Mis(Understanding) the White Working Class

white working-class life in Winchester, Virginia, for the same reason I do believe Tolstoy's portraits of 19th century Russian aristocrats. I have no experience with people anything like those in the great Russian novels, but Tolstoy's characters have the feel and frustrating complexity of real people who resist quick judgments. Conversely, even though I have direct experience of white, workingclass life over the same decades as Bageant's, some of it just up the road in South Central Pennsylvania, the people he describes don't feel real to me. Nobody is as one-dimensional, as devoid of what Bageant calls interior lives, as the people who are occasions for the clever one-liners in Deer Hunting with Jesus

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