But when it comes to canceling classes, people tend to fall into one of two camps.
Then, as now, he more often cited as potential beneficiaries not the mostly poor uninsured but the working and middle classes, people like his mother, who had insurance but fought her carrier all the while she was dying of cancer.
And now that precarity has shifted up the line from casualised women, to blue collar males, and now to the middle classes, people are finally starting to take notice.
The changing patterns are evident among the among the growing Muslim middle classes: people who leave the ghettos, enroll their children in Catholic schools (there are only a few Muslim schools in France) and are filling the ranks of doctors, local journalists, teachers and municipal councilors.
In Vikram Chandra's new novel, "Sacred Games" (HarperCollins; $27.95), Ganesh Gaitonde, a sort of Bombay Al Capone, expresses his contempt for the English-speaking classes, people oblivious of the rampant criminality underpinning their serene existence: "These Englishwallahs were always superior, as if the world they lived in was some other one, far from my barrack, my streets, my home".
Part comedy of manners, part chick lit in male drag, James Collins's "Beginner's Greek" is a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel, set, for good measure and our sociological titillation, among the WASP ruling classes, people who work at white-shoe investment firms and own villas in southwestern France and can instantly tell the difference between fine Bordeaux and plonk.
