Love and Hot Chicken

Love and Hot Chicken by Mary Liza Hartong, 260 pages

PJ Spoon is midway through her PhD at Vanderbilt when the death of her father brings her back to her podunk hometown, Pennywhistle, Tennessee. Rather than deal with grief or talk to her mother about anything, PJ gets a job as a fry cook at the local hot chicken joint, the Chickie Shak. But before long, all of the female employees of the southern chain (plus two in New Jersey) are forced into a pageant to find Miss Chickie Shak, and PJ finds herself competing against her coworkers — cutie pie Boof and cranky Linda — and ignoring calls from her PhD advisor.

This is a quirky book, full of folksy Southernisms ("cuter than a piglet in jorts" is uttered at one point), to the point that the caricature of the South almost overwhelms the plot (which is plenty stereotypical South, in and of itself). Looking at the characters and their arcs, they're a bit flat, even with the meaty backstory that PJ has behind her. But if you're in the mood for laughing your way through something that doesn't really have a lot of substance, go ahead and pick this one up. Just make sure you're fully armed with your rhinestone gun and Velveeta when you start reading. 

White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America / Nancy Isenberg, 460 pp.

Nancy Isenberg's massively researched and endnoted text wants to remind Americans that our idea of a classless nation is a myth, and a cruel one.  From the earliest colonial period our country has been home to men and women who have been called, at various times, offscourings, clay-eaters, lubbers, and mudsills along with more familiar epithets.  The commercially-interested settlement companies saw these waste humans as cheap labor and barriers against Native American violence, but not as people deserving of decent land, rights, or respect.  (And speaking of Native Americans, it is not Isenberg's purpose to minimize the destruction of Native peoples or the suffering of African Americans; rather, I believe she is trying to show how the subjugation of a substantial portion of the white population worsened conditions for all and maximized opportunities for exploitation by the very few.)

The early chapters on the colonial period through the Civil War were a blizzard of information, all of it interesting but some of it a bit undigested.  I found myself wishing that she were connecting a few more dots.  The latter portion, from Reconstruction, to the War on Poverty, to today, were terrific.  Her analyses of Elvis, Bill Clinton, Honey Boo Boo, and Sarah Palin, and what each of these (and many others) mean to our culture was great reading.

There is something here to offend almost everyone.  I admire her courageous writing; I was only offended that she did not include a bibliography.  Yikes!