The Set Up Study Guide by Jon Wynn

 

The Set Up as a Sociological Thought Experiment

Instructional Resource Guide by Author Jon Wynn


I wrote The Set Up as a twisty page-turner for a wide audience. I admit, however, that part of my motivation was also to illustrate key sociological themes in an accessible, almost sneaky, way. This instinct isn’t new, of course. Harriet Martineau’s fictional teaching novels outsold Charles Dickens in her day, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote five novels (including a romance novel), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a sociologist who is better known for her auto-biographical “The Yellow Wallpaper” and her novel Herland. More recent sociologists like Richard Sennett, Randall Collins, Andrew M. Greeley, and Eve Ewing used fiction to reach wider audiences too. A reviewer called sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s 1905 novel, Underground Man, a “sociological thought experiment,” and that sounds right to me.

Most novels sneak big ideas and themes between their pages, and most novelists leave those connections for the reader’s imagination. However, if you would like to read this book with a little more depth, or you’re an instructor considering pairing my novel with your favorite Introduction to Sociology readings (and here’s mine, along with my ‘sociological book report’ assignment) I have prepared this guide for you. What follows are discussion prompts, and additional readings organized by broad sociological themes, outlining the sociological infrastructure of The Set Up. This list is hardly exhaustive, and I am sure readers will find many more exciting and fruitful connections. 

Be warned: there are spoilers below! 


1. Self & Society

Both Ally Parks (whose last name is a mashup of sociologist Robert E. Park and Karl Marx) and Web (named after W.E.B. Du Bois) illustrate concepts of the self (e.g., double consciousness), and debate the power of interaction. Erving Goffman’s ideas run throughout the book, from the presentation of self to civic inattention and involvement shields (in Chapter 4). Web uses Goffman’s concept of ‘face work’ to describe his job in Chapter 7, and Marshall and Dr. Levesque debate whether cults can ‘program’ adherents in Chapter 14 in a way that resonates with the ideas in Goffman’s study Asylums. (The character ‘Erv’ is named after Erving Goffman, too.)

Question/Prompt:
In Chapter 6, Ally is subjected to a focus group by Web and Erv, and the coercive power of groups is on display with the Asch conformity test. How much are our own perspectives and actions shaped by the people around us? What factors do you think would increase or decrease conformity in a group setting like the one in the book? 

Additional Reading:


2. Race & Ethnicity

Web’s interior monologue offers a window into the social construction of race, as he weaves together his understandings of Black history from his father and his ‘Koreanness’ from his mother. In Chapter 13, for example, Web talks with Nyah and Ally about the history of Las Vegas, including how African Americans were forced to live in West Las Vegas, only a few blocks from the El Cortez bar where the scene takes place. It should also be clear that Web is quite adept at code switching, a key concept in sociological analysis of the relationship between race, culture, power, and identity.

Question/Prompt:
What are the subtle and more obvious cues people use to communicate racial or ethnic culture or a shared sense of community or commonality? Think of examples of situations that illustrate the limits and dilemmas of code switching. 

Additional Reading:


3. Gender & Sexuality 

Las Vegas is the bachelor party capital of the world, and strip clubs, stag parties, and sex all play an important roles in the city’s economy. Throughout The Set Up, Ally faces heteronormativity and having to participate in what sociologists West and Zimmerman call ‘doing gender’—often problematically repressing her sexuality to achieve her own goals. In her interactions with Howie, however, Ally’s also challenged by her own notions of normative masculinity, as she struggles to pin him down as a stereotype. While Web cannot hide his racial and ethnic identity, Ally acts differently when she’s at home with her girlfriend Phoebe, for example, and she uses her presumed heteronormativity for the job, particularly when attempting to derail Howie’s bachelor party in Chapter 12.

Question/Prompt:
The Bechdel Test (named after American cartoonist Alison Bechdel) is a way to assess gender representation in media. Here’s the test: Are there two (preferably named) women, who speak to each other, and do they discuss a topic other than a man? What does this test aim to show, and does The Set Up pass the Bechdel Test? Does your favorite movie?

Additional Reading:

 

4. Culture
Culture is one of the trickiest ideas in sociology. The Set Up is rife with corporate logos, clothes, symbolic boundaries, and examples of cultural capital being exchanged. The culture of Las Vegas is on full display throughout the book and Marshall, particularly in the early chapters. Web thinks about culture in a different, more interactional way: he talks about the Set Up as successful business operation and recalls how his mentor, Ruth, taught him that interpersonal skills can be just as valuable as money.

Question/Prompt: 
How is Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital on display in The Set Up? What does Web and Ally sales pitch for the app (in Chapter 10) say about consumer culture?

Additional Reading:


5. Religion

The Unification Church plays an important role in The Set Up, a bar mitzvah in Chapter 20 is a critical scene, and Dr. Renée Levesque even gives a mini-lecture on cults (e.g., New Religious Movements, rituals) in Chapter 14. There are likely strong references to the sacred and profane aspects of Las Vegas life, which were key ideas for Émile Durkheim as well. Religion clearly plays a strong role in the book.

Question/Prompt:
How can you connect the religious activities of these groups in The Set Up with a sociological approach to religion? Were their representations fairly presented? Why or why not?

