PositiveJacobinLouis returns to much of the same subject matter as in his debut but adopts a more sociological approach, taking the liberty to draw conclusions on behalf of the reader. The reader’s reception of these books will depend largely on whether they find Louis’s diagnoses persuasive, and whether they trust him more as a social critic or as a novelist ... There is a real pleasure, a charm, to reading Louis’s writing — his sentences and scenes — that is entirely apart from his political convictions. And there is a reason that more people read novels and memoirs than works of sociology and politics. The danger of privileging political considerations over aesthetic considerations is that the text may lose its charm and alienate readers who do not already share the author’s politics; it may give readers the impression that they are being lectured, or worse, scolded ... The risk is that, if critics no longer accuse Louis of being a class traitor — of talking down to those who raised him — then they might accuse him of being an ideologue — of talking down to his readers, including members of all social classes. This would be a shame, as Louis is by now one of the most prominent chroniclers of working-class lives in contemporary literature ... Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that his sociological and political diagnoses can sometimes be heavy-handed, as when he condemns literature altogether — the thing which may give him the best chance of creating future political subjects.
