The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (review)

Discussions about the decline of the middle class proliferate, regularly renewed in response to issues ranging from trade agreements to overseas outsourcing to tax cuts. Andrew Hoberek challenges conventional wisdom in The Twilight of the Middle Class, by boldly suggesting that middle class decline actually began during the 1950s, even though the middle class was growing demographically and economically as a result of the postwar boom.

Hoberek argues against ideas that post-World War II fiction shifted thematic concentration from economic to psychological, asserting that "economics and class remained central to postwar writing." Reviewing scholars who see the middle class as reaching economic transcendence in the fifties, Hoberek counters that the middle class, through loss of economic property, joined the proletariat as exploited workers. With the consolidation of property brought on by industrialization, the middle class became defined by white-collar work: professionals, managers, or workers in "routinized mental labor." This change created a new "middle-class consciousness" rooted in a sense of "dispossession" and individuality compromized by conformity.

Loss of control and a sense of replaceability redefined the middle class. They became the workers, despite unwillingness to identify with the proletariat and the postwar economy's obfuscation of its rising binary bent. While wealth was redistributed during this period, capital was not; thus middle class workers, engaged in work with people and ideas rather than things, became "organization men" with "their employment symbolizing the ultimate degradation of creative mental labor within the white-collar workplace."

The result, Hoberek explains, is the creation of narratives "of individual dispossession that enforce ... [middle class] cultural dominance" instead of seeking alliance with workers. Because of this failure to identify with workers, capital is able to exploit "the ongoing resonance of traditional American middle-class values even while it proves increasingly able to dispense with an actual middle class."

Hoberek applies his theory to several authors and novels. For example, with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, he dismisses its romanticized understanding of intellectual property issues that promises the reversal of middle class decline. He sees Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man as a "critical reworking" of the organization-man narrative through its refusal to romanticize the exclusion of blacks from the white-collar middle class. Hoberek claims that this suggests "a deep-seated fear of racial downward mobility as the telos of organization life." In contrast, Hoberek's inquiry into the Jewish novel of the fifties, centered on Saul Bellow's Augie March, presents Jewish difference as "a way of entering the white-middle class without completely sacrificing one's individuality." Similarly, he regards Flannery O'Connor's southern difference as having the potential to undermine the organization man.

In 130 pages, Hoberek shifts extensively among writers, at times confusing his points and creating a desire for additional insights. While his extensive knowledge builds contextual interest and offers provocative contrasts, the text at times seems to stray from his focus. His goal, however, is lofty: he urges reexamination of the middle class imprisonment in "the real world of capitalist unfreedom" and a change in the way it "dream[s] of a world in which people are human beings, rather than parts of the system's machinery."