Introduction The Time of the Suburb The American suburbs are not what they were. Since the late 1960s, economic deregulation, the decentralisation of employment and shifts in immigration policy have been reshaping the nation’s metropolitan areas. Demographic and social change, from African American suburbanisation to the rise of dual-income households, has made anachronisms of many commonplace assumptions about the suburbs. Much of suburbia today resembles a vast, bewildering patchwork. Closer scrutiny of its quotidian operations, however, reveals complexes of nodes, conduits and territories, and interactions taking place at local, regional and global scales. The dynamism and diversity of suburban spatiality has licenced a neologising zeal: terms such as ‘technoburbs’, ‘edge cities’ and ‘ethnoburbs’ jostle for attention as commentators attempt to make sense of emergent forms and processes. This proliferating nomenclature arguably describes a post-suburban – or even postmetropolitan – present in which the traditional polarities of city and suburb no longer serve as useful paradigms, whether for planners and developers or activists for social justice.1 Several official metrics, however, continue to recognise ‘suburban’ as a category, and register that an ever-increasing proportion of the nation’s population live and work in suburbs.2 Further, in the US, suburbs usually designate discrete political entities that are fiscally independent from nearby urban municipalities. Authoritative definitions of place, of course, do not always correspond with local perceptions and practices. Nevertheless, the boundaries between cities and suburbs, as well as an appreciation of the distinct qualities of different kinds of settlement, undoubtedly inform the everyday stories that people tell about the places they inhabit. Such stories, in turn, help reify place. Where there is social conflict, rival claims to places generate competing stories. Thus in metropolitan areas in the US, place-making is so often predicated on a sense of the suburban, though both within particular and across different communities that sense is rarely unitary. One thing, though, is certain: no one trying to narrate a broader story about the American suburbs will be able to make much sense of these places without first appreciating their composite, interconnected, evolving and contested nature. This book examines literary and cultural material produced after 1960 which responds to the socio-spatial transformations that have been taking place across metropolitan America. Despite the repeated claims of geographers, economists and environmentalists about its obsolescence both as a concept and as a way of life, the suburb continues to provide American literature a principal setting and narrative framework. Suburbia’s enduring interest has much to do with its unabating proliferation and diversification. The suburban story is still being told because the suburb is still coming into being. This book is not, however, primarily a study of recent literary engagements with newly emergent spatial forms. Neither am I trying to argue, as some scholars have, that a single epochal event has altered the course of a literary tradition by precipitating a radically different approach to narrating the American suburbs.3 Rather, The Literature of Suburban Change focuses on the ongoing attempts by authors to articulate the temporal dimensions of suburbia. The suburbs, I contend, are conceptualised in late-twentieth-century writing both as being in process across time and as places which have accumulated significant histories. The attention paid by writers to the ongoing development of places and to their continually evolving histories has reshaped the suburban story. Further, over the last half century it has proliferated across a range of forms and genres, exploiting and adapting those narrative modes that are most clearly defined by sequentiality or historicity: the novel sequence, gothic fiction, the short story cycle, the memoir, and comics. By examining a range of literary and cultural modes, this book asserts the formal diversity and innovation of suburban stories, which, I argue, advance a more complex and productive understanding of suburbs – and spatiality more broadly – as incomplete, as networked, as plural. Such complexity contrasts with prevailing constructions of the American suburbs as standing outside of time and of history. A re-temporalised suburbia, I further contend, has the potential to interrupt and even disable narratives whose relative simplicity disguises structures of middle-class white privilege and obscures the causes and consequences of environmental change. By attending to the temporalities of suburbs across diverse narrative forms, this book not only revises the established literary history of late-twentieth-century American suburbia but also enables more responsible reflection on the contemporary challenges and potential futures of metropolitan America. From Instant Suburbs to Suburban History My opening sketch of suburbia and its representations in literature as heterogeneous, interconnected and in flux may seem fantastic to some readers. It is certainly true that some American suburbs are less diverse than others. Much the same thing, however, could be said of urban and rural areas. Moreover, recent scholarship has shown American suburbia to be an increasingly diverse region overall by a variety of measures.4 But there are reasons for why it is still difficult to conceive of the suburbs as changing and for why it is hard to see them as having meaningful histories. Within the ‘suburban imaginary’ – the discursive domain in which images of and stories about the suburbs circulate – a decidedly narrow and static set of tropes prevails. Such stereotypes are easily observed. Entering the terms ‘suburban novel’ or ‘movie suburbs’ into an online search engine gives a good illustration of not only what seem to be the main preoccupations of cultural texts with suburban settings, but also the dominant frames through which such texts are appraised. Topping the results pages of my own recent searches were lists proclaiming the ‘10 Classic Stories of Suburban Ennui’, ‘9 Novels of Suburban Desolation’, ‘21 Novels about Being Trapped in Suburbia’, ‘10 great dark suburbia films’, and ‘10 Ridiculously Hellish Suburbs in Movies’.5 Although it is hard to measure exactly how influential such sites are, their salience in the results pages is a consequence of the search engine’s algorithms, which determine a site’s relevance by, among other things, the number of other pages that link to it. The sites I have curated here, then, are likely to be among the most frequently visited by browsers intent on discovering more about suburban representation. Like so many of the innumerable lists online and elsewhere that compile canons of cultural texts, my examples bespeak the pleasures of cataloguing, of distinguishing generic patterns and of creating hierarchies. But the broadly shared themes across the lists I have collated evince also a connoisseurship of malaise. Evidently, disorder and disaffection are the principal themes through which narratives set in suburbs are made intelligible as suburban stories. Although of course each was produced separately and independently, taken together the lists do seem also to discern a tradition, with recognisably ‘classic stories’ and a more recent self-conscious turn in which the suburban milieu has become ‘ridiculously hellish’. But right across the generic cycle these texts are understood to be telling the same story again and again. Moreover, these lists indicate that ennui, entrapment and other kinds of suffering provide the situations and affects that make these texts so enjoyable. My point here is not to provide sanctimonious prescriptions for more suitable responses to the pain of others. Rather, I mean to query what kind of cultural work is being done by suburban stories and the ways that they are routinely codified, and, further, to speculate on the significance of the disjunction between this narrowly defined tradition and the dramatic transformations that have been taking place across metropolitan America over the last half century. Might it be that the predictability of these stories provides a soothing distraction from the complexities of and responsibilities to the present? Might they represent strategies of ‘spatial purification’? Or, to put it another way, could it be that the endless re-telling of the tribulations of conformist, inhibited or neurotic suburbanites is the simplest way of keeping white middle-class people centre stage? This singular, pessimistic narrative persists in part because few if any competing stories are recognised to exist. Indeed, usually suburbs are presumed to have no other history, or really any history worth speaking of at all. Their apparent depthlessness is demonstrated over and over by the ersatz historicity of so much suburban architecture, despite the long tradition in the US of using revival styles in residential building.6 Further, suburbanites