, and that this difference is critical to understanding both. When he talks about the failures of new money to buy class, I look over at my newsfeed and see James Franco failing to become a respected fine artist, or a glib claim about the sort of person who drives a vintage Ferrari as opposed to an equally expensive new Lamborghini. The useless and expensive thing is for the rich, but the style of it shows us the seam between classes.
His claim that class anxiety falls most acutely on people who fear falling to a lower class seems self-evident, and does a great job explaining all the recent think pieces about Subaru socialists and elite overproduction. It certainly explains why I’m even reading the book: I’m four years into a “temporary” gig with uncertain hours, watching AI nudge my skills toward irrelevance, wondering what I really got out of that extension-school master’s degree. Yep, that’s class anxiety all right! And how dreadfully middle-class of me to try to understand it with a self-consciously highbrow reading list, beginning with this very book.
Other insights seem broadly accurate, but riddled with exceptions if you look too closely. For example, he claims that sports are higher-class when they are more expensive, more time-consuming, and less violent. His key examples, golf on the high end and boxing at the low end, fit neatly into that framework. His claims about football make sense today, and make even more sense when you recall that in his day high-end box seats were new and football was more akin to NASCAR than the all-encompassing socioeconomic juggernaut it is today.
On the other hand, basketball is nonviolent yet affordable, popular with low-income city youth and Supreme Court justices alike. He cannot categorize it, so he does not mention it. Soccer wasn’t on his radar, but he’d have had a hell of a time squaring English football hooligans with the pay-to-play phenomenon of elite American youth teams.
Or consider bicycles, my own personal interest. His framework does a good job of explaining how Lycra-clad hobby cyclists, as avatars of useless and expensive upper-class activities, help to create the perception that a $70,000 pickup truck is the transportation of regular working people while a $700 bicycle is for elitists. But that’s far too simple, as is all of Fussell’s analysis. For example, it ignores the fact that coal-rolling pickups are a symbol not just of class, but of masculinity. He doesn’t seem to have had the imagination to approach consumer class signals from that direction at all.
Nor has he identified much of a practical application for any of these sweeping generalizations and occasional insights. Has he noted how government policies and funding are shaped by our beliefs about the class connotations of various activities? Of course he hasn’t: his whole schtick begins with the claim that anything practical is a mark of low class, just like those nerds with their pocket protectors and personal computers.
His sole attempt at any kind of usefulness is the last chapter, in which claims that Americans can escape the trap of class by becoming “category X,” self-directed and often self-employed intellectuals. Category X is, needless to say, where Fussell places himself, above and apart from the contest of class in America. It is also, as anyone who’s ever filed a 1099 can tell you, absolute horseshit.
Despite Fussell’s personal, stylistic, and analytical failings, Class remains a notable, rare, and influential attempt to understand how class divisions function in America. Perhaps a different author will provide me with a more practical guide to navigating those divisions, or communicating with people of different backgrounds, or literally anything other than a vague suggestion tobecome an intellectual in a futile effort to escape categorization.
Secretly Ironic 