Abstract
Daniel Silver on The Set Up, The Tour Guide, Music/City, and The City and the Hospital.
by Jon Wynn
Belt Publishing, 2025
by Jonathan R. Wynn
University of Chicago Press, 2012
by Jonathan R. Wynn
University of Chicago Press, 2015
by Daniel Skinner, Jonathan R. Wynn, and Berkeley Franz
University of Chicago Press, 2023
“It’s not like any culture has a lock on hidden rules. There are rules and then there are rules. Just like spoons and rice.” He takes a bite and lets Ally dwell on that. “Hidden rules depend on context. How does that help me?” “Imagining what other people think of as the rules, not what you do, helps you in the interaction game. It requires an understanding of the other’s perspective. The Germans call it verstehen.”
And so goes a conversation between Web and Ally, two characters in sociologist Jonathan Wynn’s debut work of fiction, The Set Up. It is one of many sociological morsels that populate the detective novel. In its pages I found direct or indirect references to face-work, impression management, sacred vs. profane, dramaturgy, the etcetera principle, habitus, triads, emotional labor, neo-bohemia, critical race theory, doing gender, ethnomethodology, the interaction order, urban growth machines, commodity fetishism, the sociology of everyday life, and above all, framing. Even the characters’ names—Erv, Web, Ernesto, Howie, and others—bring to mind venerable sociological traditions. Indeed, all this makes the book a detective story in more than one way. For the sociologist, ferreting out the disciplinary easter eggs and surmising how they feed into the plot adds another layer to the reading experience.
But even without that supplementary sociology hunt, the book is a page-turner. Set in Las Vegas, it follows Ally Parks, an aspiring actress and journalism student, as she’s drawn into the strange underworld surrounding the titular guerilla marketing company, the Set Up. The company assigns tasks and makes payments through cryptic text messages and shady apps, but experienced employees Web and Erv are there to teach Ally how to rig situations to gain the confidence of unsuspecting marks. In parallel, Marshall, Ally’s journalism professor, starts finding copies of his old articles on his desk, prompting him to re-investigate past stories. The plot lines become intertwined as the Set Up sends Ally into the dark corners of Vegas, into shadowy real estate deals and religious cults, and Marshall’s re-opened investigations lead him to the same places. In the process, it becomes harder and harder—if it was ever possible at all—to discern what’s real and what’s not. Everybody is framing everybody else, though some are better at it than others. The Set Up is a Goffmanian detective story in which life is one great confidence game.
The Set Up is also the latest installment in the now centuries-long effort to grapple with what Wolf Lepenies called the “third culture” of sociology in his 1988 book Between Literature and Science. Is sociological writing more like a novel or a scientific treatise? A bit of both? Should we strive for the detached view from nowhere or incorporate style and rhetoric? Is it possible to do otherwise? Many novelists have taken a great deal from sociologists and vice versa. It’s less common, though, for the novelist and the sociologist to be one and the same. This dual effort places Wynn in the rare and rather exceptional company of Randall Collins, Harriet Martineau, W.E.B. Dubois, and Ann Oakley, and it gives us a chance to see how a sociological sensibility plays out across different genres, its core concerns remarkably consistent even as the form shifts.
If any sociological theme predominates The Set Up it is that expectations powerfully key interactions. Because of this, expectations must be managed and can be manipulated, though not quite at will. This play of mutual confidence is especially susceptible to management and manipulation where the boundaries of a frame (the answer to the question “what is really happening here?”) are unclear. The same logic runs through Wynn’s sociological writings, which aim to show that such keying and rekeying is not just the stuff of imaginative literature. Literature, in this view, becomes a kind of laboratory for experimenting with how far these processes might go under varying conditions. That this experimentation takes place in both fiction and sociology, in the work of a single author, makes for a rare opportunity to assess the reach and limits of this strand of Goffmanian social thought. The remainder of this review takes up that opportunity by examining Wynn’s three sociological books—The City and the Hospital, Music/City, and The Tour Guide—against the backdrop of The Set Up.
Consider first Wynn’s recent co-authored book, The City and the Hospital. Written with political scientist Daniel Skinner and medical sociologist Berkeley Franz, The City and the Hospital examines the results of the “paradoxical” fact that many world-class medical facilities exist in neighborhoods whose marginalized residents’ health is rather poor. Starting from this fact, the book uses detailed case studies to investigate the interface between hospital and city, with a view toward concrete policy ideas that could help mitigate an often tense (or, at any rate, less-than-mutually-satisfying) relationship.
The book’s sharpest insights come where the hospital begins to resemble the casino, not in content, but in the choreography of everyday interaction. Chapter 2 studies how history “keys” the hospital and community relationship, exploring how memories from both sides define “what is happening” when each encounters the other. Chapter 3 considers the “contact zones” in which the two meet. These include emergency rooms and community clinics, but also parking lots, garages, and campus cafeterias. Here, the connection to the world of The Set Up is explicit: “Akin to a modern shopping mall or Vegas casino, the [hospital] campus boasts an impressive array of options to keep workers and patrons inside” (p. 102). Like the casino in The Set Up, the hospital campus is a managed environment designed to shape movement, perception, and interaction, a frame within a frame, whose boundaries are at once obvious and opaque.
The Set Up reads like a version of Wynn's sociology freed from the constraints of empirical justification, and it presents sociology as a way of noticing what is already in plain sight. That it takes the form of a detective novel only sharpens this vision of the sociological imagination.
