[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Atlantic Crime publishers released What about the Bodies by Ken Jaworowski on September 2, 2025. The author is an ex-boxer and New York Times editor. Jaworowski has been nominated for an Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Bodies is a 288-page, noirish thriller set in contemporary rust-beltPennsylvania. What about the Bodies has been rapturously reviewed by bestselling thriller authors Dean Koontz, Alex Finlay, and Lisa Scottoline, among others.
What about the Bodies is one of the best-written books I’ve ever read. As I was reading, I kept waiting for Jaworowski to misstep. He never did. Jaworowski knows how to craft a sentence, what punctuation is and how to use it, and how to choose the right words and put them in the right order. He knows how to juggle the big picture so that each sentence works towards the larger structure and the final payoff. Characters are vivid; you know them. You’d recognize them on the street. Multiple chapter-end cliffhangers work like the dips and rises on a roller coaster ride. I had no idea how this book would end until the last page. As befits a noir thriller, there is brutality here, and sadism, and a touch of gore. But there is also real heart. Hearts that break, hearts that promise to heal, hearts that silently and invisibly endure. There is heroic self-sacrifice. There is also, to my great surprise, humor, and boy-oh-boy are those laughs earned. Jaworowski has said, “I hope I wrote a fast-paced thriller. I hope I wrote something entertaining and exciting.” Mission accomplished. “But,” he added, “I hope you can also do that and throw in a couple of questions about life and about what we think and about who we are.” Mission accomplished twice over.
My appreciation of Jaworowski’s talent is all the more remarkable given that I rarely read crime or mystery books, and I actively dislike the noir genre. In spite of my personal tastes, I recognize masterful storytelling when I encounter it, no matter the genre. I kept reading past the point when I intended to take a break because I was enjoying Jaworowski’s skill so much.
On August 31, 2025, NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe interviewed Jaworowski about Bodies. I cringed when I heard Rascoe’spronunciation of Jaworowski’s name. Then I reminded myself that to an American, these syllables do not produce the elegant sound, as they do in Polish, “ya vor OFF ski.” “His name means ‘sycamore’ in Polish,” I thought to myself.
Jaworowski spoke and I immediately noticed that he does not speak like the voices I usually hear from NPR. He sounded masculine, and he sounded like people I know. His ethnicity and employment background were audible in his speech, and that style of speech is not often heard on NPR. Jaworowski talked about the setting of his novel. In the fictional Locksburg, PA, the coal mines have closed, people have left, and those who have remained are feeling some desperation. Jaworowski read a passage from his book:
“The cemetery is huge for such a small town because Locksburg was not always such a small town. At one time, it was thriving … most of them left when the coal mines closed. You might ask, what happened to all the living people, and where did they go? But you never ask, what about the bodies? That is because most times, bodies stay where they are buried. The living do not take the dead with them.”
I was intrigued. Both of my immigrant grandfathers, one Polish and one Slovak, like millions of other impoverished, peasant immigrants, mined coal in Pennsylvania, as did my father, when he was just a boy. Underage coal miners, my father explained to me, were valued because they could fit in tight spaces. My dad hated the mines and, like many others during the Depression, he hit the rails to seek work, till he got an older boy’s papers and, at 16, joined the army.
Like the characters in What about the Bodies, I’m white, and I’m poor, and I’ve been white and poor all my life. I wanted to read a new book about people like me that was, surprisingly, deemed worthy of NPR’s attention. NPR doesn’t generally pay a lot of attention to poor whites.
We poor white folks are an underserved, if politically significant, demographic. A baby boomer, I grew up in a world where it was taken for granted that folks like us were Democrats, and that the Democrats cared about us, and that care was reflected in cultural products, including popular novels and their reception. Betty Smith, Thomas Bell, Upton Sinclair, Anzia Yezierska, Pietro Di Donato, Tillie Olsen, John Steinbeck, Michael Novak, in non-fiction, and even humorist Jean Shepherd told our story and they told our story true and their works were received and celebrated on university campuses.
