What makes for a good suburban story? A review of one suburban memoir makes an argument of what needs to be present:
The best suburban stories, on the page or on-screen, are deceptively complex, affixing irony or self-knowledge to what may initially appear to be mere scathing social criticism. Take Revolutionary Road, the searing 1961 Richard Yates novel adapted to the big screen by Sam Mendes in 2008. This is the tragedy of Frank and April Wheeler (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet), average New Yorkers in the ’50s who move to a tree-lined Connecticut suburb to start a family and watch their dreams die. Frank commutes to the city for a sales job he loathes. April whiles away her days with the kids, forgoing whatever ambitions she might otherwise have had.
Here’s the catch: As April and Frank plan a move to Paris—where Frank will do an unspecified creative something—then retreat back into a domestic existence both tortured and predictable, it becomes clear that they would live quotidian lives no matter where they laid their heads. Paris. Connecticut. New York. The suburbs just happen to be the perfect venue for their smallness, the place where their silent scream can disappear between the hedges. In this sense, Yates’s suburban critique carries a strong whiff of irony. After all, it’s hard to blame the perfect lawns and fake smiles when you carry your misery the way a turtle carries its shell.
The only truly honest person in these suburbs is John, the adult son of the community’s busybody real estate agent. John is a mathematician who has undergone extensive shock treatment for his mental illness, a spirit stifled by his family’s shame and hyperconformity. (Michael Shannon plays him in the film and walks away with the whole thing.) John might actually be happier in Waldie’s Lakewood, where strange behavior, including obsessive hoarding, arguably becomes part of the town’s beautiful fabric, the answer to any easy assumptions of conformity…
The naked reality Waldie depicts subverts any impulse to indulge dystopian visions or Twilight Zone–like allegories. (The suburbs, incidentally, provided a feast for The Twilight Zone. Take 1960’s “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which a bland collection of suburban neighbors, walled off from the rest of the world, become a self-immolating mob when they suspect an alien invasion.) Waldie doesn’t need such devices to conjure his uncanny suburbia. He accentuates minute details of housing and neighborhood construction—drywall, crape myrtle, layers of stucco—with philosophical musings and remembrances that sometimes cross over into the macabre. “In the suburbs,” he writes, “a manageable life depends on a compact among neighbors. The unspoken agreement is an honest hypocrisy.”
Is the suggestion here that the problems people face in the suburbs are the same sorts of problems they would face in other settings? Or that people in the suburbs are idiosyncratic just as they are elsewhere?
I wonder if the difference is that the American Dream placed a large burden on suburbs: life had to be good, not just normal. The sparkle of the new home and suburban lifestyle were not just to be settled into and lived in; it had to be the apex of American, and perhaps global, life.
On the whole, the standard of living in American suburbs is pretty high compared to historic and global settings. But, could any place easily be the promised land? It is probably not a coincidence that this book is titled Holy Land.
Legally Sociable 