Review: The Poor Working Class Poor (A Review of Crown By Evanthia Bromiley)

By Hugh Blanton

 

When our betters look down at us from their Ivory Towers they do so with benevolent smiles that tell us they understand our suffering and strife. Ocean Vuong once deigned to step out of the Ivory Tower to get a job at Boston Market hoping to experience for himself the life of the working class and found himself awed when he witnessed employees helping to dig each others' cars out of the snow instead of just digging out their own and heading home after their shifts. What love and togetherness these working class share! he thought, tears stinging his eyes. In Evanthia Bromiley's debut novel Crown, she tells the story of an out-of-work waitress and her two children. An MFA with numerous scholarships, fellowships, and awards, Bromiley gets out of her Ivory Tower to keep things real by working "in impacted schools with young writers and their teachers as they sharpen their craft and voices, telling stories of growing up in the American Southwest." And we get yet more romanticizing and sentimentalizing of the working class that bears scant resemblance to anything actually working class.

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An eviction notice flutters from the front door of Jude Woods's mobile home—she's been laid off from a restaurant that has been closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So right off the bat Crown opens up with a plot hole large enough to sink the whole novel—employees laid off at the beginning of the pandemic were automatically eligible for unemployment benefits. Not only that, the supplemental Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation raised the benefits by $600 weekly meaning that low wage earners were getting more than what they earned from their jobs. (The supplemental benefit was cut to $300 when it was reauthorized.) There's also no mention of the stimulus checks that went out from the federal government and no mentions of how evictions were paused during the pandemic (beyond a social worker telling Jude that unpaid rent still accrues). Jude's got two children, Virginia and Evan, nine-year-old twin brother and sister. She's pregnant with her third child.

 

Crown is told in first person narration from the perspectives of Jude and each of the children. Bromiley does not use quotation marks and the dialogue of the two nine-year-old's varies from childlike to post-grad philosopher making it difficult to know who is speaking at any given time. We are not told where the Woods live, but there are enough clues to let us know it is near Durango, Colorado where Bromiley herself resides (when she isn't out on a writing residency somewhere). Bromiley further shows her detachment from the poor when she has a homeless person carrying around a film projector in his cart which he plugs into outlets on power poles, and, using a sheet as a screen, watches a Charlie Chaplin movie (although it's difficult to believe that Durango, or anywhere, has outlets on its power poles).

 

Jude is covered in tattoos (one characteristic that Bromiley gets right about the poor) and her son Evan describes them:

 

"on her lower back float bus stops and butterflies. In the shadows between two ribs a child kicks a dog. Beneath the blade of her right shoulder a soldier crouches beside a shopping cart, his arms covered in doves. Two front wheels of the cart peel from the ground—the doves lift the cart and the man! Dangling from a rib glows a crumbling moon, also a feathered hand reaches down, down to the floor of that city, where an old, old man kisses an old woman very gently on her head. Two women fight over a loaf of bread—or are they tearing it to share? A tree, all leaf-blown. A girl burst up and out of the dirt like a flower. The girl is V. Through roots falls a boy who looks like a bird. The boy is me."

 

Those don't sound like the thoughts of a typical nine-year-old boy, and the way he becomes so familiar with his mom's tattoos is also unusual—Jude still bathes with her nine-year-old children.

 

Perhaps one of the reasons Bromiley doesn't want to get specific about where Crown takes place is the town's absurd first responder system. A man sits in his mobile home—in the same trailer park where the Woods live—waiting for 911 calls to come in. The truck he goes out on calls in is an old beater. When he gets a call from someone who says his girlfriend isn't breathing, he gives him CPR instructions: "Hold her heart in your hands." Then, "Now breathe for her. Give her your air." The caller's phone battery dies, but our first responder can't go out to save them—he forgot to get their address. Later our first responder gets a call about a child trapped up on a railroad trestle so he hustles out to do a rescue in his old truck. He doesn't have any rescue equipment, he simply tells the boy to let go and drop into his arms. One wonders if Bromiley was simply too pressed for time to do a Google search for first responder rescue techniques.

 

Also unusual in Crown is the appearance of a steam-powered locomotive pulling a passenger train through the Woods' town. Union Pacific still has a steam-powered locomotive in service, UP-844, based out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's plausible that it could make runs into Durango, although Union Pacific says UP-844 is a special services locomotive making it unlikely that it has a regular passenger train route. It was built in 1944 (rebuilt in 1960) and is the only steam locomotive still in service in the USA today. 

 

Romanticizing the working class is nothing new, but it seems that writers used to put more effort into it. Upton Sinclair installed himself undercover in a Chicago meatpacking plant to get his story and it led to the government passing the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. John Steinbeck traveled and worked with migrant workers to get his story and earned himself a Pulitzer and a Nobel. Bromiley apparently thinks she's gone far enough by assisting teachers in Title 1 schools to teach their students poetry. Gotta hand it to her for this though: "Waiting is what poor people do."

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5