Remediating Generational Deficiencies and the American Caste System in "Rich Boy"

I'm going to make this blog short because I'm pretty swamped, but I'd like to begin by saying that the whole notion of blogging is actually so provocative for me: once I start in the colloquial, journalesque tone of  my blogs, my thoughts on whatever book we are reading seem to flow out, multiply, and reform themselves all at once.

Sharon Pomerantz novel "Rich Boy," is the story of a first generation college student trying to create a better life for himself.  While I am not a first or even second generation college student, I think that Robert's struggle in the novel is one that is deeply resonant with many graduates.  Robert, through colloquial and well-rendered dialogue, desires to overcome what he saw as the hardships of his past.  In his case, his childhood was deformed by relative poverty, always having to penny pinch, and live in the homogenized world of the not- quite- totally-defunct-but-almost lower class.  For all of us however, regardless of whether we come from Robert's circumstances or other's, I tend to think that we all, as increasingly individualized selves, are all just trying to surpass something from our parent's sphere of influence, and make a life for ourselves that is always striving to be better than the last.

"Rich Boy" and Stereotypes of Jewish Identities on the Conflicted Self

Sharon Pomerantz's novel Rich Boy captures the trajectory of young Robert's life as he moves between spaces defined by different ethnic and economic landscapes and illuminates how these spacial shifts impact and mutate his identity and sense of self.  In class, we discussed the possibility that perhaps, Robert is searching for an identity without "shame," perhaps leading him to deny at times, or at least suppress, his Jewish roots.

 I found this possibility to be very intriguing, especially in light of the group presentation we watched on Monday as well.  I personally come from a town that is roughly 40% Jewish--a very high percentage and one that is growing.  Growing up, many of my friends were Jewish; I even had one friend convince me that being Jewish was more fun than being Christian, and I left her house crying and begging my mom to sign our family up to be Jewish at, ironically, the YMCA, where at the time I thought you could register for everything.  Westport never has school on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashana, we never got homework on passover or on the Hannukah days that fell during the school year.  I attended 27 Bar and Bat Mitzvahs between seventh and eighth grade, and probably would have gone to more had they not coincided with others on the same weekend. In fact, I attended both Orthodox and conservative synagogues more than I did church between 2001 and 2002. In essence, the presence of Judaism in my childhood was dominant, but not in an overwhelming way, just in a sense that it was a basic facet of normalcy growing up.


For this reason, it took me a while to fully grasp the concept of Antisemitism.  All the Jewish girls were the cool ones.  Their Bat Mitzvahs constituted awesome parties while my confirmation was austere and without fanfare.  I could not possibly conceive why anyone would complain about their Jewish roots or how anyone in the outside world could see Jews as a scapegoat.  I think with this mindset, growing up with the notion that Judaism was "cool," it is interesting to read about Robert's complicated and often negating relationship to his Jewish roots.  Ultimately however, I think that Robert's attempt at detachment is one that, at its origins, is not intrinsically linked to Judaism or any specific factor.  Instead, I think the relationship of anyone, Robert or otherwise, to their childhood, and the shaping pressures of the past, are inevitably a universal source of anxiety, especially in relation to the formation of selfhood.  In the end, it is only when Robert can reconcile his Jewish self with an understanding of his present sense of self that he is able to find balance in his life.

The Beatles "Money" and Values in Anisha Lakani's "Schooled"

Prior to one of our discussions of Anisha Lakani's novel, Schooled, we as a class listened to a number of songs, one of which was The Beatles' song "Money".  The song, while catchy, is an important and revealing anthem for the warping of material values and perspectives in society--a theme also resonant throughout Schooled.

In "Money," the lyrics of the first three verses are as follows:

The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh-yeh,
That's what I want.

Your lovin' give me a thrill
But your lovin' don't pay my bills.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh-yeh,
That's what I want.

Money don't get everything it's true.
What it don't get I can't use.
Now gimme money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want), oh yeh,
That's what I want.


Like I said, the song and its tune are catchy and fun, but the lyrics, especially when written down, are dark and objectively troubling.  The idea that money can be more important than love, or happiness, or any other intangible facet of life I often think of as being beyond economization, is tragic, and in my opinion, represents a warped set of values and perspectives on money.


In Lakani's Schooled, main character Anna takes on this sort of mindset as she becomes sucked into the vortex of elite society, extreme wealth, and consuming greed.  Interestingly enough for me, it was the combination of both hearing the song and reading the novel that sort of helped me extract this sense of value mutation as transcendent and transformative. 


 I was actually prompted to analyze this notion further after watching a documentary in my Anthropology class called "Born Rich," a film made by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune.  In the film, Jamie interviews his friends who happen to all be heirs to private fortunes and live in New York City.  In essence, he and his friends, boys and girls who attended private academies like Chapin, Collegiate, Choate, St. Paul's, and Nightingale-Bamford to name a few, eerily mimic the world Lakani captures in her novel.  At one point, Luke Weil, an heir to a billion dollar gaming fortune states, "the thought of losing my money is really like trying to imagine a parent or sibling dying. You just cant."  While frighteningly shallow, Weil's allocation of money as a part of the family, as part of his identity from birth, speaks in an organic and powerful way to the transformative power of money in the novel, the song, and in real life. 