Chapter 5 considers the ambiguous categories professionals and residents use to construct their expectations of medical institutions. These include, for example, hospitals’ compliance with formal rules versus moral or altruistic aims and residents’ desire for community support versus their pragmatic recognition that internal and external missions may misalign. The overall message is that, like a casino, the hospital is managing impressions and defining situations and expectations (though perhaps more implicitly). By and large, the policy suggestions in Chapter 6 amount to recommendations for how hospitals can internalize Goffmanian wisdom regarding the malleability of institutional frames and the potential for restructuring community-hospital interactions, such as by re-envisioning space, re-orienting medical education toward community-based health, and increasing transparency and social accountability.
Music festivals, similarly, help us see the ways that multiple frames intersect in cities. Wynn’s Music/City (2015) treats urban music festivals as “set ups” shaping participants’ experiences through frames and boundaries that transform their impressions of where they are at and what they are doing. Newport Folk Festival, we read, exemplifies a citadel pattern, Nashville’s CMA a “core,” and Austin’s South by Southwest a “confetti,” each with different levels of porosity, density, and turbulence. Crucially, festivals are temporary yet reproducible social occasions that are more flexible than large fixed cultural investments, permitting more transient adaptation and interventions to local environments.
Fascinatingly, Wynn, like any good confidence artist, understands when and how to make himself a part of the story. A confidence artist builds trust not by disappearing, but by carefully managing attention, knowing when to be seen, and when to recede. In that vein, Wynn is a steady presence in Music/City, but the book is never about him. He keeps his focus outward, toward the world he’s trying to understand, and in doing so, earns our trust in his guidance. We watch him as he learns, and the world he describes takes shape alongside him. For instance, even when describing his own performance at South by Southwest, Wynn’s attention is on the audience, the crew, the view from the stage, and what that position reveals about the festival. In this way, the confidence artist, the field-worker, and the writer share a method. The trick in all three cases is not to vanish, but to calibrate visibility and credibility— to be present enough to guide attention, but not so present that the guidance becomes the story.
Nowhere is Wynn’s interest in keying more explicit than in The Tour Guide, his first book and the one that most directly explores how people reshape the meaning of everyday life. In Wynn’s telling, New York tour guides “re-key” the city, using “schticks of the trade”—not unlike those Erv and Web teach Ally—to transform their audiences’ perceptions and experiences of urban spaces. These are the “urban alchemists” who make locals into visitors and visitors into locals. They transmute standard experiences of cities as “homogenous, commodified, and Disneyfied” into enchanting opportunities for surprise and discovery, alive with possibility.
If the guerilla marketers of The Set Up do this rekeying in the service of shady purposes, tour guides show how the tools of Goffmanian sociology may be put in the service of potentially more noble ones. At any rate, they show us that these are not only the tools of the sociologist—and if there is a common thread across Wynn’s books, it is that sociologists do well to find their concepts in use in the world among the expert practitioners of daily life. This is not just an interpretive point, but a methodological one. Wynn’s work suggests that some of the most durable insights of our discipline emerge when we sociologists recognize that people are already doing the work we claim to analyze, and often with more skill, nuance, and improvisational awareness than we might otherwise give them credit for.
In a way, the true test of a sociological concept is whether you can build a novel around it that creates a compelling impression of reality. If you cannot, well, that doesn’t bode well for your concept. Wynn’s success on this front reinforces the strength of Goffman’s approach, even as it exposes the boundaries of what framing can explain. If we look at The Set Up, the framing confidence games of the various characters seem to take place on the surface, riding atop structural forces that they can use for their own purposes, but which are the true drivers of what happens. The casinos and the urban growth machine carry on, indifferent to the misadventures of the Set Up’s employees. Wynn’s sociological work shifts from fiction to the real-world operations of hospitals, music festivals, and neighborhoods, but the worry remains: surface adjustments can leave deeper structural arrangements untouched. For example, while certainly a more welcoming cafeteria and nicer approach to a hospital through its parking lots could make a better impression, these glossing efforts can seem paltry relative to the much deeper neglect experienced by the institution’s surrounding communities. The tales spun by a tour guide make for a fun afternoon, but “homogenization, commodification, and banalization” (p. 157) continue regardless. While frames shape how we encounter the world, they do so within systems that are, evidently, not easily shifted by framing processes alone.
To be sure, this is not the most generous critique. Goffman himself saw framing rituals as constitutive elements of social life, much more than surface-level reinterpretations. Still, he often stopped at that level, describing how people used language or gestures without always tracing the deeper grammars they enacted. Wynn perhaps goes further, moving from accounts of how festivals interface with cities to something like a grammar of those interfaces in density, porosity, turbulence. Similarly, if hospital contact zones help shape health disparities, then redesigning them could have real and lasting effects. Tour guides may reshape urban identity by shifting who belongs and how space is valued. Frames do not hold themselves up, and perhaps we only see them clearly by following those who move more freely into, out of, and around them.
There is a distinct opportunity in taking stock of a sociologist’s work while they are still actively producing it, especially when that work spans both fiction and non-fiction. The Set Up reads like a version of Wynn’s sociology freed from the constraints of empirical justification, and it presents sociology as a way of noticing what is already in plain sight. That it takes the form of a detective novel only sharpens this vision of the sociological imagination.
In some of its classic forms, a good detective story does not uncover hidden facts so much as piece together the answer that was always already there. The joy of the reading is in your discovery of what you’d passed over or ignored, what was obscured by any number of other possible answers. Sociology, in Wynn’s view, seems to work the same way. It gets us to attend to what has been happening all along, whether in the hospital parking lot and cafeteria, the distribution of music venues across a street grid, or the mystery and surprise that lurk around every corner.