seem a rootless lot. In Place and Placelessness the humanistic geographer Edward Relph notes the interchangeability of ‘home’ for modern Americans, who move on average every three years. While he acknowledges that transience does not inevitably lead to placelessness, Relph contends that mobility has a corrosive effect on people’s capacity to feel strong attachments to place. Indeed, he links the radical mobility of people, products and ideas to the spread of a homogenising mass-culture that promotes inauthentic attitudes to place. Such attitudes are defined as ‘involving no awareness of the deep and symbolic significances of places and no appreciation of their identities’. Such inauthenticity is the hallmark of life in the suburbs, for their uniformity precludes the very possibility of ‘deep or symbolic significance’.7 A lack of authentic involvement, moreover, leads to places becoming de-temporalised. For Relph, ‘this does not mean just that there is no awareness of history, but also, and more profoundly, that places can become almost independent of time’.8 Thus, in Relph’s view, suburban rootlessness leads directly to an equally disconcerting timelessness. Fellow humanist Yi-Fu Tuan is more sanguine about the potential for placeattachment in suburbs, in part because he acknowledges suburban diversity. He also recognises the inevitability of suburban change. However, Tuan understands a suburb to be merely a stage in the process of urbanisation: ‘The suburb is at the frontier of metropolitan expansion. It is a society coming into being, a society undergoing change, at the end of which is urban culture.’9 In other words, suburbs do not usually stay suburbs for long. The arrival of people not usually associated with suburban settlement – African Americans, say, or lesbians and gay men – is often taken as indicative of a suburb’s urbanisation.10 Thus, suburbs cannot change; they can only change into something else. Indeed, Tuan’s account leaves almost no scope for any meaningful understanding of suburban history. Suburbs constitute at most a brief window of spacetime within a wholly predictable developmental trajectory. Given that geographers are liable to portray modern suburbs as being detached from temporal processes, it should come as no surprise that more readily accessible representations do just the same. The suburban imaginary from the postwar years to the present has been dominated by a narrow and unchanging repertoire of images that present uniform, static landscapes. Were I to repeat my previous internet search, this time limiting its remit to just visual depictions of suburbs, I would be confronted with page after page of photographs with mostly the same perspective: bird’s-eye views revealing highly patterned but entirely depopulated arrangements of uniform streets and houses.11 The writer D. J. Waldie, whose work I discuss at length in Chapter 3, has drawn attention to the role of aerial photography in shaping the way American suburbs are conceived. The abstract renderings of the first planned residential suburbs, such as Lakewood, California, depict their subjects in various stages of incompletion and always before anyone has moved in. Ironically, although these photographs ‘were factually out of date as soon as the prints were dry, the anxieties they evoked became perfectly timeless’. Indeed, Waldie contends, this small stock of images informs so much anti-suburban criticism. More than sixty years after they were taken, the same photographs ‘still serve as a model for how the “no place” of suburbia is to be simultaneously imagined and rejected’.12 What has helped sustain these images’ currency is their confirmation of a sense of the suburb’s instantaneity. In the early post-war years, mass-produced units of housing were often described as having appeared simultaneously out of nowhere. In one of the most influential books of the 1950s, The Organization Man, William H. Whyte describes the emergence of a conformist ‘other-directed’ culture linked to ‘the great package suburbs that have sprung up outside our cities since the war’.13 Two decades later Tuan would observe that ‘the most singular feature in modern metropolitan expansion is its speed and scale. Suburbs appeared “overnight.” They have the character of a “rush.”’14 His quotation marks indicate the hardening of commentary into commonplace. There is no doubting that suburban growth was in fact more rapid and extensive during the post-war years than at any previous time. At the close of World War II the US was ill-prepared for the sudden demand for housing in the wake of demobilisation and the baby boom. The crisis was mitigated by the endeavours of large builders, the most famous being the Levitts, who pioneered mass-production techniques in the development of three huge subdivisions in the Northeast. Simplicity of design, industrial methods of construction and massive federal subsidies yielded housing that was irresistibly affordable.15 But the language of instantaneity serves to dematerialise the processes of production and denies these places any capacity for future change. Indeed, many of the early critics who castigated the post-war suburbs for their dulling uniformity and oppressive conformism presumed that the object of their derision had reached its full and final form. For example, in his magnum opus The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford tells the long story of suburbanisation and suggests that suburbs have always served ‘as an experimental field for the development of a new type of open plan and a new distribution of urban functions’. But the post-war mass-produced suburb is denounced as ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste’.16 Mumford’s much-quoted caricature, which rather obviously takes its cue from the bleak panoramas of aerial photography, forecloses any possibility of the suburbs providing ‘an experimental field’. They are a fully formed, massified excrescence, and a betrayal of the autonomy that suburbanisation once promised to the select few. His infamous dismissal of Levittown, New York as an ‘instant slum’ is an even starker example of the mass-produced suburbs’ detemporalisation by an elite, city-dwelling critic.17 This quality of instantaneity not only denies the suburbs any historicity, it also absolves the critic from any requirement to be sensitive to historical context. Hence the repeated deployment of the perspective of the aerial photographer across six decades of criticism.18 Instantaneity is an eminently portable motif. The timelessness that critics insist is the product of massproduced suburbs in fact provides the very basis for their attacks. One of the main aims of this book, then, is to try to give time back to the suburbs by examining the ways writers have exploited different narrative forms to articulate more complex stories that demonstrate how suburbs, and their pasts, are still in production. By doing so, The Literature of Suburban Change dismantles a critical platform whose familiar contours have facilitated decades of selective, complacent discourse. One of my central aims, therefore, is to ‘reactivate’ the suburbs, to present them as urgent, living sites whose spatial and temporal dimensions are still being explored. For sure, the innumerable excoriations of the post-war suburbs did not go uncontested. As early as 1961, the sociologist Bennett Berger took issue with the ‘myth of suburbia’, which he argued had become established through the repeated characterisation of suburban settlement as ‘a new way of life’ defined by transience and homogeneity. For Berger, the insistent focus on the trials of commuting and the kinds of hyperactive socialising that were presumed to lead to surveillance, conformity and a rightward shift of political allegiances did not constitute falsification so much as highly selective reporting. A small number of studies of planned residential developments settled by white-collar populations had come to represent a nationwide phenomenon. Thus the considerable heterogeneity of suburbs was overlooked. Certainly, there was no attempt to appraise the conditions of blue-collar suburbs, which was Berger’s principal interest.19 The myth of suburbia flourished in large part because it confirmed the general outlook of various schools of opinion, most notably that of ‘not-quite-completely-critical’ left-wing intellectuals for whom, declares Bennett, the suburb provided a relatively safe target. It is a stance that places the critic ‘comfortably in the great tradition of social criticism’, rendering him both ‘respectable and harmless’ – harmless because his critique is cultural rather than political and economic, and threatens no entrenched interests and contains ‘no direct implications for agitation or concerted action’.20 In his landmark participant-observer study of the residents of the third Levittown to be built, in New Jersey, Herbert Gans similarly takes critics to task for depicting suburbanites as ‘mindless conformers’ who have ‘allowed themselves to be swayed by builders, the mass