Jonathan Larson, “Rent” (1996)Footnote 1
Coming to terms with recent facts about American poverty, racism, and inequality can be, to put it mildly, an alarming business. And yet, thinking about how we read about such subjects – how these dismal statistics are transformed into nonfiction narratives we visualize, or the stories we tell ourselves – can often be just as unsettling. Take, for instance, the impact of the multimedia, Big Data-driven, interactive displays now possible in digitally enhanced online journalism, such as the 2018 New York Times feature story headlined as “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys.” Presenting the analysis of economist Raj Chetty and two researchers who vetted demographic data for “virtually all Americans now in their late 30s,” Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter, the Times reported that white boys raised in wealthy families “will stay rich or upper-middle-class as adults, but black boys raised in similarly rich households will not.” But what made the Times story especially disturbing was not the finding, but its mode of presentation. In the mobile digital graphic the paper provided, colored dots representing black and white male children were loaded into the left margin at the head of the Times page. Then, with a click, they were set in motion laterally, left to right, taking on the form of a cascading waterfall, or perhaps a socially malevolent pachinko machine, in which the African American dots proceeded, disproportionately, to tumble away from their original tier of upper-class security: down, down, down, spilling into lower strata of power, privilege, and opportunity.Footnote 2 The pathos of this cascade was reminiscent of the gloomy analogy of Edward Bellamy, whose narrator for Looking Backward (1888) famously compared his elite social position to precariously riding in “a prodigious coach” from which one could fall to the ground before becoming one of the masses pulling the carriage itself.Footnote 3 But really, what did such an antecedent have to offer in the face of the stories emerging from this recent turn to massive data-gathering? Is anything changing, of late, in how American analysts “plot” the poor?
That question has been raised especially by one of the more eye-opening pieces of social analysis of recent years, Matthew Desmond's award-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016).Footnote 4 A product of a nearly two-year ethnographic immersion by its author, Evicted is a massively researched study in which an ensemble cast of nearly a dozen individuals and/or families, white, nonwhite, and mixed, are tracked as they navigate the segregated streets and private housing market of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And the ultimate conclusion the book draws is, like that of Chetty et al., quite dispiriting. The modern ghetto is not, Desmond tells us, an inevitable by-product of urban modernization, as some of the dominant sociological traditions in the US have had it. Nor is it an accidental result of benign neglect that “no one benefited from nor intended.” Rather, Desmond writes, it is an expression of “landed capital, a prime moneymaker for those who saw ripe opportunity in land scarcity, housing dilapidation, and racial segregation” (249). In short, one reason the American ghetto persists is because poverty is profitable.
Urban-studies scholars, social-justice advocates, and many others will continue to have much to say about Desmond's book, including his call for a system of universal housing vouchers. And yet my own thoughts about Evicted have been not only about its data or its reform proposals but also about the design and flows – indeed, the interdisciplinary flows – of its storytelling. Simply put, I have been interested in how Evicted is written – especially in Desmond's “plotting,” a term we use both for spatial placement, as in neighborhoods or cities, and for a narrative's intentional designs. Or, as Peter Brooks has it, for a story's “structuring operation”: the byplay of premises, settings, and players that are driven by dynamic forces towards social outcomes and, in time, meaning.Footnote 5 These aspects of Desmond's book have invited surprisingly little commentary, to date. On the one hand, Evicted is obviously an example of scholarly nonfiction achieving an enviable “trade book” status; narrative journalists like Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, have been more than ready to claim Desmond as one of her tribe.Footnote 6 And yet when reviewers have paused to consider the narrative design or style of Evicted at all, they have tended to fall back on empiricist assumptions that sideline close attention to what is supposedly being praised.Footnote 7 That is, even when Desmond has been lauded for his “spellbinding” or “unflinching” realism, or for choosing supposedly “self-effacing narration,” the implication is that Evicted succeeded mainly because it allowed its startling facts to speak for themselves. In short, the best thing a book's style could do, other than to “dramatize” its findings, was to get out of their way.
This way of reading reportage – putting the cart of content before the horse of form – is hardly unusual, these days. Empiricist norms continue to shape the default setting of critical tastes regarding general nonfiction, academic or journalistic.Footnote 8 But by privileging stylistic transparency and mimetic realism, those norms tend to neglect how the tactics of representation can reflect and shape a writer's social and political interpretations. Take, for instance, Desmond's seemingly minor choice of a lone past participle for his book's title. Simply put, his book was not called “The Evicted”; it did not follow the famous convention of American exposé that uses a definite article to posit a social entity we call “the poor” – as in, say, titles like Michael Harrington's The Other America (1963), William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), or Michael Katz's The Undeserving Poor (1989).Footnote 9 Instead, Desmond's title emphasizes how his individuals and their families, like the young men tracked by the digital graphic in the Times, are defined more by what is imposed on them: indeed, not even by the cost or availability of housing as such, but by forces of expulsion or removal coming from many quarters. Such a twist in Desmond's title is therefore a clue to the ways in which he refashions some of the central storytelling conventions that have persisted in US-based representations of poverty for some time now.Footnote 10 In fact his book might be grouped with a number of recent nonfiction texts that aim to show, paradoxically but powerfully, how contemporary powers work to create disorder rather than familiar social ordination.Footnote 11 In his case, Desmond displays how urban, private housing markets disorganize, delegitimize and make disposable the lives of impoverished American citizens. But he also tries to replicate these forces in the form of his narrative. Insisting that received theories of city life overlook “the crucial fact that urban neighborhoods are markets,” he adds this stylistic corollary: “market actors … should be seen as central players in our theories of neighborhood selection and mobility” (357 n. 9, original emphasis). In other words, Desmond wants us to rethink the stagecraft of storytelling itself, especially which “actors” or “players” we feature in the foreground.
