Like many of the staff members at the PIL, I am a big Downton Abbey fan. I love following the exploits of the upper class Lady Mary, Lady Edith and, most especially, the Dowager Countess. But perhaps even more intriguing to me are the “downstairs,” working class characters. John and Anna Bates are my favorite romantic pairing and my appreciation for the fabulous Mrs. Hughes grows with every season. As much fun as it can be to see how the elite lived in the earlier part of the twentieth century, I know in my heart of hearts that had I lived then, I would have been much more likely to be in the kitchen with Daisy and Mrs. Patmore than in the drawing room with Lord and Lady Grantham.
When it comes to books, I feel just the same. It can be intriguing to get a glimpse into the lives of the rich and powerful, but I will admit, I often prefer the more down to earth characters and stories of people who have to work hard to earn a living.
A couple of weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor offered a list of “10 Great Books Featuring Working Class Heroes.” This list focuses on recent fiction and nonfiction, but of course, working class heroes are far from new to the literary world. After all, some of the great classics of literature, like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men or almost anything by Dickens, are the stories of the working class.
In any case, had the author of the Christian Science article consulted me about my picks for her article, here’s a few fictional I would have recommended she add:
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes was my first Moyes title and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The main character, Lou, is pretty much the entire reason why. When we meet Lou she is working at a tea shop, but after she is laid off, she takes a job helping to care for Will, a former daredevil, rich boy who was severely injured in a motorcycle accident. Billing this book as simply a romance is, I think, remarkably unfair, but whatever genre you’d put it in, it’s a compelling read. A movie version is in the works, but I’m far more excited by the book sequel, After You that is due out this month.
A couple of other forays into other works by Jojo Moyes were enough to show me that I really only like her when she is writing about likable, funny and flawed working class women. Luckily for me, she wrote One Plus One. Jess, a single mother, works two jobs: one at a bar and one as a house cleaner. Despite her best efforts, her family is struggling. Her teenage stepson is viciously bullied and her brilliant young daughter needs more than her mediocre school can provide. When her daughter has the chance to enter a competition that could pay for her fees to much better school, Jess is determined to make it happen, even if it means accepting help from a rich client for whom she has a certain amount of disdain.
Unlike Jojo Moyes, Barbara Kingsolver is not a new-to-me author. I’ve been enjoying everything she’s written for fifteen or sixteen years now. She has quite the knack for creating characters that intrigue me, whether they are missionaries in Africa or recluses in the mountains of Appalachia. My first Kingsolver novel was The Bean Trees. When Taylor Greer graduates high school, the first and only item on her to do list is to get out of her rural Kentucky hometown. She takes a less than reliable car and starts driving west. She eventually lands in Arizona, but along the way, she picks up an abandoned child and finds herself creating a whole new family.
Despite the first scene in which Dellarobia Turnbow appears in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, I found myself really liking this young woman from a struggling farming family in Appalachia. She’s sarcastic and condescending towards her husband and in-laws, but I found her rather endearing. Flight Behavior is the story of how Dellarobia is thrust into a world of scientific observation when her family’s property becomes the site of a climate change phenomenon. Frankly, the whole book is worth reading just for the scene where Della demonstrates to a yuppie environmentalist just how little he knows about the lives and habits of working class people.
At the start of The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Victoria doesn’t even make the ranks of the working class. As an eighteen year old, aging out of the foster care system, she has no place to live, no job and no support. She’s also bitter and angry and perhaps an unlikely candidate to know much about the usually romantic Victorian language of flowers. This is her specialty, however, and she parlays her affinity for flowers into a job with a florist. Things certainly don’t proceed smoothly for Victoria, however, as she must face the events and people of her past. In real life, Victoria would be extremely difficult to like, but between the pages of the book, the reader grows to feel a certain sympathy for her.
Diffenbaugh’s recently released second book offers another main character who can be difficult to connect with at first. Letty is a single mother, but without much emphasis on the mother part. Her own mother has, until the start of We Never Asked for Wings almost exclusively raised Letty’s children while Letty worked as a bartender. When her parents decide to go back to Mexico and leave Letty to fend for herself and her two children for the first time, Letty certainly doesn’t seem to be a contender for mother of the year. However, she does try to improve her children’s lives by dreaming up a scheme in which they can attend better quality schools. In the end, it’s her teenage son, Alex, who really steals the show and runs away with the readers’ hearts, but I found myself liking Letty more at the end than I thought I would.
Like We Never Asked for Wings, The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez features characters from working class families that have recently immigrated to the United States. In this case, the spotlight is on the Hernandez family that comes from Mexico after their daughter suffers brain damage in a sad accident. Believing an American school can help Maribel recover from her injury, the Hernandez family relocates. They are unprepared, however, for the reality that faces them in the United States. This includes Maribel’s new relationship with a neighbor boy from Panama. Henriquez weaves the stories of all the immigrant neighbors of the Hernandez family into an intriguing and heartbreaking novel.