Burb Lit
A short history of postwar suburbia in American literature
As some of you know, I’ve been working on a project with the working title “Springsteenland: Culture, Politics and the States of Jersey.” In recent weeks I’ve been drafting a chapter comparing Bruce Springsteen’s work with that of novelist Richard Ford, whose five-novel saga about a sportswriter-turned-realtor named Frank Bascombe is set in the fictional New Jersey town of Haddam. This excerpt provides context for those books—the history of the suburbs as portrayed in American literature. I hope you find this passage useful. —Jim
The suburbanization of the United States was one of the great facts of American life in the decades after World War II, and so it is no surprise that it attracted the attention of a number of distinguished writers. Much of this early commentary was negative. Most of these writers were white and male, though there were exceptions like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, whose generally dark stories reflected their broader artistic temperaments as well as a strong anti-suburban sentiment among those who came of age artistically in the 1950s. This was a difficult time for many suburban women in particular, as vividly captured by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), written while she was living as a housewife in Scarsdale. But one did not have to be female to find suburbia stifling; William Whyte’s classic 1956 study The Organization Man dissected what seemed to some a downright mania for conformity and togetherness that eroded long-lionized American traditions of rugged individualism.
The first major tale of suburban life in the postwar era was Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, made into a hit movie starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones the following year. Much of the story is set in Westport, Connecticut, where the protagonist, Tom Rath, lives with his family while commuting to Manhattan. Rath, a World War II veteran, is haunted by the extramarital affair he had in Italy, which threatens his suburban idyll, as does his stressful job that takes time away from his family, tensions he is finally able to resolve by rededicating himself to domestic harmony.
The premier literary novel of suburban life in the early postwar era was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, published in 1961. The book tells the tragic story of the Wheelers, an aspirational couple—April wants to be an actress, Frank takes a corporate sales job in Manhattan—who buy a house in the Connecticut suburbs. But the Wheelers find small-town life stifling, and formulate plans to start over in Paris. They never manage to do so, and their marriage disintegrates in a haze of alcohol, infidelity, and a botched abortion. Though hailed at the time of its publication—it was nominated for a National Book Award in a year crowded with classics that include Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey, and Walker Percy’s (winning) The Moviegoer—Revolutionary Road fell into obscurity by the time of Yates’s death in 1992, though its critical reputation has risen since, and the novel was made into a 2008 movie staring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (who of course teamed up for the box office smash Titanic in 1997). Though unrelievedly grim, Revolutionary Road remains a landmark in the literature of postwar suburbia.
By many accounts, the bard of suburban literature is John Cheever. Cheever was perhaps best known for his short stories, among them “Country Doctor” (1954), in which a Westchester suburbanite attending a dinner party recognizes a maid as a Nazi collaborator he encountered while serving in the army in France, and “The Swimmer” (1964), an allegorical tale of a man who decides to make an eight-mile suburban journey home by hopscotching his way through his neighbors’ swimming pools. (It was made into an acclaimed 1968 movie starring Burt Lancaster.) Cheever also wrote a series of novels with proto-suburban and suburban settings, among them The Wapshot Chronicles (1957), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), and Bullet Park (1969).
The most immediate point of comparison to Ford’s Bascombe novels, however, is the fiction of John Updike, specifically his quartet of books chronicling the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest 1990). Updike tells the story of a former high school basketball star from greater Philadelphia who finds prosperity as the owner of a Toyota dealership even as he restlessly grapples with the social changes of his time, notable among them those of race and sex. The latter two books in the series won Pulitzer Prizes. Ford has described Updike, about whom he wrote an undergraduate thesis, as “a great and majestic writer, and anything I might’ve learned from him I gladly concede.” But he reported in that 2014 New Yorker exchange with his editor at the magazine that he had only read Rabbit is Rich in its entirety. Ford sees a key difference between the Rabbit and Bascombe books in their narration: Rabbit in the third-person, and Bascombe in the first, “which creates a very different moral positioning.”*
What may set Ford apart from his literary forebears is the degree to which he not only accepts suburbia for what it is, but sees bona fide possibilities in it. “On my suburban walks,” Frank reflects at the end of Be Mine, the last installment of his story, “I have plenty of time and inspiration to think about the character of my life project. We undervalue the suburbs, even the richest, most unwelcoming of them, by believing they can’t facilitate such inquiries and by facilitating them hasten the spirit to take flight. I fully enjoy my walks along the curving, manicured, palm and bougainvillea-lined sidewalks, past the asset-class dwellings hidden behind boxwoods, brick walls and dense bamboo curtains.” Ford is also distinctive in that unlike Sloan’s Connecticut, Cheever’s New York, and Updike’s Pennsylvania, he stakes his ground in New Jersey. Ford has called his saga a “paean” to the Garden State. “It’s never seemed wrong. New Jersey is a wonderful place; I love it.” Though his own landscapes tend to be different, Springsteen would agree.
One key similarity between Updike and Ford—and, for that matter, Springsteen—is that their dramas unfold in the present tense. “All these novels and stories are at least partly about Frank’s effort to live vitally in the present,” Ford has said of his work. “They’re all told in present-tense verbs, as though to corroborate Wittgenstein’s assertion that ‘to live eternally is to live in the present.’ It seems to me that to live in the present (and, of course, that’s a term of art, which merely stresses one’s effort to live vitally at all) … one has to escape the vitiating grasp of the past.”
Springsteen’s songs, like pop music generally, have a similar immediacy, also managing to encompass past and future even as they’re centered in the present. There is of course the urgent intensity of Highway 9 in “Born to Run,” fueled by a fear of entrapment, but there are plenty of more meditative examples. “Tonight here in Linden Town / I watch the cars rushin’ home from the mill,” reports the narrator of “Mansion on the Hill,” emerging from melancholy childhood reveries of skulking on the edges of the mansion’s vitality (“In the summer all the lights would shine / There’d be music playin’, people laughing all time time.) The narrator of “Long Walk Home” describes walking by a Freehold grocery store and barber shop, haunted by the fact that the faces he now sees in his hometown “are strangers to me.” Here, by way of comparison, is the opening of Ford’s Bascombe story “I’m Here,” also haunted by loss, in this case in that inflicted in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy: “The starchy zest of Tyvek mingled with the ocean’s sulfurous weft and Barnegat Bay’s landward stink. It is the air of full-on disaster.” Like Springsteen’s characters, Bascombe spends a lot of time in his car and rendering descriptions like this image from The Lay of the Land: “Route 37, the Tom’s River Miracle Mile, is already jammed at 9:30 with shopper vehicles moving in and out of every conceivable second-tier factory outlet lot, franchise and big-box store, until we’re mostly stalled in intersection tie-ups under screaming signage and horn cacophony.” Such passages may be what Springsteen had in mind in saying that they “nail the Jersey Shore perfectly.”
* In an intertextual wink in the final Bascombe installment, Be Mine, Ford has his protagonist describe himself as “a doomed-to-fail scribbler of mid-century short stories of the sort that showed up in The New Yorker, written by John Cheever and John Updike (mine never did even once).” [86] By my count, Ford has published 17 short stories in The New Yorker since 1987. The magazine has essentially stopped publishing the work of white men in recent years.