In this essay, I want to begin by touching upon some cross-disciplinary antecedents to Desmond's project: in the writings of journalist and reformer Jacob Riis and, a figure so important to Riis himself, Charles Dickens; in the realist and naturalist traditions of American fiction and the sociological tradition of the “community study”; and in a specific strand of political theory that connects property and disenfranchisement, especially the thinking of Hannah Arendt. But primarily I will be tracking through Evicted's three main sections – or “acts,” to extend Desmond's conceit above – to which he appends the compressed subtitles of “Rent,” “Out,” and “After.” Analyzing these three acts in order, I will be discussing, respectively, his departures from conventions of setting and point of view; in plot complication, the bringing together of individuals in concert and conflict; and finally in closure, how he describes aftereffects or consequences of the whole. Again, these are not merely formalist considerations: on the contrary, they are connected to dimensions of Desmond's social and political analysis that are easily overlooked – in particular, his thinking about the relationship between market culture, state power, and the political will of impoverished Americans. In closing, I will offer some thoughts on how certain confluences between Desmond's data-gathering and his storytelling, in the end, even go to what we mean by “the” poor in the first place.
I
One way to understand how Desmond reconfigures the connections in the liberal reform tradition between property, social ties, and citizenship would be to look at an anecdote from Jacob Riis's autobiography, The Making of an American (1901). Remembering his early years as a Danish immigrant recently arrived in New York City, Riis recounted how, out of work and without a roof over his head, he had been forced to wander the streets begging for sustenance. Along the way, he had also picked up a companion, a small dog that he had affectionately named Bob, he tells us, who “could always coax a supper out of the servant at the basement gate” by doing jumps and tricks “while I pleaded vainly and hungrily with the Mistress of the front door.” Riis had also taken to peddling copies of Dickens's novel Hard Times (1853), obviously hoping that others would sense the implicit parallels to his own plight in the novel's title. Yet Riis also tells us that none of this seemed to work: “we did the best we could,” he writes, but he and Bob soon faced starvation and hopelessness: “nothing had gone right; nothing would ever go right; and worse, I did not care … My life was wasted, utterly wasted.” Yet then, miraculously, the two were saved. A man who had previously mentored Riis in a business academy now offered him a job as a reporter and Bob a happy home. Looking back decades later, Riis wanted to underscore the larger forces he saw at work in this patron's gesture: “I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck … And I knew it for [God's] hand.”Footnote 12
One might say many things about this memory – for example, its appeals to sentimentality, or its likeness to providential plots.Footnote 13 But perhaps the place where Riis's ideas most came together was in how he modeled his rendering of poverty on the author whose novel he was selling, Charles Dickens. In this memory, as Dickens had in Hard Times, Riis presented homelessness as both a material and a spiritual crisis: exploitation, the word Desmond says has sadly been “scrubbed” (305) from American discourses on poverty, generates despair and futility, even a desire for social revolt. Conversely, the patron's charity in Riis's tale models Christian understanding of human need; even little Bob, a recognizable descendant of Hard Times's canine hero Merrylegs, provides a symbol of instinctual, unconditional love. By making the hand of God visible, Riis's episode also underscored a chain of benevolence that he featured even in his own memoir's title. The episode was an illustration of how, Riis felt, newcomers can not just be made financially stable, but be forged into American citizens, in part by learning to pay forward what others have bestowed on them. For Riis, that benevolence was most evidenced by the humane provision of decent shelter.
Given that Desmond tells us, eventually, how a bank had foreclosed on his childhood home (316), we should not be surprised that Evicted provides some echoes of Riis's episode. Or, as I will also show, that Desmond proffers some more fatalistic inversions of Riis's hopeful prospects about American renewal. For what Desmond did do, of course, was follow instead the more panoramic template of How the Other Half Lives (1889). Much like the book we often forget was subtitled Studies in the Tenements of New York, Evicted follows a quite dispersed and individualized cast in a single city: the mother Desmond calls Arleen Belle, forced to appear at Housing Court because she has used her rent money to pay for her sister's funeral; Lamar Richards, a Navy veteran and double-amputee who has lost his legs to the cold while homeless, barely supporting a group of family members and local boys by grabbing fix-it jobs, sometimes from his own landlords; a young man named Scott, a nurse who lost his license because of an opioid addiction, doubling up in a trailer park with an older man named Teddy also facing eviction; a mixed-race couple named Pam and Ned, both crack addicts, she with two children from a previous relationship, now suckered into a bad rental deal.Footnote 14 Crossing over from subplot to subplot even in individual chapters, Desmond intersperses the often dismal fates of his seemingly idiosyncratic individuals with deadpan renderings of alarming data: that, in that trailer park, its owner named Tobin Charney makes some 260 police calls in a single year (36); that in a city of something over 100,000 households in rental units, there are a whopping 16,000 evictions every year (4). In Desmond's interweaving subplots, full of homeless shelters, crimes gone bad, children inured to violence and despair, eviction comes to seem a way of life.
