Declining Fortunes
Newman, Katherine S.
than any other that has seen its chances at a middle-class existence slip.) Their problem is not that they are excluded from the middle class but that they are excluded from what has become, thanks...
...Once they scorned Pleasanton and all it stood for...
...it is that people like them used to be able to step on the postwar economic escalator and more or less sit back and enjoy the ride to affluence...
...Newman, an anthropologist atColumbia University, bases this unusual fusion of class and generational politics on her study of some 160 people in "Pleasanton," a real commuter town in the northern New Jersey suburbs of New York whose name has been changed, perhaps to protect the innocent...
...It is T his estimable biography recounts one of the strangest and saddest lives that any artist has lived...
...This is a book, in other words, that looks up close and personal at the lament of the 1990s: that this is the first generation in American history that will not live as well as its parents did...
...The problem is that their children, or at least the ones Newman chose to interview, can't afford the houses or the way of life their parents are leaving behind...
...Their problem is not that they are excluded from the middle class but that they are excluded from what has become, thanks to its proximity to New York, an upper-middle-class enclave in the years since their childhood...
...At the age of twelve, the precocious Flaubert is already playing the misanthrope in a letter to an older friend: "If I didn't have a fifteenth-century queen of France in my head and at the tip of my pen, I should be totally disgusted with Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Boynton Beach...
...Since about 1973, however, average incomes have been rising too slowly to accomplish that...
...Her very first one is Lauren, who "doggedly followed the prescription for entry into the middle class and landed the kind of job that should have made it all possible, as a midlevel administrator of a federal lending program...
...It is the latter group more T he problem confronting Pleasanton's baby boomers is not exactly downward mobility, which generally means working in a lesser occupation than one's parents...
...At 15 he became heartsick over a woman of 26 whom he met on summer vacation at the beach...
...The only happiness the world offers is to be had in the writer's study...
...The portraits are affecting at times, and to borrow a phrase from the Clinton era it is possible to "share the pain" of Newman's subjects...
...Three years later he finally got hold of a woman, a hotel-keeper in Marseilles and 35 years old...
...These are not people who have been laid off after thirty years on the job, or who had to grow up in a ghetto, or who possess only a high-school degree...
...Republicans, meanwhile, have a great deal staked on the not-unreasonable proposition that middle-class dismay over gay rights, abortion, and family-bashing is the key to electoral primacy...
...With Eulalie Foucaud he had a four-day erotic idyll and a correspondence, passionate at first, then increasingly...
...Only the novel he is writing delivers him from the world's crushing stupidity...
...It is an archetypal postwar suburb, filled in over the years by a mix of blue- and white-collar workers who rode the wave of postwar prosperity out of New York, raised their children in suburbia's leafy green precincts, and are now retiring...
...But it is not, after all, very great pain...
...Living is impossible without the consolations of art...
...Now you have to get off and climb...
...Today, all hopes in the political-upheaval trade seem to lie with the middle class, which itself is increasingly seen as poor, oppressed, and downtrodden...
...Florida...
...Now, riding in on Phillips's left (if I have charted his latest position correctly) comes Katherine S. Newman with the striking notion that the plight of the middle class may inspire an uprising of the oppressed baby-boom generation, especially its sixties wing...
...All of the statistical evidence from social science, as well as the anecdotal evidence from Newman's book, shows that the more traditional route of climbing the occupational ladder to the American Dream is still wide open...
...Kevin Phillips, who rode to fame a quarter of a century ago on the thesis that the political future would be remade by middle-class anger over the Democrats' cultural liberalism, now rides high on the theme that middle-class economic resentments will feed a populist backlash against the plutocrats...
...They sought a "more soul-satisfying life," Newman explains, and "were never destined to equal their parents standard of living...
...Indeed, as many of Newman's sixties-vintage subjects acknowledge, their difficulties often stem from their own choices, and their plight seems more an indictment of the ideas that flourished amid the easy affluence of their younger years than of today's economy...
...The pattern is cut here for a life's work...
...If you must have a brand-spanking-new house before you are 30, move to Atlanta or North Carolina...
...Newman's subjects violate one or all of these rules...
...life and a bullet would long since have delivered me from this crude joke called life...
...Even so, there remains a pretty reliable formula for achieving affluence: go to college with an eye on the job market, get a job, preferably in a growing industry in the private sector, start a business if possible, work very hard, and avoid living in the overpriced cities of California and the Northeast, where your money won't go very far...
...p olitical prophets once saw the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden as the engines of history...
...In his adolescence Flaubert did seek happiness elsewhere, in love...
...Location, location, location, as the real estate agents say...
...Otherwise, trade up more slowly...
...Watching her nurse the child she had had by her middle-aged lover was as close as Flaubert came to sexual fulfillment, and as much as he could stand...
...In Memoirs of a Madman, written months later, Flaubert rhapsodized this unconsummated passion: "Dear angel of my youth, you whom I saw in the freshness of my emotions, you whom I loved with a love so sweet, so full of perfume, of tender daydreams, adieu...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
