Poor Things: How Those With Money Depict Those Without ItBy Lennard J.Davis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 291 pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐4780‐3102‐4

Lennard J. Davis has championed empathetic studies of human disability, obsession, and, now, poverty. As a prelude to this book, his online “The Endo/Exo Writers Project” offers tidy lists of 50 “exo-writers” without working-class backgrounds to inform their perspectives on impoverished subjects, and 50 “endo-writers” who share their subjects' economic background and class (endoexo.digital.uic.edu). This site opens an engaging premise for considering familiar writers, the logic of which Davis explains in Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It. In the book's introduction, Davis recounts his own emergence from a family without money, whose difficulties did not involve the kinds of psychological dysfunction or self-pitying squalor too often ascribed to the poor by unknowing outsiders. Consequently, he can make credible objections to (1) stereotypical characterizations of the poor by privileged writers who view the poor as a subject of study, and (2) artists, photographers, and documentarians who embellish realities of human suffering to create their portraitures of the poor. Davis's remedy to these transgressions seems fair: Rather than study impoverished humans as diseased subjects in search of a cure, why not instead study these subjects' stories as told by themselves. Such a shift of academic focus, however, appears unlikely. Davis acknowledges the huge inequity between the percentages of economically advantaged and disadvantaged students who attend, graduate from, and become faculty members in higher education. He therefore predicts that most of his readers will be academic gatekeepers who view the poor with detached concern. He nevertheless realizes the need for both exo- and endo-representations of poverty. Ideally, endo-writers, such as Jack London and Richard Wright, provide a “realistic description of life” (224) while exo-writers, such as George Gissing and John Steinbeck, more directly challenge abuses under capitalism. The problem is that neither exo- nor endo-writers usually achieve these ideals. Davis identifies how most characterizations of the poor exaggerate or create impressions that bend to the expectations of readers and audiences or, worse, serve as a negative foil for the writer's self-promotion. Davis labels such appropriations of human subjects as “poornography” (3–7) which, he explains, has developed over time into a perturbing genre. Davis's clearest example of “poornography” is not a written work, but Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother,” which became an iconic image of Depression-era misery. Lange, who sold her photographs to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the 1930s, recalled the process behind her acclaimed picture as a spontaneous and empathetic exchange between photographer and subject. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the photograph, contradicted Lange's version of their encounter and suggested she had been misled, misrepresented, and exploited as a symbol of human poverty. Davis, perhaps deliberately, gives Thompson's version more weight with his analysis of Lange's entire series of Thompson photographs, inferring that “Migrant Mother” was not a captured moment of truth, but rather a coercive image selected from several to dramatize a prescribed theme. In the same chapter, Davis goes on to relate other cases in which poor subjects criticized the manner in which they were mischaracterized by middle-class photographers and concludes that the subjects were at least able to add context and authenticity to their own stories, albeit without compensation that might have improved their circumstances and without control over their images' circulation. The FSA may have served its intention to make the invisible visible, but at a moral cost. By comparison, Davis scrutinizes writing about the poor as an even more complex and ambiguous convention that raises unanswerable questions. Although the novels of Elizabeth Gaskill and Charles Dickens invited readers to bond with a gallery of rogues and angels as destitute humans rather than as specimens, we may question the extent to which these characterizations were cultivated to sustain bourgeois readers' acceptance. Although Friedrich Engels and George Orwell integrated themselves into impoverished communities, we may ask whether they became true endo-writers or prurient undercover reporters. Although memoirs of female sex workers might speak for a significant branch of the economic underclass, we can question the extent to which the demands and hazards of that trade permit its survivors to articulate their own stories. Davis ultimately asserts that only endo-writers can render true representations of the poor, that is, themselves. However, given the constant everyday need to meet the challenges of survival, writers must emerge from poverty to write about themselves. Although these “transclass” writers, as Davis calls them, are well positioned to articulate instructive realities about their pasts, they are also motivated to add to their stories creative embellishments that flatter and stabilize their achievement of transclass status. In a chapter on contemporary transclass writers, Davis includes a critical unmasking of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy as a fictional memoir contrived for political purposes. As Davis himself is a self-examined transclass endo-writer, his awareness of identity confusion in transclass writers is astute: He observes that transclass writers often have “not so much an identity as a (concealed) history that is constantly being reorganized and displaced like a crucial packet of index cards that can never be truly put in order” (83). Whether considering the hypocrisy of “poornography” or the common limitations of well-meaning characterizations of the impoverished, Davis's range of authentic criticism is impressive. His thesis leaves nothing lacking; nonetheless, I remain curious about his take on many of the iconic poor characters created by countless working-class dramatists through the ages. Were Shaw and Shakespeare endo-writers? What can be said about a Sophoclean chorus of poor citizens, unafflicted by hubris, who ask the right questions and cue audiences where to focus their emotions? Still, without addressing such questions, Poor Things provides a deep reflection and the start of a conversation that could go on forever.