At first glance, therefore, Evicted seems to be funneling a passion akin to Riis's into what is sometimes called the “ethnographic realism” of the so-called community study.Footnote 15 In a tradition that extends through recent texts like Amy Goldstein's Janesville: An American Story (2019), to Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1929), and well back into the nineteenth century, Evicted treats its Milwaukee setting largely as a bounded space, akin to an island or confined experiment; the story of eviction, reciprocally, provides a stern critique of the city's moral and civic failure by centering our eyes primarily on the poor. Even though Desmond certainly departs from the holistic cultural bias of this tradition by more emphatically addressing class and racial differences, he devotes relatively little narrative space to what we might call the not-other America. With the exception of an excursion into a professional landlords’ association meeting, his Milwaukee is not a place of banks or corporate receptions or museums, or peopled by commuters from adjacent suburbs. Nor do we spend evenings in baseball or basketball arenas or tourist sites. Rather, we follow the paths of the urban poor, wrapped up in the rental, criminal-justice, and welfare systems explained in sweeping collective statistical profiles.Footnote 16 Desmond's narrative voice thereby follows the familiar pattern in realist portraiture: set scenes framed by moments of narrative step-backs that present an argument or broader data. This byplay, in particular, would seem to have opened the book to wider audiences. As recent proponents of literary nonfiction have often claimed, such a technique allows Desmond's main cast to seem more rounded and fleshed out, more “realistic” and yet also sociologically representative.Footnote 17
At times, then, Desmond's work can also seem quite novelistic in the ways it allows its cast more range, difference, and individuation than many a sociological study. Creating a reality effect akin to many a novel in the British and American canon, Desmond uses third-person narration, largely leaving any discussion of his own past to his methodological Afterword and endnotes. As Desmond puts it with blunt self-consciousness about the fictive nature of any narrative persona: “‘I’ don't matter” (335). Again, this last decision about point of view struck some reviewers as fundamental to the way that Evicted seemed to allow his informants to rule his own stories, as if they were speaking for themselves.Footnote 18 His narrative likewise favors not the static or frozen time of cultural diorama, but real-time, chronological movement – and, or so it would seem, accounts of his tenants’ moral and psychological development. And like realist and naturalist fiction, Desmond's plots also occasionally cut across generational time to invoke historical backdrops.
Meanwhile, Evicted's array of stories expresses – as did that episode in The Making of an American – debts to thinkers who have emphasized the role of power relations and property holding in shaping citizenship. Desmond's subtitle, for example – Poverty and Property in the American City – turns upon nineteenth-century antecedents such as Henry George and Henry Demarest Lloyd, while his emphasis on re-creating the “intricate, almost unconscious” (70) interactions of city dwellers looks to urbanists such as Jane Jacobs. All of these debts – which connect housing expulsion to the breakdown of social cohesion and to political marginalization – come together in his acknowledgment of Hannah Arendt's writings on stateless persons (349 n. 2).Footnote 19 For example, while Goldstein's Janesville – an account of another Wisconsin city, this one facing recession and the abandonment of General Motors – more conventionally puts labor and job loss in the driver's seat, Desmond plots housing as his primary determinant of stable citizenship. Or, to put this another way, Evicted casts rent not simply in terms of the US's monetary, quantitative measurements of a supposed poverty line, but as itself a relation, like the labor relation in that tenancy signals a condition contingent upon the will and power of other persons and classes.Footnote 20 Along with a telling departure from seeing “the poor” empirically – as “thing(s) in themselves” – this difference also has significant implications for Desmond's unconventional treatment of setting and point of view.
These two fundamental elements of narrative structure, of course, are interconnected. Whether or not readers are academics or part of a general reading public, for example, they are commonly accustomed to the realist mode that uses setting as a logical “premise” of sorts, both a location that can serve as a starting place and a shaping force for the story that follows. In realist novels with a middle- or upper-class focus, houses in particular have famously provided windows on intimate emotional experiences and moral crises that pivot the plot.Footnote 21 In the naturalist mode of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, or Tillie Olsen, place is famously an even more forceful determinant of characters’ fates, especially for the impoverished. Moving in and between cities in Sister Carrie (1900) or Native Son (1940) or Yonnondio (1972) portends dramatic changes in protagonists’ lives, as if cities or neighborhoods are organisms imposing their will.Footnote 22
However, as I've said, place and shelter in Desmond's eyes are much more the things from which Evicted's individuals are expelled. In his first act, Desmond embodies that expulsion in his rather unorthodox choice of landlords as leading players, specifically an African American couple he calls Sherrena and Quentin Tarver. Sherrena, especially, serves as Evicted's main vehicle for our own education in landlording. From the start, she is a storytelling table-setter, a personal force behind this story's “setting” and “development” in the literal (economic) and literary (plot-driven) senses of those words. Meanwhile, however, Sherrena is also repeatedly antagonizing, a “player” in the sense of a boasting self-promoter, bargainer, and complainer, full of rationalizations that our narrator records with less an effaced presence than one that looks on with a numbed and dismal deadpan that has long been liberal exposé's stock-in-trade.Footnote 23 Desmond uses his Prologue to introduce us to perhaps his most powerfully presented tenant, Arleen Belle; then, however, we turn around and find ourselves aligned with Sherrena's perspective. Like many a tour guide to the Victorian-era “underworld,” Desmond takes us right into accompanying Sherrena on her rounds while she plays good and bad cop to her impoverished tenants. In her ratty Chevy Suburban, she is a modern slumlord, scaled down, mobile, and active, driving us to see her work.
As I've said, plotting decisions like this one are not merely window dressing: Desmond's opening reversal signals how his structuring operation will track social fragmentation and dislocation to its causes. Indeed, if Desmond has a signature stylistic move, it is a fondness for the above: what one might call rhetorical wraparounds in point of view. That is, like the screen wraparounds that allow computer users to continue typing seamlessly from the right margin back to the left without hitting “return,” Desmond's plots often deploy instances of dramatic reversal that take what we assume to be a cause (like losing a job) and an effect (like being evicted), and reversing their presumed relationship (227). Moreover, these reversals stem from how, in his data analysis, Desmond underscores what is the real “actuator” of a given social condition, no matter how incidental it might seem at first.Footnote 24 Plot reversals pivot particularly on property: its maintenance, powers, and fragility. For instance, we see the tenant named Scott finding temporary employment by clearing out apartments from which residents have been removed. While he is out on the job, however, his own trailer is cleared out, setting the stage for his own eviction. Just because Scott is working for a landlord doesn't mean he won't himself be, well, landlorded.