media, and their neighbours’. For Gans, these prejudices are primarily a product of class: the likes of Lewis Mumford believe in the universality of their own upper-middle-class urban cosmopolitanism while ‘refus[ing] to acknowledge the existence of lower-middle-class and working-class ways of living’.21 Gans’s conclusions were far more nuanced than of those who peddled the myth of suburbia. Hyperactive socialising, he determined, was not an unknown phenomenon in Levittown, but it was a phase which occurred out of necessity during the earliest stages of settlement. Conformity indeed prevailed, ‘though less as malicious or passive copying than as sharing of useful ideas’.22 And while Levittown was homogenous in terms of race, age and income, such homogeneity was ‘more statistical than real’. In fact, by ethnic and religious criteria, Levittown was more diverse than many urban neighbourhoods; meanwhile, the population’s narrow income range disguised many permutations of occupational and educational status.23 Lastly, Gans acknowledges that people’s lives were changed by the move to suburbia, though only in degree. In any case, the changes were usually both anticipated and desired, and were ‘only expressions of more widespread societal changes and national cultural goals’.24 Despite the interventions of Bennett, Gans and others, the conventional critical view of the suburbs – an extensive but narrow body of commentary that the historian Paul H. Mattingly calls the ‘suburban canon’ – takes for granted their homogeneity and their timelessness.25 Yet there exists a rich historiography of suburbanisation, of which Mumford’s contribution is an early highlight, and from which The Literature of Suburban Change draws inspiration.26 Pioneering studies published in the 1980s, most notably Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier (1985), offer particularly detailed accounts of suburban development in mid-twentieth century America. The many sprawling post-war subdivisions, whose progress has been frozen in innumerable aerial photographs, largely owe their existence, these histories show, to a series of initiatives in federal housing policy that commenced during the Great Depression. By far the most important of these was the establishment in 1934 of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), whose purpose was to generate employment by stimulating the moribund construction industry. The FHA transformed home finance, principally by indemnifying private lenders against losses on new mortgages. With home loans subsequently posing little financial risk to lenders, interest rates tumbled. With new financial instruments such as fully amortised loans helping to further slash premiums and down payments, homeownership came within the grasp of many for whom it had previously been an unrealisable dream. Indeed, in most instances buying was a more affordable option than renting, and housing starts accelerated throughout the late 1930s. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, established the Veterans Administration. The VA, whose purpose was to help returning military personnel purchase homes, mostly employed the same procedures as the FHA. According to Jackson, between 1934 and 1968 ‘both the FHA and the VA (since 1944) have had a remarkable record of accomplishment’. Over roughly the same period, rates of owner-occupation in the US rose from 44 to 63 percent.27 The FHA programme spurred suburbanisation in part through its establishment of minimum standards for home construction. By the end of the 1930s these requirements had become closely modelled on newly built, free-standing suburban homes, which, according to Jackson, eliminated whole categories of dwelling, such as the traditional narrow rowhouses of eastern cities, from eligibility for loan guarantees.28 More significant, though, was the FHA’s wholesale adoption of a geography of risk articulated first and foremost by residential security maps. These documents were the innovation of another New Deal institution, the Home Owners Loans Corporation (HOLC), which had been set up in 1933 to offer relief to homeowners threatened with foreclosure. The infamous HOLC maps, which I return to in Chapter 2, offered a granular assessment of the long-term value of real estate in several US metropolitan areas. Individual neighbourhoods were categorised according to how likely property was judged to hold its value. Newly built, higherincome, entirely white and architecturally homogenous neighbourhoods – typically suburban in location – received the highest security grades. Areas with older, denser and more diverse housing stock and with poorer and ethnically mixed or predominantly black populations – almost always located in central cities – were much more likely to be considered ‘declining’ or ‘hazardous’. The refusal of the FHA to back mortgages for property in low-grade areas encouraged further decentralisation, and stripped cities of their middle-class residents. African Americans and immigrants were largely prevented from joining the outflux by racially restrictive covenants and zoning laws designed to prevent the infiltration of wealthier residential neighbourhoods by poorer residents. Consequently working-class, black and ethnic minority populations were pinned in rapidly declining cities, where redlining precluded them from obtaining loans to purchase homes. In these ways federal intervention both encouraged racial and class segregation through suburbanisation and led to disinvestment in increasingly nonwhite cities. The privileges of suburban living were further subsidised through the development of infrastructure. A massive nationwide, federally funded programme of highway construction ensued in 1956. The biggest beneficiaries, naturally, were automobile manufacturers and operators in attendant industries. But those who owned or who were able to purchase cars and homes in the suburbs certainly benefited from government actions far more than their materially less-fortunate counterparts, and all too frequently the new highways that connected suburbs to central cities bifurcated or obliterated neighbourhoods settled by people of colour.29 According to Jackson, federal housing policies were not however a necessary condition for the post-war suburban explosion: ‘the dominant residential drift in American cities had been toward the periphery for at least a century before the New Deal, and there is no reason to assume the suburban trend would not have continued in the absence of direct federal assistance’.30 Indeed, historians such as Jackson, Robert Fishman and John Stilgoe have each attempted to take a much longer view of suburbanisation, and focus on the ways public policy, technological innovation, entrepreneurial desire and cultural change have combined across two centuries to transform the geography of metropolitan America.31 Typically these histories distinguish a number of successive stages to suburbanisation. Writing in 2003, Delores Hayden identifies the evolution of seven vernacular patterns: Building in the borderlands began in 1820. Picturesque enclaves started around 1850 and streetcar buildout around 1870. Mail-order and self-built suburbs arrived in 1900. Mass-produced, urban-scale ‘sitcom’ suburbs appeared around 1940. Edge nodes coalesced around 1960. Rural fringes intensified around 1980. All of these patterns survive in the metropolitan areas of 2003. Many continue to be constructed.32 Hayden, however, distinguishes her study from earlier suburban historiography. Instead of focusing on developments to transport technology, her own work concentrates on the relations between real estate entrepreneurs and suburban residents and workers. An emphasis on commuting, she argues, has allowed the experience of middle- and upper-middle-class male breadwinners to eclipse that of women and children, and has also obscured the cross-class constituency of many suburbs. Indeed, Hayden’s analysis helps to expose a problem with the earlier or ‘classic’ histories: they, like the post-war critiques of the suburbs, suffer from being selective. As the title of Fishman’s 1987 book, Bourgeois Utopias, suggests, the focus once again is on middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs. Despite attending to the multiple forces driving the de-concentration of American cities, these histories hardly register suburban diversity. The presumption that suburbanisation in the US is a story solely about white middle-class residential settlement strikes out the development of industrial and working-class suburbs from history. In fact, suburbs have also long harboured enclaves of people who service wealthier suburbanites. While Jackson helpfully explicated how federal policies and local initiatives led to the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities from suburbs, he rather assumed these strategies worked flawlessly. Indeed, as Andrew Wiese has it, ‘historians have done a better job excluding African Americans from the suburbs than even white suburbanites’.33 In his 2005 study Places of Their Own, Wiese argues that black suburbanisation between 1960 and 2000 is as significant a demographic shift as the Great Migration. African American settlement on the urban periphery in the post-war years marks the emergence of a new black middle class, but Wiese also illuminates earlier histories of pioneering working-class African Americans whose communities provided a foundation for subsequent migration. Wiese explores how, regardless of their economic circumstances, ‘across the US suburbanisation was a cumulative process linked through time and space by contested racial struggle and the desire of black families to create places of their own’.34 A further criticism of the early histories is their tendency to present suburbs as self-contained spaces. While offering persuasively detailed accounts of suburbs’ internal social and physical characteristics, the first wave of historiography largely ignores the relations between suburbs and cities and between different settlements on the periphery. