Class by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Karen Kipple is the kind of white, urban liberal whose “life was ripe for mockery.”
She is worried about the world her 8-year old daughter Ruby is growing up in.
She wants to shield Ruby from the dangers of refined flour, chemical additives, fructose corn syrup, polyunsaturated cooking oil and Chips Ahoy.
She is a conscientious do-gooder who raises money for a charity called Hungry Kids as she realizes “food had somehow become a dividing line between the social classes.”
She is very mindful of the disadvantaged around her to the point of distraction. There is not a day that goes by without her questioning her own motivations about every decision she makes about how she lives her life. And of all the issues that plague her, race is at the top. She is self-aware enough to know that “College-educated white liberals were as terrified of being seen as racists as they were of encountering black male teenagers on an empty street after dark.”
But is her daughter being exposed to enough children of color? And how many is too many?
Class, Lucinda Rosenfeld’s latest satire about gentrification and what it does to the most well-meaning of liberals could have been titled a bunch of other things. Race, is the most obvious title. What’s The Matter With White, Urban Liberals? might also have worked, as well as Do As I Say, Not As I Do or Yes, But….
Rosenfeld’s searing description of life in Cortland Hill (Brooklyn) and its environs is pitch perfect. A neighborhood that might catch up with those a few blocks away if just the right number of people of the right type, like Karen and husband Matt (another do-gooder who chucked in his law job to work on building an app to connect homeless people to housing) move in. While the world they inhabit is one of exposed beams, Edison bulbs, organic slow pour coffee and artisanal everything, the racial balance in their local public school has not caught up with that gentrification, and students (mostly of color) from public housing mingle with kids like Ruby.
Meanwhile, just five blocks from Betts, Mather is the public school with the overwhelmingly well to do, aka, white student body and a PTA capable of raking in money from the parents, donned in the uniform of their class. “The dads [wear] holey jeans, faded T-shirts with stretched-out necks advertising colleges and film festivals...”, and the moms dress in “embroidered Indian tunics with deep Vs, white cotton jeans that ended at the calf, simple gold or silver jewelry, and clogs of all colors and varieties.”
Rosenfeld paints a portrait of a highly strung working mother of a certain class, trying to do the right thing. You want to laugh at the ridiculousness of Karen’s preoccupation with getting everything right, but every now and then Rosenfeld will hit you with a truth that is applicable to a lot of working moms who aren’t preoccupied with race but are focused on everything else they want to make perfect. Karen resents husband Matt’s failure to help with Ruby “in theory, in practice she found it easier to do it herself.” That probably sounds familiar to a lot of women I know.
The novel revolves around that most contemporary of sentiments, FOMO – fear of missing out. In this case, the fear that her daughter Ruby is missing out on a better education and a more likeminded cohort of friends by being stuck at Betts. Despite Karen’s best intentions to live her life based on her own political principles, Karen undertakes a madcap scheme to get her daughter into Maher by faking their address (by rummaging through the garbage of a house in the right catchment area!).
Once she takes that step, the wheels come off Karen’s ordered, diligent life. There’s an affair with a former college classmate Clay, now a multi-millionaire (who donates to Hungry Kids), and a crazy reverse Robin Hood scheme involving the overfunded Maher PTA, an organization with so much money they don’t know what to do with it, and the imminent closure of the Betts library because they don’t have enough money.
I didn’t know whether to laugh at Karen Kipple for her ridiculous foibles or to cringe at her sensitivity to her own racial sensitivities. It is never fully explained where her obsession about race stemmed from, but it seems she is trying to make up for every white person in the world, as if the number of people of color in her life is a measure of her worth. There is Lou, a fellow mother at Betts who is a dark-skinned second-generation Jamaican (married to an Icelandic guy) with whom she is friends until she leaves the school. And then there is her excruciating effort to befriend Michelle and daughter Mia, a black family Karen makes assumptions about.
She is somehow even in competitive with her soon to be lover Clay, when she meets his wife – “Karen knew she shouldn’t be surprised to find that Clay was married to a woman of color. Why shouldn’t he have been? But she was surprised – surprised and impressed and somewhat more nervous.”
Rosenfeld’s portrait of the overzealous competitive world of school politics is very realistically rendered. And once you see through the humorous portrayals, the weight on these poor children who are proxies for their parents’ problems and insecurities appears heavy indeed.
Class takes on the burning issue of the day, in an increasingly divided country (economically, racially and politically). What is the obligation of the individual to contribute, and when does the concern for your own child outweigh that of the common good? It’s a great way to get acquainted with a topic that that is played out most specifically and emotionally when it comes to public schools. The smugness of the northern liberal elite who see themselves as open minded and decidedly not racist flies in the face of the reality that is playing out in urban school districts across the country. New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the country and if you want an introduction to understanding why, Class is a great way to start.
BEFORE YOU READ
Length: 336
Genre: Fiction, Satire
Themes: race, class, schools, infidelity, gentrification, catty mothers
Commitment: Delightfully engaging read.
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