Thus when Desmond writes that “with [a landlord's] job, you saw things” (120), we feel as if we are actually seeing both the front and back ends of Sherrena's labor. Usually what we “see” via such wraparounds is insidious. For example, we see that asking a landlord to fix something in your apartment can typically lead to your being evicted, or that the worst properties often give landlords their biggest financial returns. Having children might invite sympathy in a traditional work of inner-city reportage, but in real life, Desmond tells us, it only makes you more vulnerable to eviction (287). Thanks to rules about how fair market value is determined, the voucher system originally designed to assist renters currently allows landlords to charge more impoverished tenants higher rents than they do others (148). Sherrena, always the opportunist, helps renters secure loans, but only so she can take their cash and reinvest it into more properties, while leaving her tenants saddled with impossible debts. Often expressing sympathy for the psychological stresses on her tenants, she actually markets a few of her schemes to the mentally disabled (157).
And so the seemingly disorderly plots of Evicted also insinuate some rather fundamental political rethinking of the settings we might casually call “neighborhoods.” As evicted tenants are flung out across Milwaukee, they soon face dozens of difficult decisions – different “yes/no” choices, Desmond suggests in an analogy to binary codes (89) – that work to randomize the paths of the plots we follow. At times a life path taken by any given individual in his canvas can seem to have a virtually arbitrary set of results. Yet this does more than suffuse his stories with a mood of transience. Rather it is that location itself becomes more the consequence of all that motion, a house less an actuating “place” than a placeholder. Here is how Desmond describes a training program for landlords that emphasizes the importance of screening rental applicants:
The small act of screening could have big consequences. From thousands of yes/no decisions emerged a geography of advantage and disadvantage that characterized the modern American city: good schools and failing ones, safe streets and dangerous ones. Landlords were major players in distributing the spoils … [because] violence, drug activity, deep poverty and other social problems coalesced at a much smaller, more acute level than the neighborhood. They gathered at the same address. (89)
Therefore, when Desmond writes that there's “a business model at the bottom of every market” (90), what he means, in part, is that the landlords’ “screening” creates an outcome like the end point of that New York Times mobile graphic: a bin where microdots of disorder simply gather or accumulate even though they arrived there through different paths. “Emerged a geography” links a past participle to spatial design, and the active force of placement generates a relatively passive result – a common address.
To be sure, Desmond's point here makes the well-worn metaphor of “poverty pockets” seem quite literal. But again, in the lines above, setting is reconceptualized as a consequence more of multivariate structural displacement than of historical affiliation or meaningful, much less free, choice by his informants. As in Jacobs, the paradox of “stable” neighborhoods is that they are predicated on the fluidity of their informal, “close-grained” interactions.Footnote 25 And while we might think of place as a “base” in a “base-and-superstructure” model of social order, Desmond's leading actors or players are given more power, place itself somewhat less. Reminding us that he takes an approach that “pays attention to the people doing the sorting[,] the landlords” (356 n. 9), Desmond thereby aims to avoid what he calls the “sentimental” constructions of Chicago school-style sociology that, he says, created the notion of “urban ecology” in which the neighborhood “becomes for all purposes sentient” in drawing citizens to it (356 n. 9). Though in literary terms we might say that Desmond wants to avoid treating place like a character, primarily he wants to deflect the presumption that the character of residents is simply determined by their neighborhood. Indeed, in Desmond's variation on the “community study” it is the absence of “community” that is striking.Footnote 26
Moreover, all this churning has profound effects on how Desmond's tenants relate to their setting. In well-known journalistic works on the impoverished, it is not uncommon to find “pockets” of poverty treated as places of abandonment, of deprivation or emptiness (food deserts, insufficient social services, and much more). All too often, since place is defined by opportunities that affluent Americans supposedly hold, poor places are defined by what they lack.Footnote 27 But in Evicted, it is more the accretion of yes/no decisions by “players” that generates both the often hectic pace of subplots, and the stresses that Desmond's individuals and families face. Instead of merely emptying out a life's resources, therefore, “Poverty could pile on: living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another” (285–86). As we ourselves follow the “gnarled” narrative structure that Desmond creates, we indeed see many evicted renters tumbling “into more depressed and dangerous areas of the city.” Yet the key point is that they are often “circling back to the ghetto but not fully committing to it” (252, emphasis mine). In other words, in Desmond's first act, there's a kind of emotional displacement going on. Indeed, throughout his book, Desmond is unsettlingly skilled at using rhetorical postulations that counterbalance the collapse of setting with the evicted spirits of his informants: for example, “The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house” (256).
But of course the second part of such an equation also bears closer examination, since it takes us back to persons, not just places – that is, back to the impoverished people with whom, in so many different story traditions, readers are customarily asked to align their hearts.
II
How Desmond's individuals do or don't connect to each other in the thickets of Milwaukee dominates the second act of Evicted, entitled “Out.” Simply put, in the phase of narrative classically termed complication, Desmond now turns to weaving his subplots into the broader social fabric of the city. Like “Rent” before it, the section title “Out” once again invites rhetorical play that argues about social and political eviction. First of all, “out” is a word for narrative and spatial movement: the book's cast fans out, often searching not just for new rentals but for help. Their movement takes us out into private and government agencies, into the criminal-justice system, and even into the help that – thinking back to the dominant chord of The Making of an American – the evicted may find from another citizen in order to remain one. However, Desmond also invests “Out” with an association of revelation. “Eviction,” he writes with seeming awe of its uncanny plotting power, “had a way of quickening ties, testing relationships, and revealing commitments, thereby drawing to the surface what was often submerged below the level of observation” (368 n. 4). In short, eviction “outs” lesser-known players in the market, and uncovers social and political practices often left unseen.
