Michael Yates's In and Out of the Working Class
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Yates, Michael: In and Out of the Working Class, Arbeiter Ring
Publishing Winnipeg, 2009, ISBN 978-1-894037-35-8, 217 pages.
(Swans - October 19, 2009) In the course of reading Michael Yates's
collection of essays In and Out of the Working Class, it dawned on me
that I prefer reading memoirs to novels in the same way that I generally
prefer documentary to fiction films. If the essence of literature, as
Henry James once pointed out, is character, then you are forced to stick
with the truth. The explanation for this is socioeconomic and
historical. Now that we have reached the end of the tether for American
imperialism, which was correctly likened to Nero's Rome in Michael
Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story, Hollywood and mainstream publishing
have a vested interest in escapist fare that takes the minds of the
citizenry off their real problems. Plots and characters become more and
more removed from the reality we face, and hence less interesting.
It should be mentioned that while four pieces are labeled fiction, they
are very closely related in subject matter and perspective to those
labeled nonfiction -- namely the conflicted lives of working people from
the vantage point of the author, a lifelong academic who emerged -- or
escaped -- from their world. Michael Yates's writing is interesting in
the same way that the literature of the 1930s remains interesting.
Despite the fact that American society is made up in its vast majority
by people who sell their labor power -- to use a bit of the Marxist
lexicon -- they are almost invisible today. Like African-American Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel about a black man's search for identity
in racist America, the worker is of little interest to the professional
writer, except perhaps as an object of ridicule as in television shows
like The King of Queens.
read full review: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/lproy56.html
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