In the wake of the 2016 election upset, everyone was clamoring for profiles of the White Working Class™, the demographic who apparently delivered Donald Trump the presidency over Hilary Clinton. The WWC is a distinct group of white, non-college degreed people. The US media machine got to work; NYT reporters hit diners across the region and books like Hillbilly Elegy were put on a pedestal. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/books/6-books-to-help-understand-trumps-win.html
Admittedly I fell into the interest trap, particularly when I listened to a Fresh Air interview about Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo. The novel revisits Richard's 1993 novel Nobody's Fool, itself a supposed profile of economically anxious, older, blue-collar white dudes left behind in an increasingly consolidated world with a globalized supply chain. The interview touched on the pertinence of such a novel in light of current events.
I picked up Nobody's Fool that year not wanting to start with the sequel, but it kept getting pushed down the list by more interesting books. Finally, a whopping five years later, I finished it. Except in all the time it took me to get to it the mythos surrounding the White Working Class sort of faded. The idea that this demographic delivered the upset Trump victory has been hotly contested, but more importantly, the saturated coverage of them proved something we probably all could have guessed: these people just aren't that interesting.
This is all to say that fictionalized depictions of the White Working Class have to rely on some pretty ingenuine trickery to make them a literarily appealing bunch. It's important to note that books like Hillbilly Elegy and Nobody's Fool are meant to be about the working class, not for them. These are novels for the professional class, for people clamoring to understand the demographic.
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| This guy is here to give us insight on the working class?? |
Nobody's Fool takes place in the town of Bath in upstate New York. One-time tourism hub, the town has slipped into irrelevancy with a couple of ill-placed highways and the drying up of their key tourist attractions (you guessed it, natural springs; "baths"). At the heart of the novel is decay; a decaying town full of old, decaying people with decaying values and decaying identities.
To Russo's credit, he is a good writer. His opening depiction and ongoing description of Bath function as a type of intimate, but modern world-building. This is a town I have certainly been to in Michigan, or Ohio, or *throws dart at map of the midwest*. The believability is key to the setting but also makes the novel all the more frustrating.
It's fine that Russo's explanation of why Bath is in the state it's in leaves much to the imagination. Given that the town itself is so present in our lived reality we don't actually need much explanation and Russo throws enough hints our way (giant store comes to town, tourism dies, mills get outsourced etc etc). I think I can even forgive letting local bankers and real estate developers - represented in Nobody's Fool by the graciously humanized characters Clive Jr. and Carl Roebuck - for a sort of hand waving point about the solidarity of locality or something.
No, what's most frustrating is that the town of Bath is decisively not caricatured, but the characters and their actions are. The novel's protagonist Sully can be described as, if nothing else, an academic's idea of what a working-class person is; wise-cracking rough exterior covering up a good heart. Someone who can't help but make bad decisions. This leaks out to the rest of the cast of characters; the town simpleton, the small diner owner, the retired schoolmarm, the shifty town doctor, the eccentric local lawyer, the list goes on and on. It's like that scene in Beauty and the Beast where Belle is singing around all the "simple and provincial" people busied in their chosen career.
In short, the town of Bath certainly exists, but these people do not. While they have endearing qualities and Russo has flashes of fun characterization, when these characters fall into their mold it's almost unbearable. While a lot of critics describe the novel as funny or witty I found myself cringing when Sully was cracking wise with the other locals in the town. I just imagine my carpenter father or my truck-driving grandfather reading these exchanges.
The worst faux pas though has to be what I can only believe is Russo's stab at the psychological profile of the White Working Class; this idea that their unfortunate condition is largely a result of their actions. Hillbilly Elegy makes this same case, as do many attempts at capturing the aesthetic. This demographic acts against their best interest and it's due to some deep psychological inability to do so because of culture or masculinity or a troubled past or some mystic pass-down from one's father or some combination of all of these things.
If profiles of the White Working Class are old, then the idea that people's miserable material condition is the result of poor personal decisions is ancient. Russo's exploration of this idea is no more or less boring than anyone else's, and it's just as wrong. If you took Sully and put him in a country with universal healthcare, housing, and actually good disability insurance he could make all of the terrible decisions present in the book and his material condition wouldn't be worse for it. But there is zero interrogation of power in Nobody's Fool, only foolish individual decisions.
There are some genuinely fun and funny parts to Nobody's Fool, some of the characters are moving and the town's decay as an ongoing plot point is also engaging. But the idea that any book, fiction or otherwise, or any profile or media exculpation can shed any light on why workers aren't stuffy liberals like the rest of us is a trap. Don't fall into it.