A Tutor's Take on "Schooled"

As much as Anisha Lakhani's novel Schooled is about the dark realities of classroom life inside the prestigious Langdon Hall, what Anna Taggert, the novel's main character, engages in outside of the classroom is just as significant and telling as what she does inside of it.  Despite her initial remonstrations of and somewhat self-righteous abstinence from excessively over-priced tutoring (and cheating) with her students, Anna, driven by material need and desire, eventually gives in and follows suit.  In this, Lakhani presents an interesting and somewhat organic perspective on this often veiled yet highly impacting facet of elite, privileged education.

Although it was public, the high school I attended was probably better equipped than many private schools.  I know there is a stigma at Colby about the value of a boarding school education versus a public one, but my school by no means fits that.  We had small classes, plasma tvs in every classroom and every ten feet in the hall, au bon pain catering in our cafeteria, and indoor and an outdoor track (which is rare for schools), a tv and radio station, smart boards in every classroom, laptops for every student, state of the art science equipment, etc.  What I'm getting at is that even though I didn't go to private school, I related to this world of privilege and elitism in high school that Lakhani portrays.  With the luxuries my school had inevitably came students whose families could afford, via taxes rather than private tuition, to purchase all of our excessive amenities, and thus, the majority of the student body was very affluent.  Just like Anna's students in the novel, many of my peers had private tutors and often more than one.  It infuriated me to watch highly capable students spend absurd amounts of money needlessly on tutors (I had one friend who spent $20,000 a semester on private tutors alone--one for every subject and one or two for college/ test prep) just because they could afford it.  While I understand the parental desire to give your children all that you can, it has always struck me that that kind of tutoring really cripples the tutees: the tutors become more than a teacher; they are a crutch whom the students rely on so heavily that they lose faith in their own ability to do a semester's work on their own.  What's more, money can't buy innate intelligence, but it can definitely buy grades.  While the ability to do work and intellect are not bound by class, the students who could not afford tutoring, despite being just as smart if not smarter than many of those who could, were put at a disadvantage.

The world of private tutoring is a mysterious one, and it was interesting for me to read this book while working as a peer tutor in the writers' center.  Having come from a world where what Lakhani describes is all too omnipresent, I both related to Anna's plight and was repulsed by it.  In the Farnham Writers' Center, the crux of our ideology is to make student-writers better, not their papers.  We're not there to give student's the right words to say or tell them how to phrase something more aesthetically.  Instead, our goals are to help the tutees understand the roots of their errors on a general level, and learn how to self-correct their papers with a better understanding of mechanics, organization, and syntax that they can take with them well after they've turned in that specific paper.  In essence, the tutoring at Colby defies the student expectation that Lakhani describes that tutors do the work for the students.  In making this juxtaposition, it is apparent that tutoring should be a mechanism for improvement via exegetical probing and the acquisition of problem solving skills, not getting each assignment done perfectly with no knowledge on the student's part of what is fundamentally good or bad in her or his work.

I think I need to return to this topic in the future to concretize my opinion on the polar worlds of tutoring I experienced in both working as one, and reading one through the lens of Anna Taggert.  Regardless, and regardless of my qualms with Lakhani's writing style, Schooled invariably exposes the desperate and amoral world of hyper-tutoring that many students who live in Taggert's world, and mine, are blindly and often tragically conditioned into.

Identity and Animalism in "Beans"

As Abby noted in one of her posts on Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, the novel is by no means a pleasant read.  Instead, we as readers are largely, if not entirely, isolated from the type of rural poverty depicted in the novel and become squeamish and uncomfortable with the Bean's and the totality of their family's perversion and decay. 

Like we readers, the novel's [essentially] central character Earlene is likewise intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by her neighbors, the Beans.  With an almost pornographic fascination, Earlene, at least initially in the novel, watches the Beans and their poverty-stricken lifestyle from the protective enclosure of her living room.  However, as the novel wears on, Earlene's obsession with the Beans begins, and then totally, becomes participatory, as she essentially transcends the glass of her living room window and becomes a part of the Bean clan. 

Despite the inexplicable lure of the Beans, Earlene maintains her attitudinal position that the Beans are a bestial family prone to wild, predatory, and animalistic ways that belong to a sub-human level of civilization.  This internal position becomes even more problematized as she joins their family while still maintaining this sentiment.  Like many of the novels we have read this semester, the comparison of the lower class to animals is highly present in The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Through the narrative perspective of Earlene, it is interesting to note how, in maintaining her disdain for the Beans, she seems to suggest that as a spectator to poverty, she is subconsciously lured in by the animalism while consciously repulsed by the juxtaposition of their lifestyle to her own. 