Much of what we gather from both acts about this periphery world reinforces Desmond's theme about the corrosive, disruptive social effects of eviction. Rather than creating an emptied-out landscape, for example, evictions provide new markets for profit and exploitation. We learn how evictions feed the parasitic practices of payday lenders (90), self-storage brokers (28), and entrepreneurs who offer to manage the finances of SSI beneficiaries (62). In perhaps the most startling example, we learn about landlords’ hiring of cheap labor to repair vacated rental units and thereby churn their profits. What is outed in this case is an underground economy: landlords can easily hustle up a crew who will work for subpar wages, typically off the books (140). “[T]he biggest drug kingpin in the city,” Desmond writes, “would have been envious of the massive cash-paid labor force urban landlords had at their disposal” (141). They hire addicts and alcoholics, recovering and not. Desmond picks up the slang that calls these hires “hypes,” while Sherrena calls them “jack-leg crackheads” (141). Quentin greets one temporary worker with a gang handshake (141). Maintaining “grounds” outs an underground.
Even more importantly, however, eviction also pinwheels into a secondary “market” that we don't commonly recognize as one: that of police power. When called in to resolve a landlord–tenant dispute, that is, the police will quite often pass its resolution back to the landlord him- or herself, who in turn reciprocally uses the police's “finding” to support a subsequent court-sanctioned eviction. The police therefore allow landlords to act as if they are solid, law-abiding citizens in evicting, alas, the unruly from “the neighborhood.” In a telling link back to Arendt and statelessness, here a right to police protection is wrapped around into a reinforcement of landlord power. As Desmond notes, this is tantamount to leaving policing responsibilities to “citizens without a badge and a gun” (190).Footnote 28 Various dismal results of this turnabout ensue: one, Desmond tells us, is that victims of domestic abuse are less likely to contact the police in the first place. They either “keep quiet and face abuse or call the police and face eviction” (192). Often deadly blowback results from an impossible yes/no decision: calling the police can contribute to the evicteds’ de facto statelessness, since the state essentially abandons its protective role.
The cumulative political effect of such abandonment is especially visible in the chapter titled “Disposable Ties,” another poetic phrase that refers to the loss of collective action that would otherwise have provided resistance to landlords. Having been turned “out” by eviction, made virtually disposable, people are naturally forced to turn to kin or friends or acquaintances to get back on their feet. Their lives, as we say about interpersonal acts and narrative ones, become complicated. But in tandem with Desmond's disruption of setting comes the evisceration of such potential for sharing burdens. For instance, the figure named Crystal Mayberry, forced into homelessness, lives for a time with her grandmother, then with a woman she meets at church, and then with a cousin (161). Epitomizing Desmond's theme that the neighborhood is no longer a force of social cohesion, Crystal also looks for help even when she's nowhere in particular – for instance, she works out an arrangement with a woman she meets on a bus. Desmond's plots are always in motion, as individuals are forced to improvise new decisions with others who are displaced. “Especially in the inner city,” Desmond writes, “strangers brushed up against one another constantly … and found ways to ask for and offer help” (161). In other words, accidental movement is even likened to Brownian motion, to the seemingly accidental and unconscious interactions that Jacobs also underscored.
In narratives comic or tragic, we come to expect such complication or “rising tension” to be connected to characters’ personal and moral trials. And to be sure, Desmond is careful to highlight moments of individual decency and mutual aid akin to what Riis alluded to in his autobiographical parable. We see moments of simple kindness: Scott recovering in rehab with the help of a former (and formerly homeless) patient (85), two dispossessed women buying a meal for a ragged homeless boy they see begging in a McDonald's (254), two tenants who hop on a bus down to Louisiana, volunteering to help victims of Katrina (67–68). But undermining these individual gestures, Desmond's plotting tells us, are the corrosive effects of eviction that make mutual aid far less plausible. (By helping others in New Orleans, those volunteers fall a month behind in rent.) Echoing Desmond's line about failing houses and the people who fail them, families feel helpless to help each other. Mutual aid often doesn't end well, since one is only reaching out to others themselves on the outs. Indeed, Desmond's section title “Out” may even recall the rhetorical slide that general readers often made between US sociologist David Riesman's “other-directed” social orientation and what those readers sometimes said was also “outer”-directedness.Footnote 29 Moving “out,” or being moved out, corrodes one's relations with others.
Of course, in his reflective step-backs, Desmond also points to familiar macro considerations tearing at the social fabric: the crack and incarceration crises, the flight of the middle class, and so on. But his plotting emphasizes more how the everyday trials we've been watching also wrap around individuals’ psyches, carrying over and back to the evaluations they make of each other. When Scott returns to find his own rental emptied out while he is out helping with evictions, for instance, we learn that it has been the other trailer park residents who have plundered his possessions (92). And Desmond is quite explicit about what he sees, in the mind of Scott, in episodes like this. Though the impoverished recognize the inequalities around them, they quite commonly blame – well – the poor. Scott, Desmond writes pointedly, “had come to view sympathy [for others] as a kind of naïveté, a sentiment voiced from a certain distance by the callow middle classes” (179). Scott sees that naïveté as a kind of privilege that inexplicably releases responsibility from the individual. The trailer park is obviously the antithesis of a neighborhood. In fact the other trailer park residents rarely complain about another neighbor's eviction. Instead, we are told that they feel that “[e]victions were deserved, understood to be the outcome of individual failure … No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves” (179–80). In the past, landlord power might have been met by collective action such as rent strikes (180). But now, although Desmond's citizens perceive the common suffering around them, they turn out to have a “high tolerance for inequality” (182).
It is hard not to read such scenes without thinking back to the sentimental vision in Riis's autobiographical parable about how citizenship is renewed by a cycle of benevolence; Desmond is clearly undoing that vision. And yet perhaps the crucial thing is how starkly this cycle is being replotted. Over time, that is, Evicted's narrative complications hardly conform to the classic paradigm, from Aristotle to Freytag, that charts the familiar drama of rising complication leading to a singular crossroads or crisis, as in Riis's story – much less stories about rising up, or about finding a helping patron. Rather, Desmond's central figures are piled down upon, worn out, their mutual ties eliciting only mutual distrust. This result surfaces when Desmond refers to something he sees in Crystal's life: a “weary, looping rhythm,” Desmond writes: “make a friend, use a friend, lose a friend” (268). What we have here are the cascading consequences of bad options and repeated crises, often leading the cast of Evicted downward, not fully committing to the world, or we should say the addresses, to which they have been relegated. Even when this second act closes with a deadly fire at one such address, for instance, Desmond does not view it as a morally regenerative event. Rather, in the looping rhythm of his narrative algorithm, it generates, as we shall see, a mood of mourning.
