Connor Harrison Reviews:

Deborah Dundas, On Class, Biblioasis, 2023
Tree Abraham, Cyclettes, Book*hug Press, 2022

There is an incredible amount you simply do not know when you’re raised in the ‘lower class.’ You know of those who have more money than your parents, but you don’t quite understand the true scale of it. You are sure that the best and quickest way out of poverty is, of course, sudden fame or the lottery, but you don’t see the bait for what it is yet. You know that university education exists, is even within reach, but you have no idea where to look, whom to ask, what to read or how to begin. Often, by the time you’re old enough to understand why you’d want to attend university, you simply no longer have the time. To be raised lower class is to feel as if you are in a perpetual game of catch-up. 

It is in remedy to this that Deborah Dundas has written On Class, the seventh book in Biblioasis’s Field Notes series. The premise of Field Notes is similar to Penguin Essentials and Oxford’s Very Short Introduction line: pamphlet-sized points of entry, written by experts in their respective field. When it comes to the class system, Dundas is an expert in perhaps the only way you can be: she suffered under it. While the book is not memoir, she justifiably establishes her credentials. Recounting an experience at a cocktail party (Dundas is now a journalist and an editor at the Toronto Star), she finds herself unable to share in a conversation about back-to-school shopping. What was nostalgia for those more fortunate, ‘triggered memories of what it was like to want’ for Dundas. She recalls being shamed by her classmates for her unwashed clothes—‘because there was either no change to feed the washing machines in the basement laundry room in our apartment building or because we’d run out of detergent and couldn’t afford to buy any more.’ Later, she writes about having to move to her father’s place ‘because of abuse from my mother’s boyfriend,’ a line that enters the narrative as suddenly as abuse itself often does.

From here, Dundas takes a typically journalistic route through the culture and conversations around class in Canada. Each section of her book tends to begin with a profile of a notable figure, usually a writer or middle-class professional from a poorer background, through which Dundas approaches the broader topics of education, economy, history and mobility. ‘Role models and mentors are important,’ she writes, ‘parents might want the best for you, but they don’t always know how to get there themselves, much less show their children the way.’ This, it seems, is why she is in conversation with so many writers—to provide those reading with examples of those who broke the mould and published their stories. And Dundas is entirely correct to hammer this point home, to provide points of reference beyond parents and teachers. However, the overall effect is one of too many chefs in a very small kitchen; in a well-intentioned effort to inspire and offer variety, Dundas risks stifling her own voice. 

This also leads to another issue with On Class and its dominant voice. While Dundas draws upon the experiences of some figures who continue to work in underpaid, exhausting jobs, the majority are established writers, artists and lawyers. The intention may be to feature role models, but doing so leaves out other valuable voices from the conversation. Near the end of the book, Dundas writes, ‘Once you’ve heard and understood different perspectives from another’s point of view, it’s impossible to forget them, to ignore them. They become a part of who you are. You become part of the narrative.’ If it is impossible to forget them, then, perhaps the best choice isn’t those whose narratives can already be found in a bookstore. 

Dundas is at her best in the discussion of what you might call class emotion: the baggage that we collect while struggling to navigate the politics of class. By not opening up at the cocktail party about her own history with school, Dundas recognizes that, ‘in not sharing about myself, I lost an opportunity to begin a dialogue.’ This is the kind of silence anyone raised poor will understand, one that can easily mutate into a broader feeling of shame. Because as much as the statistics of wealth and education might be gathered and shared, there is no honest way to account for the embarrassment of class. 

On Class is primarily a book of surface connections and numbers, one that approaches its subject so completely earnestly that it leans into the naïve. This stance seems to be a product of the Covid-19 lockdown, where the book originally took shape. Dundas refers multiple times to our inspirational ‘bang[ing] on pots and pans,’ as if the pandemic were a heavy flock of birds. That being said, she succeeds exactly in what she set out to do, which is to offer an introduction to the field. The perfect place for On Class is in the hands of lower-class undergraduates. Because while for some older readers the ideas discussed will appear obvious, this is a book for new students in need of an encouraging voice and somewhere to begin. As Dundas puts it in the final pages, ‘The book is meant to start a conversation.’

While Cyclettes, the debut title from Tree Abraham, might wait until its final pages to reach the pandemic, it is a book as much informed by the years of lockdown as On Class. A memoir told through the spokes of Abraham’s love affair with bicycles, Cyclettes begins, naturally, with her learning how to ride one: ‘My earliest encounter with a bicycle that I can claim with any certainty is not a true memory, but a photo record of me found tucked with other outtakes behind posed photos in a clear pocket album.’ On the page facing this is the photograph itself, of a two-year-old Abraham riding a tricycle through the family yard. 

Both graphic designer and writer, Abraham has created a book that is closer than On Class to the original idea of the field note. There is in Cyclettes as much imagery as there is text, either created by Abraham herself or collected as part of her field research. As a result, the narrative—from her first bike ride in the early nineties to the pandemic and its emotional aftermath—can be read through in a single day. The illustrations are designed to feel casual, almost as if scrapbooked, and imbue her series of vignettes, reflections and memories with a sense of humour. 

As a writer, she is an easily identified millennial, touring through international volunteer work with an acute awareness of self. In the main, this lends itself to the philosophy of Cyclettes and its approach to memoir. It means that Abraham is both sympathetic and completely honest. ‘I was jealous of the special attention injuries garnered,’ she writes of a school friend who was rolled over by a bike. ‘I was jealous of Bertie even when she was wailing in pain and had to leave class or sit out of activities.’ Her prose is often effortlessly balanced, and leans cleanly into the poetic: ‘Geoglyphic gravel roads foreshadowed the crescents and cul-de-sacs to come, already named after the nature that was stripped to make them: Otter Tail, Mud Creek, Owls Cabin, Mountain Meadows.’

It is this self-conscious narrative voice, however, that can sometimes lead Abraham into overindulgence. The subject matter of Cyclettes is indulgent to begin with, but only in the sense any book concerned with a writer and object is (Sontag’s On Photography, for example, or Brian Dillon’s more recent Affinities). To put it another way, a reader will stay for the ride for as long as the writer keeps us in their draft, and sometimes Abraham leaves us behind. This is best illustrated by a section like ‘AN INTERVIEW WITH MY BIKE-IEST FRIEND,’ a conversation that, since we do not know the ‘friend,’ means very little to us as readers. In another example, Abraham lists her ‘parents’ oversights,’ which includes ‘how to cook’ but also how to ‘be happy…’ These references to an encroaching unhappiness, or depression, are dotted throughout Cyclettes, which of course are no doubt very real. But among the travel diaries, bicycle purchases and a ‘jaunt through the British Museum,’ Abraham never quite takes us out of the sun and into the shade.

Both On Class and Cyclettes are, by their conclusion, notes on the post-pandemic world. There are, and will continue to be, many books of this kind, as lockdowns and illness are refracted into thousands of personal accounts. It is perhaps natural then that both texts are written in a voice that feels unreserved in its open-skied optimism. ‘This book,’ writes Abraham, ‘might be about searching for people who can house enough wonder and love and home to quell a looming melancholy,’ while Dundas concludes, ‘We’re all in this together, after all.’ This, however, is because they are both books written with the best of intentions: to give expression to a need for global communion, after our bout of recent enclosure. What pleasure might be taken from this depends entirely on the damages that enclosure dealt you.

—Connor Harrison