Certain terms are, to most American ears, tacit invitations to poke fun. Trailer-park. Influencer. Florida. They inspire smirky contempt, are shorthand for we’re better. This list includes the suburbs—a place, in the popular imagination, where conformists go to wither in bourgeois tedium and die unfulfilled; a cultural void of strip malls and drive-thrus; the realm of former idealists, for whom owning property and upholding principles are somehow incompatible. As a suburbanite—in a “progressive” area better at talking the talk than walking the walk (more on that in a sec)—I’ll confirm that this last part isn’t wholly inaccurate. But the overall vision is incomplete. Life here, which felt strangling as a kid—all that aimless cruising, so much time and nothing to do with it—is different for adults. It’s enriching and surprising in ways that don’t lend themselves to smug jokes. There are good and valid reasons to be here: the space, the pace. Convenience and community. Homes to own, room for kids to be kids.

Of course, not all suburbs are alike. My beloved hometown—a diverse California city of 110k, famous for two rappers, a serial killer, a pitcher, bankruptcy, a rogue police force, and a guy who eats hot dogs—is a different genus from the pop. 25k New Jersey village where I live now, with its rainbow crosswalks and zero-waste co-op serving nitro cold brew. (I love my town, but I’m aware of its flaws.) Yet both are suburbs (of SF and NYC, respectively), as is Garland, NE, pop. 216 (greater Lincoln); and Mesa, AZ, pop. 500k (west of Phoenix). To collapse these disparate places into one image, a bland land of lawns, is to misconstrue much of America.

            For this syllabus to be of use, then, it must reflect the varieties of suburbia—and avoid peddling canonical suburban lit you already know: the tragic Revolutionary Road; John Cheever’s stories (e.g. “The Swimmer”); tales of Rabbit Angstrom, Frank Bascombe, and the decaying key-partiers of The Ice Storm. And anyway, in 2021, as homeownership grows ever more impossible thanks to bloated housing costs and stagnant wages, novels set in some Greenwich manse or midcentury Main Street don’t exactly capture the zeitgeist. The books below depict a fresher view of these parceled communities, our literal lots in life.

            If you’re ‘burbs-bound, I have three things to say: first, if you’re staying, congrats on settling in. There’s no feeling like coming home after a long temporariness. Second: Fear not that this move will stunt you, shrink you, signal the death of your youth. You were you in the city and will be you here, too, just with a second toilet. Third: As ever, I hope these works will ease and aid your journey—to a clean, well-lighted town center, to buy formula, new tires, and a rotisserie chicken without parking twice. See you at the block party, neighborino.

 

1.

Aloft

Author: Chang Rae Lee

Book; Fiction (2004)

 

            This contemplative novel may resemble those by the aforementioned writers—your Cheevers, your Yateses—since it involves a man dissatisfied with a privileged suburban life. But Aloft is more a descendent of those books, nuanced in its thinking about what a suburb means to different people. Its narrator, Jerry Battle, is an immigrant (Battle is his update on Battaglia), for whom inhabiting Long Island’s sprawl is an act of assimilation. In fact, the immigrant experience of suburbia is the lifeblood of the novel: Jerry’s deceased wife, whom he still mourns, was Korean, as is his son-in-law and forthcoming grandchild; his newly ex-girlfriend is Puerto Rican. Jerry has a flawed means of escaping his malaise, flying his small plane over the endless rows of houses. The ascensions never fully lift him from his grief-tinged torpor, nor can they prevent tragedy below. When misfortune strikes Jerry once again, unlike the protagonists of Cheever and Yates, et al., Jerry doesn’t turn inward in despair. He reorients toward connection, no longer willing to fly solo. Between the spirit-murdering towns in the novels of yore and the imperfect but redemptive setting herein, I’ll take Jerry’s suburb any day.

 

2.

Holy Land

Author: D.J. Waldie

Book; Memoir (1996)

            How I love this book. Equal parts poem, history, memoir, and letter, it tells of life in the blue-collar tract housing of 1950s Lakewood, CA. Meditative and measured, Waldie’s prose revels in the macro (the rapid swell of postwar development) and micro (chicken wire beneath stucco, “the calling of a mourning dove, and others answering from yard to yard”). Over 316 vignettes, he paints a stirring portrait not only of his own suburban life but of the invention of suburban life, its utility (“Density is what developers sell to the builders of shopping centers”), steadiness (“Daily life here has an inertia that people believe in”), its private tragedies. “My father died behind a well-made, wooden bathroom door,” Waldie writes. “It [has] a lock with a small hole in the outside knob so the door can be opened with a narrow-blade screw-driver.” A line break, and then: “I didn’t have a narrow-blade screw-driver.” I’d be hard pressed to think of a non-fiction book so unassuming in its beauty or virtuosic in its approach.

 

3.

