<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Why the Old Money WASP Has Been Marginalized
Review: This novel helps us understand why upper class WASP culture (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) lost its exalted place in American society in the decades that ended the 20th Century.
The families portrayed in this novel are inheritors of the WASP culture that founded our country and in later generations founded and populated our exclusive suburban neighborhoods, such as the Philadelphia Main Line where this story largely takes place. Members of this culture created and sent their sons and daughters to exclusive boarding schools and the Ivy League Colleges. They were largely Episcopalian, their telephone book was the Social Register, and they hung out at clubs where tennis was played on grass and where blacks, Jews, and "ethnics" were not allowed.
In the later half of the 20th century the upper class WASP community was marginalized as standardized test scores, not family connections, determined who got accepted at elite schools and colleges. Meanwhile, technology was revolutionizing business and regional family companies all but disappeared. In short, as America moved toward "meritocracy," Old Money WASPs had a hard time competing. Furthermore, the generation of WASPs that came of age in the '60s and '70s had difficulty reconciling the elitism of their own culture with the democratic ideals for which their country was supposed to stand.
American Blue Blood deals with these themes through a Philadelphia Main Line family, the members of whom struggle to understand who they are supposed to be in the late 20th Century. The plot is primarily a coming-of-age story, and the characters are well drawn and believable.
This novel is worth a read for anyone interested in understanding what WASP culture once was, what it was up against, and what happened to it. This book is for that person who wants to learn all of the above, but who wants to do it by reading fiction as opposed to the works of University of Pennsylvania sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (The Protestant Establishment, Philadelphia Gentlemen, Puritan Boston Quaker Philadelphia), Robert C. Christopher (Crashing the Gates), Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (Old Money), Joseph Epstein (Snobbery), David Brooks (Bobos in Paradise), etc., etc. All are great books and are also worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Well written portrait of upper class social change
Review: This novel's premise is: the culture of wealthy, aristocratic WASP families that was once center stage in America is all but gone. This novel is a portrait of one such family of the Philadelphia Main Line that came apart in the social upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies, and whose members had difficulty competing as America susequently moved toward a more complete meritocracy. The main character is a sympathetic hero who is well developed and easy to understand, even for those of us who didn't grow up with the Social Register and who went to college on scholarship. The writing is excellent, the narrative voice and writing style convey a sense of propriety, a natural fit for the subject matter of this novel.
<< 1 >>
| 
