Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Tom Perrin. The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945-75. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 197 pp.
Review by Birte Christ
26 January 2016
Coming across Tom Perrin’s recent—and truly groundbreaking—study on middlebrow fiction, you, dear reader (to use a quintessential middlebrow authorial gesture here), might wonder: does middlebrow literature really matter? And just in case it turns out it matters somehow, then isn’t middlebrow a category useful mainly for literary sociologists and book studies scholars—and not for you?
The first of Perrin’s major achievements in The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction is to demonstrate that US American mid-century middlebrow novels shared one sophisticated, coherent aesthetics. In doing so, he moves the study of middlebrow literature away from a focus on the mediating institutions and structures through which it was marketed—as pioneered by Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway in the 1990s—and away from questions of the social stratification of taste in the manner of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of la culture moyenne. While Perrin’s inquiry into mid-century fiction is framed by categories such as its mediation and popularity in the marketplace, he describes the middlebrow’s shared aesthetics from within the texts themselves. Mid-century middlebrow writers, Perrin demonstrates, “remake” the realist paradigm and existing literary genres such as the bildungsroman for modernity by productively misreading the aesthetic program of modernism and defining themselves against it. The most obvious text-internal indicators of this dynamic are “Scenes of opposition between modernism and the middlebrow” (p. 1) that middlebrow novels stage over and over again. So, yes: As an aesthetic category, the middlebrow might indeed be relevant for you—even if you are not interested in questions of the book market and distinctions in literary taste—and middlebrow texts do pay off a close reading.
The second feat of Perrin’s study is to make the middlebrow matter, too—to carve out its important place in the arena of the formal history of the twentieth-century novel. By any account so far, middlebrow fiction in the twentieth century seemed to have lead a parallel life next to modernist and postmodernist texts. One formal feature of middlebrow novels—and one that they have particularly been dismissed for—is their hopeful and even happy endings in a (fictional and real) world characterized by fragmentation, chaos, and Lukácsian transcendental homelessness. Perrin demonstrates that middlebrow novels do not suppress this contradiction to make their glib solutions to modern problems seem viable. Instead, they rely on the reader’s knowledge that “what he or she is reading is a comforting fantasy about their problems but believing all the same that it might constitute some kind of solution to those problems” (p. 4). By virtue of such an “aesthetics of disavowal,” the mid-century middlebrow, Perrin argues, becomes one source of, and is eventually absorbed by, popular postmodernism; it is only a small shift from a middlebrow aesthetics that suggests that if there is only chaos and loneliness in the world, readers may yet be comforted by the fantasy that this might be otherwise, to a postmodern fetishistic aesthetics that proclaims that “if there’s nothing but pain, it might as well be the kind [one] enjoy[s]” (p. 128). Perrin thus also challenges received wisdom about the core tenets of postmodernism: postmodernist texts do not simply bridge the high and the low—leaving the middle’s aesthetic “sticky slime of calves-foot jelly” (Virginia Woolf) untouched—but instead adopt the middle’s actual “aesthetics of disavowal” to make the high and low gel in the pursuit of postmodernist textual pleasure.
The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction is a must-read for anyone interested in the increasingly vibrant field of middlebrow studies, as it breaks ground by consistently focusing on the middlebrow’s textual qualities and mapping the middlebrow as an aesthetic category. But anyone interested in postmodernism and the history of the novel—the more general reader (if you allow another middlebrow category adapted to the academic realm) —should give it a go, too; middlebrow fiction, Perrin’s book teaches, is not a field apart from post-war “legitimate” literature, but a shaping force in its formal development. Without taking account of it, an understanding of the history of the novel will remain incomplete. Go forth, fellow readers, and make it your own!
