[ad_1]
What I read: hot snobs edition
I’ve made a decision that I think is a good one: this year’s summer fiction reading theme will be snobbery.
This dovetails with an interest in the way that status and hierarchy limit political change and fuel backlashes. But snob fiction is its fun, lighter cousin: books that focus on the strange habits and eccentricities of people at the top of certain status hierarchies, and the wild flailing that ensues when outsiders try to get in — or insiders try to get in. escape.
I like “Pineapple Street,” by Jenny Jackson, which is set among the ultrarich Brooklyn Heights in New York City. It has a sort of reverse-Edith-Wharton feel – a character at the height of wealth and status who is uncomfortable with the social implications of that privilege. It pairs well with the “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy by Kevin Kwan, a funny story about a marriage plot set between the old and new money elite of Singapore.
And I don’t need an excuse to re-read Plum Sykes’ socialist novels, “Bergdorf Blondes” and “The Debutante Divorcee,” which manage the difficult feat of warm, stinging satire, but I’m happy to do so. Sykes skewers New York high society through peripheral insiders – women who feel the need to save, but the idea of doing so is to buy Chanel bags in sample sales instead of boutiques. They can roll their eyes at the social doyennes deforesting the Southern Hemisphere in search of out-of-season pear blossoms to complete their party decorations, but they still want to party anyway.
(I haven’t read Sykes’s 2017 mystery “Party Girls Die in Pearls,” but the jacket copy promises “Clueless meets Agatha Christie,” a blurb clearly designed in a lab to get me to click “buy now.”)
And because I can’t enough refuse to get analytical about all this, I have also picked up “Status and Culture,” by W. David Marx, which dissects the rules why money can not buy class, except when sometimes it can. The book is excellent, and I appreciate that ‘less’ culture is taken seriously as a force that brings meaning and conflict to people’s lives. But I came away thinking that he had set himself an impossible task. To be truly effective, a status sign must be at least indescribable, because as soon as a certain status can be pinned, outsiders can copy it, which immediately undermines its power. That means that any book that explains the rules of these markers will, on some level, make the analysis itself obsolete.
It also looks good to take “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin. A friend of mine told me yesterday that he was back when he wrote an article about artificial intelligence. I wonder if Benjamin would have been created from ChatGPT?
Reader response: Recommended books
Susana, who reads in Puerto Rico, recommends “Walk the Blue Fields” by Claire Keegan:
He writes beautiful prose, almost poetry. They take the ordinary and make it extraordinary. Her capacity to transform everyday life is amazing.
do you read
Thanks to everyone who wrote about what you read. Please keep the posts coming!
I want to hear about what you have read (or watched or listened to) about snob or snobbery! The more fun the better, but I’ll accept the dark tales of the elite if you tell me why I should.
If you want to participate, you can fill out this form. I may publish your response in the next newsletter.
Thank you for subscribing
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you like what you read, consider recommending it to others. They can enter here. Browse all subscriber-only newsletters here.
[ad_2]
Source link