Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein

(Norton, 598 pages, $29.95)

“A culture’s forms of escape,” writes critic Morris Dickstein, “are as significant and revealing as its social criticism.” Take the great screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s, movies in which love arises not in an exchange of roses but in an exchange of verbal barbs. Such prickly talk first sprang up in hard-boiled detective fiction, says Dickstein, but the Depression economy made the tone suddenly feel appropriate to the art of courting. After all, a man without a job was a man whose authority had been shaken. A woman’s duty seemed to be to challenge him in an intramural battle of wits, while the man’s was to prove himself a worthy opponent. Look anywhere among the decade’s cultural artifacts, Dickstein says, and the mind-set of Depression-era America is visible.

It takes a critic of expansive vision to pull off what Dickstein has done here, said Gene Seymour in Newsday. The movies, music, literature, and art of the 1930s had a split personality. It was “an era rich in grit and gloss,” in overly earnest social novels and escapist Hollywood musicals. It was the decade of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads and of Radio City’s Rockettes, of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and of Fred Astaire in white tails. But Dickstein is “a veritable magpie” of the era’s “contradictions and connections,” and he wraps apparently warring cultural impulses into the kind of sweeping narrative that you’d expect from “the Great American Novel.” Dickstein makes no grandiose claims, said Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times. Instead, he’s constructed the book as “a collection of thoughtfully linked essays” on a variety of exemplary works and their creators. The big insights just creep in.

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One major insight concerns the central artistic battle of the Depression years, said Caleb Carr in The New Yorker. At the time, half the nation’s creative community insisted that art should be political, while the other half claimed that politics diminished art. It was a standoff between “those who cried ‘agitprop’ and those who cried ‘escapism.’” But rewatching Preston Sturges’ comic masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels with Dickstein, you can see how the best art transcended such debates. Rather than rub the audience’s face in the nation’s misery, it acknowledged the hard times, then shrugged them off.