In Plantation Airs Brannon Costello offers an insightful analysis of the intersection between the concepts of race and class in southern fiction. While many critics have focussed close attention on the subject of race in southern fiction, Costello contends that the issue of class has been overlooked. Costello aims to fill this critical gap by analysing the link between racial paternalism and class in the years following World War II. During this period Costello argues that the racial paternalism which had been important to the development of class structures in the South was becoming increasingly challenged due to the emergence of a new business ethos and civil rights movements which were beginning to alter the landscape of southern life. By examining how each writer dramatizes the collapse of the agrarian plantation ideal, Costello argues that it is possible to gain sharper insights into the ways in which racial paternalism has played a key role in shaping class structures in the South. Costello's analysis is informed by the theories of Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen, who argue that class is not defined just as the outcome of wealth, as what is most important is the manner in which this sense of wealth is manifested. The issue of conspicuous consumption is therefore key to an understanding of racial paternalism.

Costello explores how each text provides a different relationship between racial paternalism and class. He compares how African American writers approach racial paternalism in comparison with their white counterparts, and how the meaning of the term “aristocratic” varies when considered from the perspective of the very well-off businessman as opposed to the poor farmer. Beginning with an analysis of William Faulkner's The Mansion, Costello discusses how the racial paternalism which defined a romanticized ideal of agrarian aristocracy was necessary for well-off white southerners who wished to sustain their status as aristocrats. Furthermore, those less wealthy whites who harboured social aspirations were keen to preserve their identities as distinct from “white trash.” In his subsequent analysis of Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and “The Pet Negro System,” Costello shows how “racial performances” validated an aristocratic class system which ultimately constrained both the oppressors and the oppressed. The chapter on Walker Percy is particularly interesting, as it reveals the extent to which Percy's work is influenced by, yet resistant to, the racial paternalism espoused by his adoptive father William Alexander Percy. In his final conclusion Costello provides an intriguing contemporary slant by drawing parallels between Percy's Love in the Ruins and the film The Legend of Bagger Vance, though the depth of analysis here does not quite match that of the preceding chapters.

Overall, Plantation Airs is a valuable contribution to southern literary studies which opens up the intersection between race and class in stimulating new ways.