‘Want’ Captures The Precariousness Of America’s Middle Class

I always remember how a beloved college professor of mine responded when I told him the news that I’d gotten a fellowship to a Ph.D. program in English. “Well,” he said, “at least you’ll be able to read Finnegans Wake in the unemployment line.” At the time, I laughed along; I, too, believed literature would be enough of a consolation were I ever to find myself jobless and broke. But no more. The passing years and the present economic crisis make Finnegans Wake seem like cold comfort. The unnamed narrator and main character of Lynn Steger Strong’s immersive new novel, bluntly entitled Want , is only in her early 30s, but she already knows what it took me a while to learn: that without bread, you can’t appreciate roses. Married, with two little girls, and living with her family in a cramped seven floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, she teaches at a charter high school in Manhattan, where she’s one of the few white teachers. It’s a dispiriting place where the instruction is, as she says,