III
This entropic, wearying motion of Desmond's narrative design finds its way to the third and final act in Evicted, called “After,” a section which tracks a variety of individuals and families: Ned and Pam with their multiracial family, who end up on Milwaukee's largely black North Side; Scott, who makes his way into rehabilitation and a margin of hope; another figure named Vanetta Evans, who participates in a robbery and is sent off to prison; and several others. As in many a dramatic narrative's final denouement, Evicted's finale is also largely about the aftereffects of its first two acts. Furthermore, the keyword “After” brings Desmond's storytelling closer than ever to the sociopolitical antecedents I have discussed. First, “After” refers to the realms of comfort, pleasure, and safety that poor citizens go to after their long days – as in “happily ever after”; second, and relatedly, “After” refers to the sense of futurity embodied in their children. In raising these two matters, Desmond broaches some of the most difficult aspects in the representation of poverty; once again, his stories emphasize disruption and undoing.
Not uncommonly, when readers arrive at the end of a story, they will intuit a relationship that narrative analysts have long dissected: that closure is commonly set in motion by disclosure, by a reprise of earlier elements and the revelation of their long-term consequences.Footnote 30 For example, the fire described above that guts the temporary home of the family living upstairs from Lamar Richards, taking the life of an eight-month-old baby girl (201), is a reprise in the sense that it both returns Sherrena and Quentin back to the scene and shows a result of their exploitation. In many literary traditions, a house fire itself creates the opportunity for such a reprise because it carries multivalent domestic associations. In Hard Times, for example, fire is a sign of home and hearth, warmth and shelter, love and care; a medium of introspection, attracting a child's wonder and worry about the future; a sign of passion; and more. One of the central children in Dickens's story, Louisa Gradgrind, is herself called “a fire with nothing to burn.”Footnote 31 But fire also has the capacity to eviscerate a family's hopes and foment despair. In Riis's tenement landscapes, fire held a similar mixed potential for disclosure: keeping families warm and workers at their labors, but making owners and landlords rich with unjustified insurance payouts when it burst out and, in particular, threatened children:
I cannot think without a shudder of one such scene in a First Avenue tenement. It was in the middle of the night. The fire had swept up with sudden fury from a restaurant on the street floor, cutting off escape. Men and women threw themselves from the windows, or were carried down senseless by the firemen. Thirteen half-clad, apparently lifeless bodies were laid on the floor of an adjoining coal-office, and the ambulance surgeons worked over them with sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A half-grown girl with a baby in her arms walked about among the dead and dying with a stunned, vacant look, singing in a low, scared voice to the child. One of the doctors took her arm to lead her out, and patted the cheek of the baby soothingly. It was cold. The baby had been smothered with its father and mother; but the girl, her sister, did not know it. Her reason had fled.Footnote 32
Here fire is, one might say, the quintessence of Riis's view of poverty: it dis-spirits, makes reason and hope flee. In a line Desmond himself quotes from Riis, poverty has a way of making a seeming “day of reckoning” into but another “hardship to a life measured from the cradle” (115). A single day cascades into a life span.
Evicted's fire takes place in one of Quentin and Sherrena's holdings, and they rush to this dilapidated property, pointedly, straight from a night of pleasure at a casino (199):
[They] watched firefighters’ silhouettes dash around what had been Kamala's apartment, now a gutted, char-coated shell. What was not burning was slicked in ice from frozen hose water.
Quentin headed toward the house. Sherrena stayed put. The fire reminded her of a time a disgruntled mortgage customer tossed a homemade bomb through her office window. Since then, the sight of fire disturbed and reduced her …
Patrice, who had seen a firefighter carry something to the ambulance under a white sheet, looked to Kamala. She was writhing on the floor, screaming, “My baby! My baby!” Her hair had been burnt off on one side.
… [She] had lost [another] baby just a year earlier, a daughter who was stillborn. Kamala and Devon wore her ashes around their necks in matching lockets. (200–1)
The silhouetting and eviscerating throughout this scene is especially apt: what was hollowed-out housing to begin with was a home already ashen with suffering, already in the crossfire of war-like conflict. (The chapter is titled “Ashes on Snow.”) Fittingly, the torched building is soon bulldozed into the ground, per order of Sherrena, and thus joining other ties disposed of, turned to wreckage. But Sherrena uses the insurance payout to purchase two new duplexes (255). Fire thus reprises and discloses the forces of exploitation that were already present in Desmond's storyline. But what happens after, to the impoverished themselves, to the hopes or dreams or despair they convey to their children? For that, we should turn to the two most striking episodes in “After.”
