Lubrano's view of the challenges that upwardly mobile children of
blue-collar families (he calls them Straddlers) face in
establishing themselves in white-collar enclaves could spark lively
debates among Straddlers themselves, not to mention those Lubrano
views as having a head start based on birth into a white-collar
family. In this combination of memoir and survey, the
Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter recalls his freshman
year at Columbia; he'd expected classmates to regard him as
sophisticated because he was a New Yorker. However, this son of a
Brooklyn bricklayer found himself on the outside of elite cliques
populated by men he characterizes as "pasty, slight fellas-all of
them seemed 5-foot-7 and sandy-haired." This was only the beginning
for Lubrano, who came to see entry into a select educational
institution as a harsh cultural dividing line between his
blue-collar upbringing and his white-collar future. Becoming a
journalist cost him emotionally when he felt torn between
abandoning cherished values from his youth and accommodating his
new profession's demands. Lubrano's interviews with other
Straddlers have convinced him that ambition puts many of them in
positions f raught with similar ambivalence and unexpected culture
shock. With quotes from Richard Rodriguez and bell hooks, Lubrano
illustrates his thesis: "Limbo folk remain aware of their
'otherness' throughout their lives [and remain] perpetual
outsiders." Yet he's quick to recognize individual Straddlers
who've persevered in the face of those outsider feelings (though,
regrettably, he doesn't share self-reflection). Straddlers'
ultimate challenge, Lubrano opines, is to be as steadfast and
self-possessed in reconciling their white-collar present with their
blue-collar heritage as they have been in achieving their
professional goals. Agent, David Vigliano. (Nov.)
Forecast: A national advertising and publicity campaign and
co-promotions with the Philadelphia Inquirer and NPR should attract
readers who've experienced the duality Lubrano describes.
(
Publishers Weekly, July 28, 2003)
An award-winning reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer and
commentator for National Public Radio, he owns 11 backyard-bred
horses on a farm in South Jersey: "I hold our chestnut yearling
Beau Soleil as a friend French braids his blond mane in preparation
for his Devon debut," he reports. Life is good-but that's the
problem: Lubrano cannot reconcile his father's being a construction
worker with his becoming an aflluent professional. The result is
Limbo, a stringing together of Lubrano's and others' thoughts on
the pain of straddling two different worlds. Lubrano's journalism
background apparently precludes any sociological methodology: the
narrative is full of broad generalizations with little
substantiation. One may wonder what country Lubrano was born in:
aren't most Americans of a "hybrid class"? Don't most parents
aspire to have their children exceed their own station in life? And
what about the current glut of unemployed graduates? Now there's a
problem. My advice: Lubrano should stop kvetching, and librarians
should save their money for Sherry B. Ortner's New Jersey Dreaming:
Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, which explores the forces
that influenced the author's classmates' lives after graduation.
Many of them went from blue-collar families to the middle class,
but Ortner analyzes the phenomenon with scholarly expertise rather
than bemoaning it. ?Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ
(Library Journal, October 1, 2003)
One of the lies we tell ourselves, as a nation, is that there
are no real class boundaries here - or, at least, none that can't
be overcome by determination and hard work. Anyone can be
president, right? That's why we've had so many working-class
presidents over the years, so many vice presidents from the ghetto,
so many cabinet secretaries from the barrio and the hollow, so many
Supreme Court justices whose fathers were plumbers.
With another presidential election clicking into gear, the issue of
class is sure to be raised, but it will be quickly doused by one
millionaire candidate or another saying something like: "Now, now,
no one wants a class war in America." True, no one wants a class
war. In fact, we want so badly to avoid a class war that we're
afraid even to initiate the kinds of national discussions we've
managed to have about race, gender and sexuality. Part of this
comes from the fact that the poor and working classes have no voice
in the American media elite. Part of it is more subtle: Though the
law offers equal opportunity to members of the lower classes, there
are enormous psychological barriers to upward mobility, and, often,
an enormous price to be paid by those who overcome them.
In Limbo, his brilliant examination of people who have climbed from
the poor or working classes into the middle and upper classes,
Alfred Lubrano knocks down one of the walls that keep the class
issue out of sight and earshot, and floods the subject with light.
Born to a tough, kind Brooklyn bricklayer and a knowledge-hungry
housewife, Lubrano now lives on a horse farm, is a reporter for The
Inquirer, and does commentary for National Public Radio, so he
knows the joys and perils of this climb, and writes about them with
an authority unavailable to someone merely making an academic
study.
Limbo is a pitch-perfect interweaving of his own story - as
neighborhood kid, Columbia scholarship student, newspaper reporter
- with the stories of others who have made a similar journey. Some
of the others, such as writers Richard Rodriguez and Dana Gioia,
are well known. All are successful - surgeons, professors,
executives, lawyers, teachers. And, beneath the business suits and
degrees, all of them carry histories that reach back to the mean
streets, the factories and farms, the dinner tables and bars at
which their unschooled parents and less talented, less ambitious,
or simply more frightened peers talked to them about the snobbery
of the well-educated and well-off. "This book," Lubrano writes, "is
a step toward understanding what people gain and what they leave
behind as they move from the working class to the middle
class."
We already have an idea what they gain - nicer homes, cars and
vacations, safer schools for their kids, safer jobs for themselves.
But Lubrano wisely gives equal time to what they leave behind - the
directness and authenticity of their hardworking relatives; the
rough, honest humor of their peers; a humility and a courage born
of daily discomfort.
"Much about working-class life is admirable and fine," Lubrano
writes. "The trick is to avoid glorifying it without painting life
in it too darkly." So he gives us the racism, sexism and
small-mindedness, too, the crippling envy and pettiness, all the
things that pushed his aptly named "Straddlers" out of the old
neighborhood in the first place.
After the Straddlers have earned their degrees, moved away from the
familiar streets, and embarked on the types of careers their
parents once spoke about with envy or disdain, they face challenges
parallel to those faced by immigrants to the land of plenty.
Lubrano details those challenges in chapters on the workplace,
dating, marriage and child-rearing. His research is extensive, and
the stories he elicits from interviewees are touching and
raw.
There is the woman who loses on purpose while playing Scrabble with
her less-well-educated mother; a young man who spends months
carefully talking his closed-minded father into letting him go to
college. Lubrano presents their stories sympathetically, linked to
them as he is by his own uncomfortable adjustment to the bright new
world of American success: "I often feel inhabited by two people
who don't speak to each other."
That duality will be intimately familiar to readers who have moved
from humble backgrounds well up into the middle class, from
Campbell's soup to sushi, from stifling apartments to summer homes,
from a sweaty tribal comfort to an anxious open-mindedness. But
this book is too good and too important to be limited to a narrow
audience. In Limbo, Alfred Lubrano has said something fresh and
true about our simplistic myth of upward mobility, and in doing so
he has illuminated the panoply of fear, hope, envy, courage and
sacrifice that lies at the very heart of the American dream.
(The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2, 2003)
"Hopefully, this superbly written book will give voice to the
millions who have to make this transition...." (San Francisco
Chronicle, November 2, 2003)
