Small-Town Italians: The Left and the Right

To novelists, social scientists seem a subversive class. It is not merely that the latter have increasingly invaded the hitherto settled territory of the novelist—the individual’s complex ties with his society. Far worse. In recent years they have sought to pry further into the novelist’s secrets and to escape with the precious jewels of his art: those peculiar aesthetic forms that transmute the invariable topicality of material into works of permanence. Among the arch-criminals is Oscar Lewis. Through skillful use of the first-person narrative forms, and patient revision of his material, Lewis has consistently brought to artistic life the enduring and painful lives of the poor, the marginal, the exiled.

Lewis and hi...