Never Home Alone

Author: Rob Dunn

Book; Nature (2018)

An undiscussed perk of suburban life is intimacy with nature, the nearness of birds, rodents, bugs, trees, flowers, grass. After so many city years I revere this vast view of sky; our tidy square of bluegrass; the lives, animal and vegetable, that surround my own. To plant a seed or pot a bloom is to access child-you, the one awed by the world’s simple workings. (Ask my son, who each morning “checks the flowers”—i.e., how they’ve changed since yesterday, which they always have.) This fascination also applies to the fauna within your habitat. Some may be less welcome than others—the squirrel eating your jack-o-lantern, the robins nesting in the rain gutter—but you have to admire their fortitude in the face of human encroachment. (Ask my husband, who buys seed to attract blue jays and cardinals, but this morning saw at our feeder a city pigeon in from Newark and 32 sparrows being edged out by a grackle.) Just now I hear a beagle barking, sparrows chirruping; I see snapdragons, rhododendron, the honeysuckle outgrowing its trellis; I smell post-storm petrichor. Here, nature isn’t something you drive to.

Never Home Alone zooms in even further on the suburban ecotone, to the creatures with whom we unknowingly share our indoor spaces: Thermus aquaticus in the hot water heater, lactobacilli fermenting kimchi, countless fly/spider/silverfish roommates. It’s edifying, enjoyably creepy, and quite in line with my point: We too are organisms in a system, and in the suburbs this fact is reasserted with every report of the woodpecker and dart of the chipmunk.

 

Extra Credit: Two more books on houses and their inhabitants: Home: A Short History of an Idea, by Witold Rybczynski (1987), a thinky architectural reading of the way houses and humanity intertwine; and The Walls Around Us, by David Owen (1991), a wry look at how a house works. (Meta suburban note: I borrowed the latter from a neighbor’s little free library.)

 

4.

Duplex

Author: Kathryn Davis

Book; Fiction (2013)

             Miss Vicks is a schoolteacher residing in a duplex on a quintessential suburban street, where kids laugh on stoops and parents play canasta. Also, there are robots living next door, and giant aircraft hovering in the sky, and a soulless not-man whose headlights blind the stoop-sitting kids and cause one to vanish. (It’s even stranger than it sounds.) The novel is surprisingly lovely, but you have to wade through weirdness to reach its tender heart. Which makes it a worthy primer on suburban life, which often looks like the epitome of conventional living—movies always seem to be set there when something bizarre happens, to set up contrast—but is just as complex and mystifying as life anywhere else. Example: We moved here after much painful uncertainty about where we should land. The need to decide had consumed me; I think I believed that once we settled the question, all would be well. LOL. The world shuttered nine months after our 2019 arrival, after which we lived by the same insane sci-fi logic as this novel’s, blithely continuing on in a world that made no sense. In pictures, life looked simple, light. It wasn’t. The point is, move here with open eyes—it’s great, but it’s no panacea.  

                

Extra Credit: If you enjoy Davis’s freaky surrealism, try Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim (1993), a bizarre and darkly funny tale of small-town politics gone grotesque.

 

 

5.

The Sellout

Author: Paul Beatty

Book; Fiction (2015)

Set in Dickens, an invented pocket of Los Angeles’s fringe, this unruly satire is deadly perceptive and blisteringly funny, distilling American race relations with a deft calibration of wit, weirdness, sorrow, and rage. Beatty’s suburbia—his America—is oppressive, and it’s also home. “I fingered a bullet hole in the tree bark,” his narrator says, “thinking that like the slug buried ten rings deep in the trunk, I’d never leave…like all lower-middle-class Californians, I’d die in the same bedroom I’d grown up in.” After Dickens is erased from the state’s map, too slummy to claim, the narrator—who, like Beatty, is Black—draws attention to his town however he can, segregating Dickens and reinstituting slavery within its borders. (The novel’s central question: If the world refused to look at you, what would you do to be seen?) Beatty eviscerates America’s paltry attempts to address or even acknowledge systemic racism—many aspects of which play out on the suburban stage. (See: The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein [2018], about government policies designed explicitly to segregate American housing.)

Urbanites tend to live in bubbles of the (mostly) likeminded; suburbanites get no such assurance that the neighbors aren’t, say, homophobic antivaxxers who tell racist jokes at barbecues. Even in an ostensibly forward-thinking haven, the progressivism advertised may not be what’s truly on offer. Perhaps you saw the Victoria’s Secret Karen, Abigail Elphick, try to slap a woman named Ijeoma Ukenta and chase her around the store—as no one came to Ukenta’s aid. In one of several videos she recorded, Ukenta says, “This is Short Hills! I thought this was the safe mall.” The Mall at Short Hills is one town over from mine, and Ukenta’s words nail the disconnect between what this area claims to be—Hate Has No Home Here, signs declare—and what it is, which is a place where, after a Black woman is publicly terrorized, residents will ask the perpetrator if she’sokay.

That incongruence, reading as it does like satire, would be right at home in Beatty’s novel, as would the shitfit thrown in my theoretically liberal town when its long-imbalanced school district announced a plan to better integrate via busing. Here, too, are ubiquitous BLM signs, Claudia Rankine poems on display downtown—but when sacrifice was needed, and acknowledgement that living on the tony side of town shouldn’t buy your kid a better future at the expense of another’s, it became clear what those signifiers of solidarity were worth. (The NYT podcast Nice White Parents keenly observes the intersection of race and public schooling. If you’ll be raising kids in the suburbs, please listen.)

My fellow well-meaning people of privilege, you may see your principles tested here. You may be asked to surrender some of that privilege for the greater good. You may need to assist a woman being chased around a panty display. You may need to put skin in the game. If a moral challenge comes, be ready to rise to it.