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue insist that a proper understanding of suburban development is only possible with a ‘metropolitan outlook’: that is, one which recognises that ‘the histories of cities and suburbs are fundamentally intertwined, even as municipal boundaries kept them separate’, and which pays particular attention to the ‘contests for power taking place in the struggles over policy, money and the law’, and the ways these conflicts have shaped modern America.35 The interventions of Hayden, Wiese, and Kruse and Sugrue are then each explicitly revisionist. Together they contribute to a second wave of historiography sometimes referred to as the ‘New Suburban History’.36 The Literature of Suburban Change takes a leaf from the New Suburban History to the extent that it insistently focuses on how writers have appraised the relationships between suburbs and other spaces. While most of the works I address were written by white authors and focus on middle- and upper-middle-class communities, they nevertheless range across a diversity of experience: of men and women, children and the elderly, and the upwardly mobile and the déclassé; but also, of drivers and pedestrians, writers and realtors, and recent immigrants and perennial outsiders. These stories even conceive of non-human agencies normally beyond the scope of historiography, including animals and buildings. Further, I show how these narratives are preoccupied by the ways suburban sites are contested through competing histories. Thus The Literature of Suburban Change demonstrates not only that the settings of suburban stories are, in vital ways, in process, but also that suburban pasts are being continually redefined and redeployed in order to make claims about the present and future. Who gets to author and narrate history and how they are enabled to do so are key concerns in this book. This should come as no surprise: the history of suburbanisation in the US is after all a history of the unequal distribution of resources; narrative, arguably, is just another resource. But I am equally exercised by how certain narrative modes help to legitimise and delegitimise specific voices and positions. Indeed, the book’s first three chapters examine texts whose form enables them to interrogate and even problematise the presumed universality – and therefore the authority – of white middle-class male perspectives that continue to dominate the suburban story. By contrast, the fourth and fifth chapters and the book’s conclusion focus mainly on texts whose arrangement serves to articulate not only diverse voices but also multiple temporalities. Broadly, then, The Literature of Suburban Change is shaped by a trajectory towards increasingly complex narrative forms and complex renderings of suburban spatiality. Theorising Suburban Complexity To view places not as static enclaves defined by singular identities but instead as conjunctures of multiple trajectories has important and far-reaching consequences, and not only for conceptualising suburbs and the stories we tell about them. The supposedly more intuitive perspective, which sees space as merely inert or purely abstract and which presumes places to be detached and fully formed unities, can limit the political imagination in potentially harmful ways. Such attitudes are liable to mystify the larger forces and flows that produce space, and obscure continuing conflicts over place and the possibilities of spatial change. Worse, they can enable a retreat into isolationism and give credence to chauvinist, exceptionalist narratives about situated communities imagined on both local and national scales. As Doreen Massey argues, to emphasise that space is instead the product of interrelations, is shaped by multiplicity, and is always unfinished, in development, helps elucidate a ‘range of connections between the imagination of the spatial and the imagination of the political’.37 For sure, the task of explicating the political dimensions of space and place has been a central objective of thinkers who have participated in the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Attending to the ongoing assemblages of space and of place, however, helps to clarify the ways a progressive politics of spatiality co-ordinates with the principal campaigns of late-twentieth-century critical theory: the rejection of grand narratives; an insistence on the genuine openness of the future; a commitment to anti-essentialism; and a focus on difference and heterogeneity.38 Massey has probably been more determined than any other theorist in demanding that space be conceived in ways which foreground its multiplicity, its ongoing production, and its interactions across various scales. Other thinkers, however – whether their work emerges out of the tradition of humanistic geography, which focuses on the subjective experience of place and the ways that places provide loci of meaning for humankind, or from the more radical tradition, in which Massey is situated, with its commitment to appraising how the production of space is defined by relations of power – have come to broadly similar conclusions. For instance, in his phenomenologically oriented treatise Place and Experience of 1999, Jeff Malpas insists on the complexity of place, which he holds to be, among other things, bounded yet permeable, nested and networked, and spatio-temporal in nature.39 As Eric Prieto observes, despite their very different starting points and priorities – respectively, the social-political dimensions of space, and the inseparability of individuals from their experience of place – Henri Lefebvre shares with Malpas a sense of place/space as a ramified formation that both shapes and is shaped by human agency.40 Throughout The Literature of Suburban Change, I engage with the arguments of humanistic as well as radical geographers, not only because articulations of spatiality’s complexity are forthcoming from both traditions, but also because of their mutual interest in narrative. For humanistic geographers such as Nicholas Entrikin, it is narrative that produces a logical grasping together of elements, which in turn transforms a mere site into a meaningful place.41 Radical geographers, as ever, are more concerned with dynamics of power. So, when Michel de Certeau discusses ‘spatial stories’, he is exercised by the question of which narratives get to be authorised as well as what forms of behaviour are sanctioned by official narratives and which are delegitimised.42 I understand the texts that I examine in this book to be narratives that make meaningful the very idea of suburban space and place. Further, these texts, whether traditionally realist or explicitly metafictional, continually draw attention to the role of narrative in the creation and contestation of place-based identities. Such self-reflexivity, I contend, provides scope for a much more politicised understanding of suburban stories and suburban spatiality. Attentive readers will have noticed the careful alignment in the previous paragraph of the term ‘place’ with the concerns of humanistic geographers and ‘space’ with their radical counterparts. The differentiation is intentional and registers the distinct intellectual trajectory of each tradition, as well as divergent assumptions about methodology and politics. Theoretical interest in ‘place’ in the Anglophone academy gained ground from the 1970s and marked a reaction against a hegemonic scientism which presumed that only positivistic modes of enquiry could produce reliable and useful forms of geographical knowledge. Bolstered by their engagement with a continental European tradition of phenomenological thought, humanistic geographers re-asserted subjective experience of place as a worthwhile object of intellectual scrutiny. Moreover, places were understood to constitute, in Edward Relph’s words, ‘the profound centers of human experience’; the intentionality that defines being in place comprises the very essence of what it is to be human.43 Further, for humanistic geographers a keen sense of place both encourages