Additional Reading:


6. Cities and Urban Life

One of the reasons Las Vegas is so fascinating is because it has much of the same aspects of other cities (e.g., redlining, gentrification, real estate development), but also offers some unique aspects of city life as well (e.g., casinos, culture-driven urban redevelopment). There’s a balance between general and novel aspects of urban development that provide key moments and plot points in the book.

Question/Prompt:
How do Marshall’s earlier ‘City Beat’ articles (e.g., homelessness, housing discrimination) connect with what you’ve read about cities? What are the similarities and differences between the histories presented in this book and those in your own area? 

Additional Reading:


7. Migration and Immigration

There are many demographic changes happening throughout the Southwest of the U.S., and certainly in a rapidly growing city like Las Vegas. Just as Dr. Renée Levesque offers a window into religious life, Ernesto provides Marshall a window into demographic changes that shaped the city’s ethnic and political culture in Chapters 22.

Question/Prompt: 
How can you apply what you learned from The Set Up to larger demographic changes happening in the United States overall? How does the city represent wider demographic changes, particularly in ‘Majority-Minority’ regions (e.g., areas where a racial, ethnic, or religious minority population of country is the majority of a particular area)?

Additional Reading:


8. Work

The Set Up could be seen as commentary on how service work requires a certain amount of performativity. There is also some employment history in the book, too. For example, while Web talks about segregation in Chapter 13, he also discusses how African Americans were barred from working in the gaming industry until the NAACP mobilized to get a seat at the gambling table. 

Question/Prompt:
Taking examples from the book (e.g., Ally and Web’s work to Marshall’s employment history), how can you take a sociological approach to understanding the Las Vegas service industry, the occupational prospects in journalism or higher education, or your own career aspirations?

Additional Reading:


9. The Family

Each of the main characters in The Set Up has a different family dynamic, ranging from the more dysfunctional to the nuclear, from the literal to the more religiously symbolic. The book attempts to complicate one of the more taken-for-granted yet complex aspects of modern life: The role of the family. 

Question/Prompt:
The idea of the traditional or conventional family has been complicated by people like historian Stephanie Coontz who describe them as a ‘convenient myth.’ From Cal’s reflections in the Prologue to the Unificationist splinter sect called The Third Family, we see discussion of how a family can be broken and new ‘found’ or ‘chosen families’ are re-made. What sociological insights can be applied to the different versions of family presented in this book?

Additional Reading:

 

10. Education

Marshall is clearly caught in some institutional shifts in higher education. In Chapter 8 he says teaching is show business, and his department chair pressures him for not fulfilling his duties as an instructor. Marshall reflects on his precarious position as a lecturer, in a system that is increasingly reliant on adjunct lecturers like him, which has its own pressures illustrated partially in Chapter 11 (e.g., needing positive evaluations).

Question/Prompt:
Reflect on your own experiences in college, and how this peek into the ‘backstage’ of higher education can inform the way you approach your classes.

Additional Reading:


11. Poverty

The prologue Cal watches ‘the guessing man,’ a character representing one of the hundreds of unhoused men and women who live in the 600-miles of drainage tunnels under the city. This is a very small window into the precarity of life on the margins of what might otherwise seem like the wealthy glitter of Las Vegas.

Question/Prompt:
How does the invisibility of poverty render structural inequalities so difficult to understand?

Additional Reading:


12. Politics

In Chapter 11, realtor Ernesto talks about the city’s ward system and some of the players in Las Vegas politics. While these were largely fictional, Las Vegas has a history of colorful mayors, including Oscar Goodman (who once told me at a wedding that he was a sociology major and proved it by talking about the grandfather of sociology, Auguste Comte). Elías ‘Landslide’ Losado, however, is a fictional character who represents the rising political power of the Latinx community in the city.

Question/Prompt:
Reflect on how The Set Up portrays political power. Find a recent news item that displays how money, social networks, or charisma work in real life.

Additional Reading:


13. Media and Technology

The Set Up’s business model of using smartphones and text messaging to send instructions is supposed to be somewhat ominous, representing how media and technology can be a mixed blessing. In Chapter 13, Web imagines the trajectory of his texts and messages travel. The book demonstrates some of the significant costs of technology’s encroachment in everyday life.

Question/Prompt:
Is there something about the portrayal of technology from The Set Up that can be connected to a real life examples? Is there a section from the book that you can use to connect to a real life pro/con tension in the use of contemporary social media use? 

Additional Reading:


14. Deviance

Deviance plays an important role in the thriller genre, obviously and The Set Up has it, from murder to manipulation of emotions for clandestine purposes. The art of manipulation is detailed in Chapter 6 and the ethics of it are argued over between Ally, Web, and Erv in Chapter 10. For example, although many of the Ally and Web chapters illustrate the manipulation of others, these activities range from the perfectly legal (e.g., restauranters hiring someone to park a Vespa in front of their business), to the illegal (e.g., selling apps without disclosure).

Question/Prompt:
There is a kind of sociology to ‘the art of the convincing’ most clearly in Web’s evocation of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s strategy for how to talk to people who have different feelings about race (i.e., “Felt, Found, Feel”) in Chapter 7. While The Set Up is full of examples of using these ideas for more nefarious means, how can we use these conversational tactics for good (i.e., the way Tatum intended)?

Additional Reading:

 

Buy the book here.