In these narratives, men were maimed or died in industrial accidents – we all have brothers, fathers, and grandfathers whose fates match. Though “white” and though they take a shower and dress as well as they can afford to dress, characters face prejudice from their betters. Some characters fall through the cracks and become drunks or addicts or simply stuck, but others, through stoic self-sacrifice – working two jobs, swallowing every disappointment and insult – achieve the dream. They acquire a modest home in a safe neighborhood and enough dirt to plant tomatoes and sunflowers. And in a move impossible for their own parents to imagine, the kids can get an education in an actual school. And that’s the happy ending. It is an ending that is respectable and admirable and not ironic and not mocked.
Then the left perverted our story. If we talked about our very real sacrifices, struggles, and the barriers we faced, we were shedding “white tears” and voicing “white grievance.” Back in the day, immigrants like our ancestors were indeed lynched and some of us have that as part of our personal family history. But the left insists that that never happened; we all always enjoyed “white privilege.” In spite of all we went through, we believe in the American Dream, because we ourselves have seen the fruits of hard work and self-denial. For that, we really must be silenced, because America must be seen as perpetually unjust and in need of a cleansing revolution.
I think of the Tennessee Williams’ play and then movie, A Streetcar Named Desire. Suddenly the working class “Polak” is the enemy, the monster, the rapist, the destroyer of civilization.Previously, eugenicist authors like the bestselling novelist Kenneth Lewis Roberts produced such negative caricatures. Streetcar, though, is not bestselling pulp. It occupies an esteemed place in the American canon.
When and why did the left perform this about face? When did they turn us from noble workers into Archie Bunkers? In a 1971 article, folklorist Alan Dundes dates a change in allowable elite expressions of contempt to the Civil Rights Movement. Elite whites used to establish their superiority through their treatment of blacks. It became socially unacceptable to do so, so poor whites became a new, allowable target. “Lower-class whites are not militant and do not constitute a threat to middle-class white America … with the Polack [joke] cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for aggression and means of feeling superior,” Dundes writes.
In a 1994 New York Times essay, poet Lloyd Van Brunt writes,
“Unlike blacks and other racial minorities, poor and mostly rural whites have few defenders, no articulated cause … And they have been made to feel deeply ashamed of themselves — as I was. This shame, this feeling of worthlessness, is one of the vilest and most self-destructive emotions to be endured. To be poor in a country that places a premium on wealth is in itself shameful. To be white and poor is unforgivable … That’s why I call them the Polish-joke class, the one group everybody feels free to belittle, knowing that no politically correct boundaries will be violated … trying to hide some shameful secret, some deep and unreachable sense of worthlessness … is the legacy of America’s poor whites.”
When Democrats lose elections that they were sure that they could win, they reach out to us. After the 2016 presidential election, some elites paid some sort-of sympathetic, grudgingly respectful attention to us. Sociologists announced that we were the folks dying “deaths of despair.” That is, we were the ones reversing expected actuarial trends. Rather than living longer and longer, we were dying younger and younger, often of alcohol, drugs, poor self-care, and suicide. Poor whites have been disproportionately affected by the opioid crisis. We were less likely to go to college, and especially if white, Christian, and rural, we practically didn’t exist on elite college campuses, as either students or faculty. See Russell K. Nieli’s “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others,” and John Leo’s “Yes, Elite Colleges Are Biased Against Poor Whites.”
Pundits wrote op-eds about us. They discovered that we felt not just betrayed, not just abandoned, but demonized by the Democrats, the party that we had donated to, volunteered for, and trusted. Terms like “toxic masculinity,” “white privilege,” and “Christian fascism,” some rocket scientist discovered, might alienate male, poor white, and Christian voters. Op-eds would appear, even in liberal papers, insisting that Democrats had to abandon an identity politics that ignores economic class and obsesses on skin color and sexual orientation. This lesson is somehow never learned; witness Democrats swooning over exotic Zohran Mamdani, and disdaining Curtis Sliwa in the 2025 New York mayoral race. Mamdani is a child of immense wealth and privilege, but he’s supposed to represent the “workers.” Sliwa is the son of a Polish-American Merchant Marine and World War II veteran father and an Italian-American bookkeeper mother. He himself used to be the night manager of a Bronx McDonald’s. Sliwa has been a fixture on New York City’s streets, trying to keep the peace for average people, for decades. Mamdani has no such experience; the left loves him, though. He’s an anti-Israel Muslim who wants socialists to seize the means of production. The lesson that that kind of talk ends badly for the average worker is also somehow never learned.
