Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (review)

How does social class—specifically, the odd classlessness of the middle class—function in American fiction? Robert Seguin's study aims to show how the middle-class fantasy of transcending class is organized around liminal spaces: between work and nonwork, stasis and mobility, looking backward and looking forward, passivity and agency. The difficulty of such an enterprise is immediately apparent: one must produce compelling arguments about ambiguous and obscure phenomena. Seguin succeeds incompletely at the task, largely because he circles around the key issues rather than confronting them.

Periphrastic and circuitous, Seguin's prose tires the reader's patience. Particularly annoying is his habit of overqualification: phrases like "a kind of" and "not un-" crop up on practically every page, slowing sentences to a crawl. Furthermore, his chapters are burdened with theoretical lumber that inhibits rather than empowers critical reading, so that the book often resembles someone trying to fly while wearing a knapsack loaded with bricks. Arguments loiter like factory workers returning from lunch. Indeed, Seguin seems vaguely embarrassed by the prospect of settling in to read a text; he'd far rather pursue digressive journeys into cultural theory. Fredric Jameson is a special favorite, and Seguin seems to have imbibed Jameson's stylistic mannerisms along with his ideas.

Although Seguin announces in his introductory chapter that he's accepting Marxist categories of class uncritically, he seldom discusses class directly, except as a signifier of something called "middle-classlessness." Still, this aporia may be appropriate because, he contends, "middle-classness" itself tends to disappear into a set of contested binaries.

Seguin begins by examining Sister Carrie through a set of intriguing tropes—the window, the porch, the rocking chair. These tropes represent the novel's blending of public and private, social and domestic spheres, embodying that period between work and leisure that subtends the novel's action. Like a rocking chair, Carrie is always moving yet going nowhere. And, one is tempted to add, so is Seguin's argument, which meanders, hesitates, and leaves undercooked intriguing ingredients such as Hurstwood's ambiguous condition as a scab and his vacillation in embezzling money from his firm. Like passengers on a nighttime tram, we find ourselves reaching conclusions with no clear sense of how we arrived.

The chapter on Cather is much better, as Seguin analyzes, mostly through A Professor's House, Cather's vexed position on textual production. Are novels high art and consumable commodities? Gazing simultaneously backward to the artisanal model of handicraft and forward to the polished professional, Cather exhibited a double vision embodied, Seguin shows, in Tom Outland, who simultaneously imagines and refuses his own middle-classness. Cather's notion of authorship thus portends a nascent middlebrow culture, which becomes the typical intellectual space of the bourgeoisie. One wishes Seguin had provided a more precise definition of "circulation," which seems to float amorphously, but at least here he uses the primary text to drive the secondary ones, rather than vice versa.

Unfortunately, the chapter on The Day of the Locust relapses into the dawdling manner of the earlier sections. A promising attempt to portray the novel's suspension between social criticism and melodrama founders upon a set of dubious parallels: we're to believe that Faye Greener's lugubrious film scenarios and the novel's briefly described stag film somehow adumbrate high modernist narrative devices. More persuasive is Seguin's discussion of the grotesquely arrested condition of West's Californians, whom Seguin compares to the technology of film projection, which seems to animate a series of still photographs. Once again, however, the precise citations that would clinch his arguments are absent. Thus, when he proposes that the very shape and movement of West's sentences are influenced by the medium of film, one finds nary an example of such a sentence. Eventually, Seguin...