At first, the two might seem plotted very differently: one is about spending, the other about parenting. The first concerns one Larraine Jenkins, following a horrendous day in which she tries to restore her ability to use food stamps. Given a list of all the necessary paperwork, she realizes that most of it has been in storage (216). Leaving a welfare office, she passes by a furniture store and, despite her utter lack of resources, nearly buys herself a sixty-two-inch television, finally putting it on layaway. Desmond writes of this aftermath: “Larraine was participating in a kind of cleansing ritual, swapping the welfare building's miasma of unwashed bodies and dirt with the smell of a new leather sofa … To Larraine, putting something on layaway was saving” (217). In this narrative sequence, the aftereffect reprises and reveals the futility of her original quest: even when her food stamps do finally kick in, she consumes her entire monthly allowance on a single purchase of lobster tails, shrimp, king crab legs, salad and lemon meringue pie, washing it all down with Pepsi (218). The contrasting second episode also pivots on lessons undoing what is sought, and it happens in a chapter called “Little,” so titled after the name of a cat that Arleen's family has been housing, in part to keep the children happy and distracted from their dire poverty. Sadly, they lost track of Little when they were evicted from one of their rentals. However, on the day they return to their old address, situated on the bad-luck numbered 13th Street, they find him pawing away at the door in the snow, as Riis's pet “Bob” might have. But as the boys pick the cat up and begin cuddling him, Arleen grabs her son Jori's arm and causes the pet to fall to the ground. In practical terms, Arleen's choice here is built around the simple calculation that many landlords won't allow pets. But here, of course, Desmond draws upon the name “Little” to refer to the way in which Arleen scales down her emotional life, and in turn that of her boys, even as Desmond himself laments that she is probably also marking those children deeply. By saying “No, I won't. I cannot help you,” he writes, she was implicitly saying they were “unworthy of help” (241). Later, when Little is accidently killed in the street, Jori expresses his sadness and anger by repeatedly punching the head of an abandoned mannequin (288). The reprise of Arleen's mothering, by grabbing the mannequin, also registers their spiritual eviction.
As Desmond's endnotes make clear, he fully expected that some of his readers would zero in on these two episodes, precisely because they could be mistaken for rehashing the thesis of the “culture of poverty” he meant to dispute (377–78 n. 4). And predictably, some reviewers indeed used such scenes to argue, in the familiar refrain, that the impoverished supposedly carry pathologies with them wherever they go or however their housing is paid for.Footnote 33 But as I have been suggesting, such reactions misconstrued the more subtle synergies between Desmond's plots and his analysis of eviction's aftereffects. What is remarkable in both cases is how Desmond counterbalances his respect for his informants’ choices – even when he thinks they are bad ones – by folding in their own estimate of what lies ahead of them. Or, we might say, of what comes not so happily after. “People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations,” he writes, “that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty … So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season their suffering with pleasure” (219). “It wasn't like she had just stumbled into a pit and would soon climb out,” Desmond writes, perhaps in reference to older, Victorian notions of poverty as an abyss.Footnote 34 No, “Larraine imagined she would be poor and rent-strapped forever. And if that was to be her lot in life, she might as well have a little jewelry to show for it” (218). In other words, she acted the way she did because of how she herself saw her future. Likewise, Desmond writes, despite its costs, Arleen “was teaching her sons to love small, to reject what they could not have. Arleen was protecting them, and herself” (240).
And yet, consistent with Desmond's wraparounds, the contrast of these two resolutions also bears noticing. In plotting Evicted, Desmond sets out to show that the poor's spirits are anything but uniformly determined, as in the traditional Marxian sense of iron laws, nor fully free, resolute, and ever-forward, as in populist imaginations such as John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), or John Ford's film adaptation (1940). On the contrary: the two aftereffect plots Desmond constructs above are, in a logical sense, utterly contrary to each other: whereas Larraine adds color to her misery, Arleen withdraws it from her son's life. Thus just as Desmond's narrative refrains from using these citizens as stick-figure “representatives” of mechanical social forces, his plotting avoids “closure” in Fredric Jameson's sense of an ideological “sealing” off of hard or inconvenient facts.Footnote 35 Instead, Desmond isolates the impulsive, pragmatic, angry, despairing decisions different individuals can make in responding to the sheer brutality and randomness of a market calculus playing itself out both in their setting, their homes – and yes, inside them. The market outs what is good and bad and human in them: as “characters” these citizens vivify, put flesh and bones on, make loose and vague talk about, the sorting system that has made them disposable. And, at times, made them fight not to feel that way, after.
IV
Thinking about the relationship between Evicted's complex plotting and its political subtexts about citizenship might well bring to mind one final literary antecedent, one of the best-known American short stories about social banishment: Stephen Crane's “The Blue Hotel” (1898). Crane's story concerns an unnamed stranger who arrives in a Midwestern town looking for lodging. After being shepherded into a local boardinghouse by its proprietor, the outsider becomes embroiled in a number of confrontations with the town's citizens – an argument over a card game, a vicious fight in a snow-covered alley, a showdown in a bar – all of which lead these citizens to turn upon the stranger and put in motion events that lead to his death. Along with the cascading structure of its plot, the story is famous for the stylistic innovations that Crane introduced into the landscapes of American social realism. His radical shifts in point of view, in particular, take us from zoomed-in shots of poker cards splattered on a hotel floor to a stark perspective from outer space, looking down at the minuscule figures that populate the “blue hotel” which is our planet. But in addition to its wraparound reversals of cause and effect, “player” and victim, panoramic perspectives and micro points of view, the story is famous for its closing meditation on this community's own responsibility for the stranger's fate. The meditation occurs in an analogy one character makes between social processes and the syntax of English sentences. Looking back at the local gambler who eventually brings about the stranger's death, a character observes that the gambler “isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration.”Footnote 36
Crane is not, of course, being directly appropriated in Evicted, any more than Riis or Jacobs or Arendt are the only writers who are. Nor are any of those writers the only thinkers who ask us to ponder what Crane might have called the “syntax” of social relations, to question who acts upon whom, who earns sympathy or who bears the shame of a community's acts of exclusion. But Desmond does share with the predecessors I have selected the desire to make the powerful effects of property and community exclusion more visible – and their aftereffects on communal values more telling. Moreover, as I hope I've made clear, key elements of his narrative experiments may derive, at least in part, from synergies with his data gathering: in the ways that his ironic wraparounds invert a reader's sense of cause and effect, and make the “little” actuator seem large; in the way he comes to see neighborhoods not as communities but merely as gathering places where the impoverished bottom out and never really feel at home; and, perhaps most of all, in the ways narrative setting, complication, and closure are flattened out, with events piling on so much that conflicts with others on the “outs” only engender mutual distrust. Desmond also reminds his readers, however, of the way that quick-trigger judgments of the moral character of “the poor” – as I've said, judgments about how a given individual spends or how another parents – are often only as generalizable as more privileged readers choose to make them.