There has been some progress. Black leftist Van Jones earned my respect when he stood up against leftist contempt for poor whites. In one of many statements after the 2016 presidential election, Jones said, “There are poor white people all over the country now who have addiction and poverty and criminal records and are living in neighborhoods with high death rates — in places like West Virginia, Appalachia — and nobody’s doing anything for them.”
On August 21, 2025, on NPR’s Fresh Air, Tonya Mosley was interviewing Robert Reich. Reich was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. He also worked for Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. The Wall Street Journal listed him as one of its “Most Influential Business Thinkers.” In short, a black female journalist was interviewing a powerful white man. We know the drill. She’d talk about racism and he’d apologize and speak mournfully and self-accusingly. He’d offer a quasi-religious commitment to a better future, once the big, bad racists were defeated. He’d protect his fellow elites by scapegoating poor whites, the real bad guys.
That didn’t happen.
Mosley certainly presented Reich with the liturgy. Mosley protested the “huge pushback” against presumably above-criticism affirmative action and Black Lives Matter. In fact neither is above criticism. Both affirmative action and Black Lives Matter have done quantifiable harm to black people. See, for example, here and here. But that’s not what Tonya Mosely would expect to hear, and any such criticism would immediately be condemned as “racist.”
To my astonishment, Reich didn’t play Mosely’s game.
“Democrats have to understand … that the white working class has felt besieged for fifty years. The white working class has felt that nobody has paid attention. Nobody has helped. They haven’t moved forward. They’ve been working hard. They’ve been … doing everything they are supposed to do, but they have not made it. In fact, they are falling further and further behind, and their children are even further behind … So, certain issues, like affirmative action, strike the white working class as direct insults, as direct competitors. If black people or brown people are going to get help and going to be put in front of the line of the white working class and their children, that doesn’t seem fair to a lot of the white working class.”
Whoa. I listen to NPR daily, and I’ve never heard anything like that on NPR. Reich even said that he wished he had fought against NAFTA.
My mom worked in a candle factory a ten-minute walk from our front door. It was hot, filthy, and noisy. It was also a source of income, friendships, and pride. In those days, families had one car. Dads drove to work. If women were going to earn anything, they went to the candle factory or others like it. After NAFTA, the factory – the entire building – disappeared. Erased.
I now live in Paterson, aka “Silk City.” Tens of thousands oftextile workers in Paterson once produced almost half of America’s silk. I live in what was a functional silk mill till fifty years ago.
I know members of both parties, and many factors, played a role in the loss of American manufacturing jobs. But you know what? It’s not the loss of jobs that gets me the most. It’s the left’s theft – their aggressive, calculated theft – of our narrative. I have gotten political in this review; Jaworowski does not get political in his novel. No politicians are ever mentioned in What about the Bodies. There is one passage that will bring to mind current events, but no direct associations are made. More or less the same book could have been written in the fifties as in the two thousands.
I may be the only reader who was disappointed that the book has negligible Polish or other Slavic content. There is a Pulaski street in town; that’s mentioned once. Most characters are godless and certainly not churchgoers. St. Stanislaw church is mentioned twice, in passing. The eleventh-century martyr Stanislaus of Szczepanow is Poland’s patron saint, and so “Stanislaw” is a common name for parishes in Polish-American communities. The first mention specifies that St. Stanislaw had a bad priest. The second mention is more positive. A character who is contemplating leaving Locksburg, and is toting up all the things one might miss after leaving town, says, “St. Stanislaw church … if you arrived at the right time, seemed to glow blue and purple and red inside from the sunbeams traveling through the stained glass.”
What about the Bodies has plenty of poor white content. Ihighlighted many sentences that resonated. I and others I know have walked a mile in those shoes. We’ve faced those tough choices. I’m not a character in a noir novel, so I didn’t make the spectacularly self-destructive choices that characters in Bodies make. But before the noir plot complications kick in, yeah, I’ve been there.
Noir’s conventions set characters up to fail. The characters in Bodies are so accurate as poor whites that the author’s setting them up to fail, for this reader, feels like a condemnation of all poor whites, even though I know that that is not what Jaworowski wants to do. A character, as a newborn baby, is described as a descendant of “generations of busted homes, broken noses, and unplanned pregnancies.” This baby grows up in “this unfeeling small town, which tried its hardest to poison dreams,” and attends a “bankrupt school system, with its mocking bullies.” All of that is accurate, of course. But, in real small towns like Locksburg, there is also joy, camaraderie, meaning, and even transcendence. The noir genre doesn’t allow reporting of more positive realities.