Ultimately, I think that Earlene and her subtle, subconscious descent into poverty and her becoming a part of the lifestyle she abhors testifies to the dominance of poverty on its surroundings.  The Beans, unlike Earlene, are largely unaware of their options for economic salvation (school, transplantation, welfare, work, etc.), and so in their maintenance of economic destitution, the permanence of their squalor becomes contagious, infecting Earlene.  In her total isolation with the Beans, Earlene finally succumbs to the Bean's predation, if not consciously than certainly on a subconscious level, suggesting that poverty entraps not only those who are born into it but those who live passively alongside it as well.

Is This Real Life? The Ambiguity of Time in Carolyn Chute's "The Beans of Egypt, Maine"

Today in class we had a striking conversation on Carolyn Chute's highly provocative novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine.  In particular, I liked Faye's point about the ambiguity of time in the novel as it serves to represent the cyclical, inherited, and inevitable nature of poverty for the rural working class.  However, after more thought on the novel and its characters, I would like to expand on this interpretation and suggest that the ambiguity of time also forces us to interrogate our understandings of today's impoverished as not only anti-evolutionary but symbolically anachronistic.  This anachronism ultimately works to suggest that we as a society, so obsessed with the notion of progress, speeds forward blindly often forgetting those without the means to keep up.  It is only when we have the opportunity to look back through the lens of literature (like that of Chute's) that we can see how exclusive our progress is and how much it has inexcusably behind.

Often at times in the novel I found myself wondering, "what decade is this??".  The novel is so conceptually foreign and at times, disturbing, that I found myself unable to imagine that such a scene, and such a grotesquely marginalized family, could live in the same world that I do.  However the novel's plot is one that is almost a layering of short stories becoming intertwined and seems to move in bursts rather than with a steady linearly narrative progression (a temporal movement so evenly organized that we are subconsciously jarred by its literary fracture).  In this rupture of our most normative interpretation of temporality, Chute offers the notion that rural poverty like that which the Beans inhabit transcends time, forcing us to see that yes, the collective 'we' of readers inhabit the same world as the Bean family.  As Sam mentioned in class as well, it is hard for us to reconcile our participation in a Capitalist system that has likely worked for the majority of our families with the fact that this same system has left families like the Beans without healthcare-- a major point of interrogation in the novel.

In essence, the Beans are metonyms of an often-overlooked form of poverty: that of the rural working class.  They force us to see that today's poverty is not necessarily the inability to put food on the table (which the Beans also face) but is the ignorance to know there is a way out, an escape.  The Beans, in their ambiguous temporal shifts, are real most definitely real life, and they finally rise to the surface of a society that does not always want to acknowledge them through the graphically descriptive advocacy of Chute.

Is Shakespeare a Barometer for Class on Brewster Place?

As a Shakespeare lover (hate me, it's fine), I often take for granted how accessible it has been to me over the past 12 years of academia.  Of course, at first it was extremely difficult, and it was only after I had struggled through a number of "No Fear Shakespeare" versions of his plays that I started to enjoy them, but my point is, I've been exposed to Shakespeare so often for so long that I have taken for granted its place as a cultural and class-based status symbol.  In The Women of Brewster Place, Cora Lee is a woman arrested by the fantasies of her childhood innocence and the vacuity of soap operas to the point that she neglects her own children's development.  It is not until Kiswana finds one of Cora Lee's children eating out of a garbage and invites her to attend an all-black production of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" that she is inspired to change for her children's future and pull herself out of her self-infantilization.  In essence, Shakespeare catalyzes Cora-Lee's desire to change, but what strikes be about this shift is how Kiswana, the only woman to come from means on Brewster Place, is the one to introduce her to it.  Not only was Shakespeare previously intangible to Cora-Lee, but it was practically unheard of.  Prior to the play, Cora-Lee had rejected Shakespeare as a product of the white history that systematically marginalizes and excludes non-whites and as a part of the academic culture people of her class do not have access to.

Beyond the racial polarization of Shakespeare, the works' Elizabethan language is only palatable after significant exposure and instruction, and this kind of education is often impractical or even impossible in lower-income neighborhoods of all backgrounds.  My mom works for an organization that promotes writing and reading skills in inner-city students through publication, and she often visits English classrooms in the Bronx, Harlem, and even at Riker's Island Prison where some students are still working on their reading skills in modern English.  After teaching at an affluent public school before her current work, she often tells me how radically different the curriculums are between schools and how much further ahead the students with means are in terms of reading level.  I dont think this discrepancy should come as any shock to anyone, and in Connecticut where I live, the achievement gap between wealthy and under-served schools is actually the greatest in the country.  What I do think is significant is the fact that the prevalence of Shakespeare in a curriculum and the ability to read Shakespeare often acts as a barometer for this difference.  In this sense, I wonder if Naylor's intent in using Shakespeare was as much a symbol for class divisions and the desire for social mobility as it is a symbol of the racial reappropriation of academic culture in The Women of Brewster Place.  Thoughts?