greater moral accountability, by generating what Yi-Fu Tuan calls ‘fields of care’, and provides a bulwark against the homogenising forces of global modernity.44 By contrast, for radical geographers the scientific associations of ‘space’ have been welcome. The term’s more abstract cast is suggestive of mobility, freedom and political possibility. ‘Place’, on the other hand, is either denigrated or avoided altogether: it suffers from associations with tradition, nostalgia and, worse, an atavistic territorialism. Further, the presumed connection between Heidegger’s valorisation of rooted place and his Nazism has prompted a reciprocal turning away from phenomenology by radical geographers. I, however, am not motivated to elevate one term over the other, largely because I understand both space and place to be socially produced and therefore similarly complex. For sure, ‘space’ better facilitates generalisation about geographical arrangements and relationships, whereas ‘place’ helps to particularise them. ‘Place’ designates a location and material setting made meaningful by people through various kinds of practice, though these meanings are rarely if ever stable or fully shared. ‘Spatiality’ substitutes ‘space and place’, providing a superordinate term that also helpfully connotes the complexities that I have been foregrounding. Another dyad that is invoked again and again by cultural geographers is that of space and representation. Despite their interest in the politics of narrative, many radical geographers evince a deeply felt suspicion about the representation, as opposed to the lived experience, of space. The concerns have a similar basis to those that motivate the repudiation of place: representation tames, stabilises the spatial. For Lefebvre and especially de Certeau, the representation of space is closely associated with the tools of technocratic management: maps, plans, scientific writing and other abstractions. For de Certeau, the abstract panoramic projections of architects, planners and cartographers are ‘a way of keeping aloof’ from everyday life; the condition of possibility of these ‘facsimile[s] is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practice’.45 Such mapping deadens, denies real life its dynamism and flow, and thus prevents true becoming. As Massey observes, these repudiations of representation reveal a presumption that time can be ‘captured’ by space. Thus, space constitutes an inferior dimension; the liveliness of the world is ultimately defined by temporality. De Certeau’s implicit denigration of space would appear to be a residual formation, a hangover from the ‘epoch of history’, during which temporality provided the principal frame for appraising human endeavour.46 Of course, not all representations of space constitute technologies of control. Lefebvre considers certain kinds of artistic practice as capable of harnessing the complex symbolisms of ‘bodily lived experience’ to resist authoritative representational frameworks designed to regulate social life. However, these interventions are conceived not so much as mimetic (and hence stabilising) than as ongoing practices, continuous productions that are part of and engaged with the world.47 As such these practices transcend the traditional binary of space and representation; they are constitutive of what Edward Soja refers to as ‘thirdspace’, or ‘real-and-imagined space’.48 Massey contends that all kinds of representation, even the scientific, might reasonably be conceived of as ‘productive and experimental, rather than simply mimetic, and an embodied knowledge rather than a mediation.’ What would be even more useful, she suggests, is to appreciate that representations do not merely capture the temporality of human life; rather, they articulate its spatiotemporality.49 This would appear to be at the heart of Bertrand Westphal’s ‘geocritical’ approach. Harnessing the ideas of Soja and other postmodern spatial theorists, Westphal insists on the usefulness of engaging with ‘literature and the mimetic arts’. Indeed, he says, ‘the space-time revealed at the intersections of various mimetic representations is this third space that geocriticism proposes to explore. Geocriticism will work to map possible worlds, to create plural and paradoxical maps, because it embraces space in its mobile heterogeneity’.50 How might suburban representation constitute an ongoing production of embodied knowledge that registers its spatial as well as its temporal dimensions? In Sprawling Places (2008), the philosopher David Kolb makes some useful suggestions for reconfiguring the ways in which we conceptualise and represent suburban space. Kolb notes that the American suburbs are typically measured against traditional standards of space which privilege unity, centredness and symmetry. That these are obviously aesthetic categories begins to explain why the harshest critics of suburbs are preoccupied by their aesthetic shortcomings. Kolb, however, is not concerned to make a case for sprawl being an under-appreciated architectural marvel, and he acknowledges many of manifest problems associated with suburbanisation, from environmental despoliation to the unequal distribution of the social costs of low-density living. Kolb insists, though, that the frequently expressed contempt for suburbs and many other contemporary places in the US is misguided because it fails to register their complexity. Typically, critics do not appreciate sprawling places’ interconnections – or potential connections – with other locations and wider processes; neither do they register how such environments change over time. Perceiving this complexity is necessary but not easy, for it ‘demands a sensitivity to contours and links that are more than spatial’.51 What is required are ways of enhancing this complexity, and strategies for making these connections more obvious. The practice of making suburbs more self-aware can take place at several levels. Architects, designers and planners can both reveal and compound the structural complexity of suburbs by emphasising borders, linkages and routes of action. Residents themselves might foreground the temporal processes of living in place through the small acts of modification to their own homes; indeed, says Kolb, ‘the cumulative effects of such bricolage could change the sense of the whole’.52 While wary of the fact that public art is all too often commissioned to celebrate a narrowly defined genius loci, Kolb suggests that artists too can contribute to the cause of making suburban places more self-aware. For instance, Tobias Armborst’s redesign of an ‘absolutely ordinary’ strip mall outside Cambridge, Massachusetts is commended as an attempt to clarify ‘the simultaneous presence of multiple temporalities’. By emphasising the different temporal activities of different groups of people the project successfully extends and makes visible ‘all these multiple and co-existing interpretations of this place’ without prettifying or transforming the mall into another kind of place. Indeed, by intensifying what is already there, Armborst’s work ‘enhances everyday experience, building in a kind of ordinary magic that was absent in [the] mall’s previous everyday life’.53 Kolb does not directly countenance an equivalent role for literature, but he does conclude suggestively with the claim that a more complex suburbia will be ‘reread and remade without ever coming together hierarchically. As a shared story, its narrative form […] will be a joining of episodes where each has more than one focus as it moves and links in many directions at once’.54 The novels, short stories, memoirs, comics and plays examined in this book accord with Kolb’s suggestions insofar as these materials are centrally concerned with suburban complexity and typically are shaped by multiple focuses and movements. Most of the literary texts I discuss are indeed interested in the idea of suburbia’s being a ‘shared story’. Sometimes this story is imagined as being singular and collective: a national narrative. More often – and perhaps more usefully – it is conceived of as being composite and plural. And, once again, these texts are preoccupied by the politics of narrating space: with the matter of who gets to tell whose story, with conflicting accounts of changing circumstances, and with contested histories. At the same time, this literature employs old forms with long histories to tell new stories. I ask then what kinds of formal innovation are required to make sense of the historicity of the suburbs, and what kinds of pressures these literary traditions bring to bear on attempts to articulate spatial change. Forms of the Suburban Story Alongside the New Suburban History, a flourishing body of scholarship has taken up the task of reckoning with cultural representations of the American suburbs. One of the most important literary studies in this new field remains Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora (2001). In this path-breaking book, Jurca argues that the suburban novel has long provided a vehicle for expressing the anguish