Not that this guaranteed how Evicted's readers did respond. Indeed, ultimately it was entirely understandable that some readers, even sympathetic ones, thought they were reading a book still in step with the revisionist call to give voice to the voiceless, or practice “history from the bottom up.” As plausible as all that sounded, however, Desmond's ambitions seem different, and his view of his subjects perhaps more ambivalent. For one thing, Desmond wants to keep our eye on the power of the “players” at the top – who, as in Crane, are the “nouns” in this system; for another, quite often it seems that political will is what is truly being evicted. Thus Desmond's embedded metaphor of disposable ties, for example, sometimes recalls elements in Riis's famous photographs that seem to blur the impoverished into the material detritus surrounding them. There are times, too, when the voices of Desmond's cast can blur into what seems like chaotic incoherence. In truth, Desmond can seem a bit vexed about what to do with dialogue or testimony. People say lots of things in Evicted, but quite often Desmond feels compelled to tell us that what they say doesn't accord with what they do. For instance, he reports that people in his trailer park might say that they had a lot of friends or no friends, that they had a wonderfully supportive family or one that abandoned them. But what they said often depended, Desmond writes, on the mood they were in or what week he was talking to them. As he himself admits, constantly returning to his data trove often gave him a debunking retrospect on testimony that, he says, wasn't so consistent to begin with. “I came to view these accounts skeptically, interpreting them as a kind of data in their own right but not as accurate evaluations of people's social relationships” (368 n. 4). Thus, though his cast are given “voices,” he isn't always inclined to let those voices determine his analysis.
In another vein, some readers might also wonder whether identity markers like gender or race might have played a larger role in the mobile-market-driven thickets Desmond describes. In his social pachinko machine, it can sometimes seem that both white and black dots end up, as Ralph Ellison might have said, awfully blue.Footnote 37 As such, one might reasonably wonder whether racial difference also became subject to some blurring, perhaps as a result of the book's drive towards aggregating its data. In a characteristically ironic pivot against an entire array of US storytelling, Desmond suggests that the irony of Pam and Ned ending up in Milwaukee's North Side, for instance, is that it exists above a river valley he compares to the city's Mason–Dixon line (33). North becomes South; mixed-race children lose the mix.Footnote 38 And in a related turnabout, of course, Sherrena and Quentin are black (and she is female), a selection on Desmond's part that might seem, to some readers, ethnographically unrepresentative of landlords generally. Indeed, Desmond tells us in one endnote, most Milwaukee tenants rent from a man (346 n. 2).
In my view, however, this goes back to how Desmond's plots reflect and shape “findings” as citizens become “characters” in a narrative and are “played,” alas, by others. Desmond might have actually been drawn to Sherrena because of the inside/outside view her that putative unrepresentativeness, or her ostensible “otherness” to a largely white landlord class, often supplies him. Sherrena can occasionally identify or empathize with her black and/or female tenants, or shepherd them to court hearings, even manipulate them when she doesn't seem to intend to, consciously. Her social identifiers do express themselves in her work, for good and for ill. Nevertheless, Desmond is sure to show how those social markers also play into her macro role – for instance, in a scene where she attends that meeting of the professional landlords’ association. Here, in a gathering that comes across in Desmond's upside-down “play” much like a religious revival in the name of Rent, with attendees crying out in the marketplace's call and response, the ultra-power of property over citizenship – “This is my property,” they chant together (91) – we see the supplementary power of Sherrena's mixed, mobile, and interstitial positions. That is, her differences can serve as a strategic bridge between a largely white and male corpus of exploiters, on the one hand, and tenants who are black or poor white, and often female, on the other. In the flow of Desmond's plots, her identity markers become, as it were, transactional. If anything, the complexity of such a choice reveals what the power of storytelling means to a book like Evicted. After all, that New York Times mobile graphic can tell us much about patterns of race and class and gender these days, but it cannot, on its own, tell us what or who is putting Americans in their social bins, nor tell readers how it feels to be caught in the flows and back-eddies of being cast off.Footnote 39 What we're looking at with Arleen's quandary about her son, Desmond says, is “parenting in scarcity” (382 n. 13). It is something other scholars have noted, Desmond reminds us, in US slavery.Footnote 40
The forces surrounding the impoverished, I've tried to show, are therefore not “impersonal” or abstracted; they are not merely displayed by Desmond's storytelling but enacted in it. In writing about Crystal's friendships, or Larraine's buying spree, or Arleen's parenting choices, Evicted's plots are careful never to stray far from the sorting system that larger players have put in motion, the bad choices the impoverished are given, the eroding effects on their homes and spirits and rights as citizens. In another multivalent verbal play on statelessness, Desmond writes that poverty has a way of “taxing” the mind (378 n. 6). In a conceit Americans might well recognize, here he uses “taxing” both in the sense of being put upon, and thereby denied the actual benefits of citizenship, and in the older meanings of bearing down on you, undoing your reason. And so he says, we don't need to be looking for something in particular – or, more to the point, for someone among the impoverished to disparage. We just need to add up all the actuators of dispossession Evicted has shown us: “what is unique to poverty,” he says, “is poverty” (382 n. 13). Poverty reflects the mobile power of active players in Evicted's literary canvas to profit from others’ lives and then, too often, to invite us to disapprove of those lives. Indeed, such powers have manifold taxing effects at their command: they pile on, make things and people disposable, leave ashes in the snow – make life “little.” At least that's where Evicted's plots should leave our social imaginations dwelling.
