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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A nice read, but DeMott misses some of the complexities,
This review is from: The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class (Hardcover)
DeMott's "The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class" tackles an important subject; however, though DeMott offers some nice explanations for and readings of contemporary American class issues, he simplifies a little too much.The best thing about this book is that it's an easy read. DeMott's prose is clear and concise, and, unlike some stuffier acadmics, he's not averse to sounding conversational. This might contribute, in part, to what can only be categorized as an overly conversational reliance on mantras that are never adequately explained in their complexity: "the myth of classlessness" (America's disbelief in class...sort of) and "the omni syndrome" (the desire of certain people to be everything to everybody...sort of), for example, are explained well at first but then applied everywhere until their edges start to blur. The strongest chapter is DeMott's historiography of autonomy and individualism in American culture; not coincidentally, this is also his most persuasively, historically grounded chapter, covering educational and media-influenced roots to the crisis. He buttresses his case with a fine reading of Oliver North's willful flouting of constitutional law, which, DeMott argues, belied a faith in the man over all else: law, politics, public dialogue. Unfortunatley, though, this welcome shot of history comes two thirds of the way through the book, by which time the reader has already been subject to a flagrant anti-history. The readings of John Hughes's films offered, interesting but one-sided, are a case in point. DeMott looks at "Some Kind of Wonderful" (1987)and "Pretty In Pink" (1986) but presents the later film first, and then concludes that the two films are identical. (A lot of movie critics at the time, to be fair to DeMott, made the same mistake.) Thus can he claim that Hughes's movies are always about the erosion of class boundaries, supporting the "myth of classlessness" by subsuming everyone into the "Imperial Middle." This is not the case, though, unless you ignore the narrative structure of the films. The endings of the films--intra-class romance vs. the rejection of it--are radically different. Clearly, something was going on in America that could account for such a shift in accepted plotting, but the book doesn't interest itself in this particular historical rupture. This weakness touches as well on a paradox central to his argument. For, while DeMott claims that Americans foster a fantasy of American culture as "classless," he repeatedly uses the notion of upward social mobility to support other points. How can a society so ambivalent about the possibility of class be so ardent in their pursuit of rising from one class to another? It's entertaining reading--especially the stories of politicians, like Gore, Dole, and Bush, Sr., trying to make themselves into "working men"--and often provocative. But, often, "The Imperial Middle" feels more relentlessly polemical than carefully thoughtful.
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