SOURCE: “Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy and the Ideal of Southern Folk Community,” in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 161-72.

In the following essay, Rodgers attempts to deconstruct the image of West's The Living Is Easy as outside the mainstream of twentieth-century African-American literature, instead placing this middle-class novel within the context of southern Afrocentric values.

Satire, like signifyin(g), seeks to revise. The Living Is Easy, Dorothy West's only published novel, draws much of its energy from its satiric picture of Boston's “counterfeit bourgeoisie,” its black middle class. The novel indicts black society artificially modeled on false white values and celebrates black folk life situated within a down-home, feminized, communal matrix. Having read the novel primarily through its middle-class veil, critics have paradoxically aligned it with the very subject that it mocks. Tagging The Living Is Easy as middle-class fiction puts it in a...