Locksburg is, like my own hometown, surrounded by green hills. That green and those hills meant everything to us as kids. They were playground, supermarket full of fish, venison, and squirrel, science lab equipped with live copperheads and ancient arrowheads, and an invitation to little-girl, dress-up fantasy. But to many characters, Locksburg’s geography is merely depressing. “The empty roads made me melancholy. They meant that no one wanted to come to this part of the world. They meant that anything important was happening elsewhere, far from where we lived.” A couple of characters, both on the verge of leaving town, suddenly see something positive in the town’s geography. One says, “The only thing I’m going to miss is these hills.” Another says, “the soft breeze that comes off the hills … makes you feel that Locksburg is hidden away from everything in the world as if it were a special place.”
I asked myself the same question, while reading Jaworowski’s book, that I ask when watching film noir. Does noir increase or lessen the audience’s compassion? On the one hand, one might argue that noir increases compassion. The audience witnesses poor and desperate people struggle in impossible circumstances. Characters are hampered by poverty and lack of connections. They make desperate choices, and are crushed by fate. Does the audience feel for these people, and do they later feel compassion for the petty thief shot by cops they hear about on the news? Or does noir feed the punitive, censorious impulse? While reading Bodies, I read about poor whites a lot like me. I watched them make disastrous choices that I, facing similar circumstances, disciplined myself to avoid making. This is how judgmental I felt – at a certain point, after yet another character did something incredibly stupid and self-destructive, I actually said out loud, “These people aren’t poor. They are trash.“
A character lives “in a dank basement apartment” where “silverfish skitter across the cracked, water-stained ceiling.” This character is offered a way out, refuses that escape route, for what feels like right reasons, and sees others, who did take the offer, become millionaires. “My day had been spent nearly being jailed, falling deeper into debt, and watching my dream start to slip away.” Another sleeps on “a mattress and box spring, sans sheets and frame … A sagging sofa sat in front of a large, tubed television that was perched atop a pair of milk crates.” Another character, an old, chronically ill widower, is cheated by a low-rent femme fatale. The old man meets the wicked con artist at church. I think that’s the only time a character is mentioned as attending church.
Though religion plays almost no part in the book, when it is mentioned, it is mentioned negatively. A character says, “It would be the Christian thing to do;” this character is unaware of how ironic this statement is, given the context. Otherwise, “We’d long been atheists or agnostics or whatever you call people who don’t believe or simply don’t bother to care about such things.” But then, in a tight bind, a character confesses, “I knelt down by my bed and began to pray and begged God to give me an answer.”
The New Age beliefs that work well for others are mocked in Locksburg. Every now and then a character remarks on how tragically comical self-help quotes sound in the context of this rust-belt town. “Those clichés are so easy to regurgitate, but they never take into account the failures and the missteps and the madhouses that await the vast, vast majority of those who set out to succeed. No one wants to talk about all of life’s losers, do they?”
A character is mercilessly bullied. This character then has to perform on a sports field. The character thinks, “If this were a movie, what would have happened was that I would have hit a grand slam and won the game. But life is not a movie, no matter how badly you want it to be or how badly it deserves to be.”
About three quarters of the way through Bodies, Jaworowski allows himself and his audience a beautiful passage that lifts off and takes flight. Some kids are at an outdoor drinking party and they spontaneously decide to drive to New York City. They do. This passage contributes nothing to the plot. It offers, rather, a moment of escape from the grind.
There’s a character in Bodies about whom I dreaded reading ever since I first heard the NPR interview. This character has an unusual feature, and I often don’t like how novelists, filmmakers, or even people in casual conversation talk about people who share this unusual feature. In the end, though, this character became my favorite. Why? Jaworowski writes about this character the same way he writes about every other character who doesn’t share this unique feature. In other words, Jaworowski treats this character as if the character were just like everyone else. Once you get to page 245 of the book, you will understand what I mean.
Bodies closes with some surprising conclusions and some loose ends. There might be a sequel.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.