#eistc

This piece and his finding of joy and gratitude in embracing discomfort and failure is both so at the heart of comedy and Jewish and incredibly unJewish at the same time.

That Southernness, however much it is now the material of cliché, is still the most pleasing thing about the book—the kind of easy, Agee and McCullers Southernness (as against Tennessee Williams’s more Gothic version) that was as much a part of the postwar American novel as Jewishness, of which it was the alternative construction. Jews (in Bellow, Malamud, early Roth) were urban, worried, and compellingly neurotic; Southerners (in Capote, McCullers, Harper Lee) were rural, carefree, and absolutely crazy. As always with such things, neither construction makes sense unless you see the missing central panel that both are reacting to: the Wasp ascendancy, only just about to be called so—that average American whiteness from which Southern drinking and Jewish schmalz alike could seem welcome refuges.

-Adam Gopnik reviewing Go Set A Watchman and essaying in lovely form about Southern intellectualism and the deft early selling (to themselves and others) of white supremacy