On this blog, we recently discussed somebody’s opinion that nobody is publishing novels about the working classes any longer. This isn’t at all true, however. Such novels are there to be found and if people are not finding them, I’m guessing they aren’t looking very hard. For instance, there is a recent novel by Kelly Braffet called Save Yourself. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a good, solid novel that I greatly enjoyed reading.
The novel offers a very interesting contrast between the lives of its working class protagonists, with their crappy jobs and hopeless existences and the ridiculous overwrought dramas of their upper-middle class neighbors. In a brilliant move, Braffet doesn’t tell us how well-off the upper-middle class protagonists are. We only discover this when a working class protagonist observes them at a restaurant where she works and notices an enormous contrast between their reality and hers. This complete unawareness of the rich neurotics of how different their lives are from those of the working poor is the novel’s strongest point. What I really liked about the novel is that this contrast isn’t overworked. You see it if you want to see it, but the author doesn’t push it in your face.
This is precisely what distinguishes literature from entertainment. A writer of an actual work of literature isn’t worried that readers wouldn’t get the point. She lets them approach the work of art on their own terms and take what they will from this.
The writing is surprisingly good, very simple and clear. The author seems to have an MFA but even this didn’t make her write in a pretentious, prettified way so many of the MFA graduates do. I definitely recommend the book, and I’m very glad I discovered this promising writer among the mountains of crappy novels American authors publish every year.
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