February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue

One character trait I cannot abide is snobbery. I detect it in James Wood’s description of his mother in this week’s issue. He says she “possessed a full complement of petit-bourgeois anxieties, tics, and unreadable rules (such as putting the milk into the teacup before the tea)." “Petit-bourgeois” is just a fancy way of saying “lower middle class.” So that’s what Wood thinks of his mother: she’s lower middle class. He’s said it before. In his “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), he writes, “It was important to my Scottish petty-bourgeois mother that I didn’t sound like a Geordie.” Is there a difference between “petty-bourgeois” and “petit-bourgeois”? Wood changed it to “petit” when he collected the piece in his Serious Noticing (2019). That sounds a bit better, a shade less condescending. But whether it’s “petty-bourgeois” or “petit-bourgeois,” it’s a snobbish thing to say. I admire Wood’s writing immensely. I just wish he wasn’t so damn class-conscious.