What I’m Reading: Summer-Snobs Edition
What I’m Reading: Summer Snobs Edition
I’ve made a decision that I’m very comfortable with: The theme of my summer reading of fiction this year will be snobbery.
This ties in with my interest in the ways in which status and hierarchies constrain political change and fuel resistance. But snob fiction is its fun, lighthearted cousin: books that focus on the odd habits and eccentric preoccupations of people at the top of a certain status hierarchy, and the wild swaying that ensues when an outsider tries to get in — or an insider tries to get in. come. escape.
I am enjoying “Pineapple Street‘, by Jenny Jackson, set among the ultra-rich of New York City’s Brooklyn Heights. It has a sort of inverted Edith-Wharton feel to it – characters at the height of wealth and status who aren’t comfortable with the social implications of that privilege. It fits well with the “Crazy rich Asianstrilogy by Kevin Kwan, a humorous take on the marriage plot unfolding between Singapore’s very old and very new money elite.
And I didn’t really need an excuse to re-read Plum Sykes’ socialite novels,”Bergdorf blondes” And “The debutante divorcée”, which manage to be warm and caustic satire at the same time, but I like to do it anyway. Sykes impales New York high society through peripheral insiders—women who feel the need to cut corners, but whose idea of doing so is to buy their Chanel bags at trial sales rather than boutiques. They may roll their eyes at social doyennes deforesting the southern hemisphere in search of out-of-season pear blossoms to complete their party decor, but they attend the parties anyway.
(I haven’t read the 2017 Sykes mystery”Party girls die in pearlsnot yet, but the copy of the jacket promises “Clueless meets Agatha Christie,” a blurb clearly designed in a lab to get me to click “buy now.”
And because I can’t rather resist getting analytic about all this, I’ve picked up too”Status and culture‘, by W. David Marx, who dissects the rules why money can’t buy class, except when sometimes it can. The book is admirable in its breadth, and I appreciate that it takes even “low” culture seriously as a force that brings meaning and conflict to people’s lives. But I came away thinking he had set himself an impossible task. To be truly effective, the markers of status must be at least somewhat inexplicable, because once a certain status can be pinned down, outsiders can copy it, which immediately destroys its potency. That means any book that explains the rules of those markers will render its own analysis obsolete on some level.
I also thought it would be a good idea to pick up.”The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction‘, by Walter Benjamin. A friend told me yesterday that she came back to it while writing an article about artificial intelligence. I wonder what Benjamin would have made of ChatGPT?
Reader Responses: Books you recommend
Susana, a reader in Puerto Rico, recommends “Walk the blue fieldsby Claire Keegan:
She writes beautiful prose, almost a poem. She takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. Her ability to transform everyday life into something beautiful is extraordinary.
What are you reading?
Thank you to everyone who has written to tell me what you read. Keep the submissions coming!
I want to hear about things you’ve read (or watched or listened to) about snobs or snobbery! The funnier the better, but I’ll accept dark stories from the elite if you tell me why I should.
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