of a white middle class that feels itself to be inauthentic and dispossessed despite, and sometimes because of, its evident affluence and security. Jurca calls such discursive chicanery ‘sentimental dispossession’ and argues that suburban-set fiction promulgates a ‘fantasy of victimisation’.55 Certainly, anything which makes clear how class and racial privileges come to be disavowed is enormously useful, and I draw on some of Jurca’s key observations on several occasions throughout this book. What is perhaps less helpful about Jurca’s argument is her assumption that the suburban story in the late twentieth century remains the ‘same as it ever was’, recycling the same clichéd imagery and manifesting the same self-pity.56 The likes of John Updike and Richard Ford are, in her view, merely inheritors of a tradition, rather than innovators. Jurca acknowledges that such writers have been ‘dedicated to charting the fluid contours and complex social and spatial geographies’ of an increasingly ‘polymorphous’ suburbia. But their appreciation of this new terrain is mere window dressing as they plough on with stories of suffering suburbanites.57 If this conclusion disappoints it is perhaps because it merely confirms what is already well known. As the online lists that I previously mentioned showed, suburban stories are not only recognised but also celebrated for their singular focus on middle-class distress. The historical flatness of Jurca’s study is also homologous to the repetitious deployments of aerial photography in anti-suburban criticism. My readings of Updike’s and Ford’s fiction, which I turn to in the next chapter, suggest that Jurca’s brief engagements with literary material published after 1960 are selective; I demonstrate instead how such writers keenly explore how suburbs have evolved as lived places and have provided scope for multiple though frequently contested place-based attachments. Kathy Knapp takes a different view to Jurca insofar as she identifies 9/11 as having had a galvanising and transformative effect on the literature of the American suburbs. In the 1990s authors of suburban-set fiction revelled in an orgy of destruction: novel after novel saw suburban homes razed by fire and flood; suburban families were routinely ripped apart by brutal acts of violence. That these tropes intensified almost beyond bearing underscore for Knapp how the suburbs and the suburban story were deemed by writers to be well past their sell-by date. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, such fantasies of devastation became unseemly. Moreover, the deadliest-ever single terrorist attack on US soil (and indeed the world) shattered any sense of security previously afforded by the suburbs. Indeed, contends Knapp, ‘the cohort of writers who have returned to this beat do not offer the postwar suburb as a retreat from the larger world but suggest that the world has come to the suburbs’.58 Post-9/11 novels, she argues, approach the suburbs through an aesthetic of contingency, fragility and open-endedness. Meanwhile, their white middle-class male protagonists demonstrate a willingness to hold themselves accountable for their past failures and, generally, twenty-first-century narratives advance a more ethical model for middle-class life that emphasises interdependence over independence. Knapp’s readings of her selected novels are, like Jurca’s, truly compelling and illuminating. But there is an obvious risk in loading one historical juncture with so much explanatory power. For, just as the laying waste to suburban houses is a habit that extends beyond 1990s fiction, a great many narratives published prior to 9/11 demonstrate the contingent nature of suburban communities.59 Indeed, as Joseph George shows in his excellent study of post-war American fiction, all manner of writers, from Richard Yates in the early 1960s to Gish Jen in the mid-1990s, have been concerned with the dynamics of what he terms ‘critical hospitality’, that is, the face-to-face interactions that go beyond the contractual requirements imposed by planning and law. A great many suburban stories published since World War II, George argues, in fact ‘highlight the messy and contingent results of infinite individuals sharing space with one another, making fractured and non-determining communities together’.60 Thus, transitions of the kind that Knapp identifies can easily be overstated. Like George’s, my approach is predominantly revisionist; I too seek to re-evaluate a narrative tradition that has persistently been understood in narrow terms. George, however, admits that the suburbs, in his reading, are ‘surprisingly static’: he understands that their most important role is to provide imaginary ‘stages’ for playing out scenarios that explore how people might better live with one another and with difference.61 George’s project of reimagining community and intersubjectivity is a vital one, though in The Literature of Suburban Change I am not content to read the suburbs as an inert backdrop. Where I focus on imagined communities in suburban narrative – in Chapter 3 in particular – I see them as always interacting with an understanding of the changing material circumstances and with the evolving histories of suburban spatiality. The studies of Jurca, Knapp and George each deal solely with novels. There are perhaps good reasons for presuming, as these and other scholars do, that the novel is the primary cultural vehicle for engaging with suburban life throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The tradition is as long as the corpus is extensive. But the novel’s dominion over the suburban imaginary has been abetted by the critical standards by which other literary modes are evaluated. In her important study, The Poetics of the American Suburbs (2011), Jo Gill suggests that the reason why poetry that addresses suburban themes and readerships has been largely ignored is a consequence of the failure of this material – much of it exhibiting characteristics of light verse – to meet ‘the perceived standard for recognition as “poetry”’. Hence the widespread but false assumption that poetry has nothing to say about suburbia.62 Gill argues to the contrary that, across the mid-twentieth century, poetry ‘devises a language, structure and voice appropriate to the physical and social formations of the contemporary suburbs’. The very best examples, indeed, display ‘an awareness of [poetry’s] own processes of perception, reflection and meaning production’.63 Those who have taken the novel as their focus have been noticeably less assiduous than Gill in attending to the formal and generic dimensions of suburban representation. Indeed, while they do give account of their own interpretive strategies, critics rarely see the novel as much more than a transparent receptacle, a container of stories, representations and so on. By contrast, questions about form are at the forefront of Timotheus Vermeulen’s innovative study of suburban space in film and television, Scenes from the Suburbs (2014). Vermeulen notes that suburban stories have been valued in popular criticism above all for their sociological insights, for their accurate depictions of Americans at home and at work. Meanwhile, academic engagements with the same material are driven by a historicising impulse; typically, scholars are preoccupied with the development of a distinct chronotope over time.64 For Vermeulen, neither approach adequately addresses the crucial matter of aesthetics. He contends that only careful analysis of rhythm, tone, stylistic register and so on can disclose how texts cohere as suburban stories, how suburbs not only feature in but structure the stories in which they feature. In other words, paying attention to aesthetics can help elucidate the ways that suburban representation and suburban spatiality are mutually constitutive, or as Vermeulen – echoing Lefebvre – puts it, how ‘the space of the US suburb is produced in the stories it produces’.65 To this end, Vermeulen sidelines historical concerns and selects material that he considers representative of leading generic trends in contemporary film and television. Focusing on the contemporary of course does not, and indeed should not, necessarily preclude historicism, but I applaud Vermeulen’s commitment to exploring how aesthetic elements combine to produce a sense of the suburbs. In similar fashion to Vermeulen’s study, each of my book’s five chapters examines a discrete literary form or genre: the novel sequence, the gothic novel, memoir, comics, and the short story cycle; in addition, my conclusion reflects on some recent two-act plays. Each chapter investigates how these modes have shaped, and have been shaped by, a concern with suburban spatiality. Unlike Vermeulen, however, I consider it necessary to appraise the historical development of each form. There are two main reasons for this. First, many of the texts I discuss are innovative in various ways. Their adaptations of specific forms of writing are responses to, and help make meaningful, the complex processes of suburban