The EconomistJune 1st 2019 Books & arts 772 ten leaving their home towns behind, both
for the sake of opportunity or because they
felt judged, out of place and hemmed in.
They are careerists, often liberal in politics
but afflicted by immense blind spots. “We
had compassion for those left behind,” Mr
Arnade confesses, “but thought that our
job was to provide them an opportunity (no
matter how small) to get where we were.”
That, he discovers, was a patronising mis-
take: “It didn’t occur to us that what we val-
ued...wasn’t what everyone else wanted.”
Back-row people did less well at school
—because they disliked it, or were obliged
to leave to earn money, or were distracted
by personal problems. Affinity, family or
lack of alternatives kept them more bound
to place than the nomadic denizens of the
front row. As a woman in Cairo, Illinois,
tells Mr Arnade: “When you don’t have any-
thing else all you got is your home.” A gen-
eration or two ago, many such people could
have stayed put in comfort. Factories pro-
vided plentiful jobs at decent wages in
small and medium-sized towns across
America. The pay might not have madeanybody rich, yet it provided a middle-
class life for people who had a sound work
ethic but no college education.
More important, jobs conferred dignity.
This, argues Mr Arnade, is what (deliber-
ately or not) the front row routinely denies
the back row, and what he seeks in some
measure to restore. On that score, his book
succeeds. Mr Arnade went to a lot of places
that his peers have little cause to visit. He
talked to a lot of people who are often ig-
nored, and has rendered them visible.
Some of the characters he evokes are
haunting: the prostitute who left home
after finding her mother unconscious in
the company of strangers; the shrewd and
diligent drug-dealer in Selma, Alabama;
the welcoming wife of a storefront-preach-
er; the retired factory workers catching up
over morning coffee at a McDonald’s on
Milwaukee’s north side. Mr Arnade spends
a good deal of time in McDonald’s restau-
rants across America, which often become
de facto community centres.Back to front
His photographs—of addicts and street
scenes, invalids and sports events—are un-
captioned, which lends them an everyman
air. But they are intimate and unflinching.
He quotes people at length, letting them
define themselves on their own terms.
“Everyone wants to feel like a valued mem-
ber of something larger than themselves,”
he writes. In his telling, back-row Ameri-
cans find this sense of belonging in places
“that [do not] demand credentials”, wheth-
er it be church, family or people who share
their drug habit.
The portrayal of front-row Americans is
much less nuanced. It may be true that
America’s elite move more often and value
education as a path to advancement. But it
does not follow that all of them define “suc-
cess as all about how much you can learn
and then earn”, or put “owning more stuff”
above everything else. It is true that racism
persists in America, but for a middle-aged
man raised in the small-town South, as Mr
Arnade was, to say that race relations today
are “just the same ol’ thing, dressed up dif-
ferently” is both facile and inaccurate.
Still, these caricatures may let his front-
row readers know how it feels to be stereo-
typed. To Mr Arnade’s credit, he shies away
from prescriptions beyond observing that
“we all need to listen to each other more”.
Self-deprecatingly, he calls that “wishy-
washy”, but it is not; for adults caught in the
maelstrom of jobs and relatives and daily
life, listening is hard. “Attention is the be-
ginning of devotion,” wrote Mary Oliver, an
American poet. Mr Arnade is scarcely the
only commentator to worry that Ameri-
cans have grown less attentive to each oth-
er. But in listening himself, and reminding
his compatriots to do so more, he sets out a
path to greater devotion. 7