change. An appreciation of the innovativeness of the texts under examination necessitates a longer view of the literary traditions in which they participate. Second, each mode has a particularly long and close association with the suburban and the domestic. Despite this latter fact, little critical attention has been paid to any of them as vehicles for the suburban story; once again, a consideration of novels – and, specifically, their narrative content – has dominated scholarship. As for my choice of particular texts, I do not presume that a single case study can represent an entire literary mode. Each chapter therefore examines multiple examples. I draw attention to the divergences and well as the similarities between texts operating within particular formal and generic traditions. Indeed, the aim of this book, which I hope is clear by this stage, is not to achieve the kind of spatial purification that popular reports and some scholarly studies presume is the function of suburban stories; a certain messiness, or complexity, befits my subject. The earliest text that I examine in detail is John Updike’s breakthrough novel Rabbit, Run, which was first published in 1960. The most recent, Heide Solbrig’s transmedia project Dandelion King, is still in progress. What these very different texts have in common with each other and with the numerous others that I discuss in this book is the way they attend to developing suburban forms, which often originate from earlier in the twentieth century. Indeed, I contend that the late twentieth- and twentyfirst-century suburban story is defined by an appreciation of the historicity of its setting. Inevitably, however, this historicity is produced differently across different literary forms, with varying implications for present-day suburbia and for future developments. In Chapter 1, which focuses on novel sequences, I describe this sense of the past as ‘metropolitan memory’, as its province is congruent with entire city regions. I argue that a metropolitan perspective – enabled by innumerable commuting journeys – better facilitates an appreciation of suburban complexity, from the dynamic relationships between centre and periphery to the ramifications of economic and demographic change. This mode of remembering is revisionary, in two senses of the word. On the one hand, the perspectives employed by the protagonists of novel sequences are continually subject to revision: successive novels develop new, improved optics for countenancing and engaging with metropolitan change. On the other hand, far from producing a solidification of space, the protagonists’ repetitive journeys reveal its contingency and incompleteness. If all novel sequences are shaped by provisionality thanks to the multiple beginnings and endings supplied across their many instalments, I suggest that suburban novel sequences are further defined by a tension between the production of progressivist and deconstructive narratives, between revisions that refine and revisions that dismantle. Chapter 2 considers novels that employ a distinctly gothic mode in order to situate their suburban locations within histories defined by class- and race-based exclusion. If uncertainty and anxiety are the troubling but potentially radical qualities of gothic narrative, suburban gothic has typically been understood in terms of a banal unhomeliness which merely confirms reassuring commonplaces about the post-war American suburbs. In such readings, the suburbs are supposed to embody a desire to stand outside of history: either they are places in which people seek refuge from their own pasts, or they represent an idealised past removed from the challenges of the present. I argue that if suburban gothic has any power to disturb it is when it registers the historicity of the suburbs while confounding a desire to put the past in its place, that is, to contain it, to keep it from touching the present. Chapter 3 situates the emergence of suburban memoir within the broader ‘memoir boom’ that gathered pace in the 1990s – itself partly an outcome of the maturation of the post-war baby boom generation. I consider how memoirists of suburban experience have countered persistent criticisms of both the suburbs and memoir as low-grade, mass produced and self-indulgent cultural forms, through their articulation of the complexity of suburban history and their narration of collective stories. Indeed, while it has been claimed that memoir as a genre is rooted in the way ordinary people narrate their lives, I contend that memoirists of suburban experience employ more specialist narrative modes – from autoethnography to prosopography – in order to historicise everyday life and to foreground the interconnections between suburban localities and other times and places. Chapter 4 examines material that combines visual and textual elements: graphic narrative, or comics as they are more commonly known. I consider the ways graphic narratives situate suburban homes within broader environmental, economic and social histories. I focus in particular on the ways comics artists have innovated with framing techniques to produce what I call ‘narrative ecologies’: complex assemblages of ongoing stories about particular sites which emphasise their connectedness with other spaces, processes and histories. I argue some graphic narratives articulate ‘anticipatory histories’, which foreground process rather than permanence and thereby enable more responsible consideration of future change. In doing so this material helps to combat a very particular but widespread form of cultural amnesia, ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. Chapter 5 considers short story cycles, whose multipartite structure provides a useful narrative vehicle for articulating diverse perspectives on, and the complex temporalities of, suburban localities. I examine cycles that reflect on the significance of suburbs – and their histories – for diasporic communities. I also reflect on the use of metafictional techniques to engage with the changing form of US suburbs. This self-reflexivity distances these cycles from suburban literature’s traditional insistence on dispossession, and instead demonstrates how writing can performatively create home attachments, and how nostalgia might be harnessed in productive ways. Moreover, this material suggests the need for a sophisticated kind of spatial literacy, as well as collaborative, insurgent narrative interventions on the part of suburbanites themselves. The book’s conclusion examines the significance of narrating suburban historicity at a time of frequent and vocal proclamations of the end of the suburban era, a period repeatedly judged to have been historically anomalous. I consider recent theatrical productions which dwell on the changing social and material conditions and the always-ambivalent and contested historic value of housing constructed in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that these plays challenge the outand-out pessimism of contemporary experts by foregrounding both the need and ability of ordinary suburban residents to dispute the histories of their own environments. In so doing these plays provide critical perspectives on the intersecting processes of suburbanisation and the preservation and gentrification of residential neighbourhoods. Thus the book concludes by reasserting one of its central premises: that the twentieth-century suburbs were not a peculiar, and now closed, chapter in American history. Across its many forms the suburban story is neither singular nor complete. Indeed, as the following chapters demonstrate, the time of the suburb is neither over nor easily locatable in the past. Rather, its temporality is complex and contested; just as the histories of suburbia are ongoing, its legacies remain live, unresolved issues in metropolitan America. Notes Introduction: The Time of the Suburb 1 On ‘technoburbs’ see Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic, 1987), 182-208; on ‘edge cities’ see Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor, 1991); on ethnoburbs, see Wei Li, ‘Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles’, Urban Studies, 35(3) (March 1998), 479-501; on ‘post-suburban regions’ see Rob Kling, Spencer C. Olin, and Mark Poster (eds), Postsuburban California: the Transformation of Orange County since WWII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); on the post-metropolis, see Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); on social activism in the suburbs, see for instance Genevieve Carpio, Clara Irzábal and Laura Polido, ‘Right to the Suburb? Rethinking Lefebvre and Immigrant Activism’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 33(2) (May 2011), 185-208. 2 Following the 2000 census, the US Census Bureau reported: ‘From 1940 onward, suburbs experienced more population growth than central cities, and by 1960 the proportion of the total U.S. population living in suburbs (territory within metropolitan areas but outside central cities) was 31 percent, almost equal to the proportion of the population living in central cities (32 percent). In 2000, half of the entire population lived in the suburbs of metropolitan areas.’ United States Census Bureau, Census Atlas of the United States, chapter 2: ‘Population Distribution’, 3, available at <www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/2_PopulationDistribution.pdf> (last accessed 11 March 2019). The 2010 census showed that the rate of growth of central cities just overtook that of suburbs, a reversal which for many indicated the beginning of an urban renaissance. William H. Frey’s analysis of newly released census data, however, suggests such celebrations are premature: in the 2016 and 2017, suburban growth once again exceeded urban growth. William H. Frey, ‘Early Decade Big City Growth Continues to Fall Off, Census Shows’, The Avenue, 29 May, 2018. Available at <www.brookings.edu/blog/theavenue/2018/05/25/early-decade-big-city-growth-continues-to-fall-off-censusshows/?utm_campaign=Metropolitan%20Policy%20Program&utm_source=hs_email &utm_medium=email&utm_content=63594951> (last accessed 11 March 2011). 3 Two trenchant and illuminating studies delineate how contemporary American authors have grappled with post-suburban forms: Pippa Eldridge, ‘The Poetics of Sprawl: Literary and Filmic Engagements with American Suburbia, 1990-2017’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2018), and Tim Foster, ‘Escaping the Split-Level Trap: Postsuburban Narratives in Recent American Fiction’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012). By contrast, in American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), Kathy Knapp makes the case that 9/11 triggered a dramatic shift in the way suburban environments and inhabitants are depicted in American fiction. 4 On suburban diversity, see Jon C. Teaford, The American Suburb: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2008), 43-86, and Matthew D. Lassiter and Christopher Niedt, ‘Suburban Diversity in Postwar America’, Journal of Urban History, 39(1) (January 2013), 3-14. 5 My search was made with <www.google.co.uk> on 13 October 2018. Websites that feature ‘best of’ lists are likely to rank highly in search engine results pages because they are liable to repeat the terms of the search multiple times and thereby be judged to be more relevant. 6 See for example Virginia Savage McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 2015). 7 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 29-30, 83, 82. A similar argument is made by William H. Whyte in his landmark 1956 study The Organization Man. Whyte identifies a shift of allegiance from local community to national corporation, which has led to a willingness to relocate at the behest of one’s employer. The new ‘package suburbs’ such as Park Forest, Illinois provide the ideal staging posts for members of this expanded managerial class, whom Whyte repeatedly refers to as ‘transients’. The interchangeability of suburbs and residents is facilitated by an increasingly national, unifying culture that ‘is part of the momentum of mobility’: ‘The more people move about, the more similar the American environments become, and the more similar they become, the easier it is to move about’ (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002 [1956], 276). More recently, Robert D. Putnam has argued that transience itself is not to blame for a reduction in civic engagement across the nation, since there has in fact been a slight reduction in the frequency with which Americans move home since the 1950s. Rather, it is the privatised lifestyles associated with sprawl, and in particular the requirement to spend more and more time commuting alone by car, that has eroded feelings of social connectedness. Noticeably, however, Putnam’s own bar charts show that rates of community involvement in the 1990s were higher in suburbs than in central cities. (Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000: 204-15.) 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), 238. 10 Ibid., 236. See also Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5; and Martin Dines, Gay Suburban Narratives in American and British Culture: Homecoming Queens (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 32-3. 11 The editors of Making Suburbia begin their introduction with a similar observation. See John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul and Katherine Solomonson, ‘Introduction: Making, Performing, Living Suburbia’, in Archer, Sandul and Solomonson, (eds), Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015), vii-xxv, vii. 12 D. J. Waldie, ‘Beautiful and Terrible: Aeriality and the Image of Suburbia’, Places, February 2013, available at <placesjournal.org/article/beautiful-and-terrible-aerialityand-the-image-of-suburbia/#ref_14> (last accessed 11 March 2019). 13 Whyte, The Organization Man, 267, my emphasis. 14 Tuan, Topophilia, 233. 15 Several histories have been written that focus on the development on one or other of the Levittowns. See for example Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic, 2001); David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker and Company: 2009); Dianne Harris (ed.), Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). 16 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and its Prospects (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1961), 554, 553. 17 Mumford is reputed to have described Levittown, New York as an ‘instant slum’ on an initial visit to the suburb. The phrase has often been recalled by suburban residents and developers to demonstrate how such predictions were misplaced. See for example Michael T. Kaufman, ‘Tough Times for Mr Levittown’, New York Times Magazine, 24 September 1989, 43. 18 For example, Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, declared by its author to be ‘written in fury’ and a ‘deliberate attack upon all those who have already befouled a large portion of this country for private gain, and are engaged in befouling the rest’ (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964: 7), features aerial photos of Lakewood, California; several developments on Long Island, including Levittown; and new subdivisions outside Chicago and Oakland, California. Relph labels aerial photographs of sprawling development as ‘a placeless geography’ (Relph, Place and Placelessness: 118-19). In their manifesto for New Urbanism, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck illustrate the destructiveness and the absurdities of sprawl with several (mostly unidentified) aerial photos (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, New York: North Point, 2000). 19 Bennett M. Berger, Working-Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in Suburbia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 20 Bennett M. Berger, ‘The Myth of Suburbia’, Journal of Social Issues, 17(1) (Winter, 1961), 38-49. In Class and Suburbia William M. Dobriner divides students of the suburbs into two camps: on the one hand there are scientists like himself and Berger; on the other there are commentators, who constitute ‘an exuberant band of social impressionists who greatly outnumber the scientists’: Dobriner, Class and Suburbia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963, 5, emphasis in original). See also Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York, Columbia University Press, 1969). 21 Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (London: Allen Lane, 1967), 179. 22 Ibid., 154. 23 Ibid., 165-72. 24 Ibid., 410. 25 Paul H. Mattingly, ‘The Suburban Canon over Time’, in Suburban Discipline, ed. Peter Lang and Tam Miller (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 38-51. 26 Another pioneering work from the 1960s is Sam Bass Warner Jr.’s Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 27 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press), 203-5. 28 Ibid., 208. 29 See Mark Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939-1989 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). 30 Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 217. 31 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic, 1987); John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: The Origin of the American Suburb, 18201939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 32 Delores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2003), 4-5. 33 Wiese, Places of Their Own, 5. 34 Ibid., 3. 35 Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, ‘Introduction: The New Suburban History’, in The New Suburban History, ed. Kruse and Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1-10, 6, 10. 36 Other important contributions to this second wave of history include: Paul H. Mattingly, Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001); Becky M. Nicolaides, Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945-1965 (Philadelphia: university of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Bruce Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Middle-Class Suburb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jerry Gonzalez, ‘“A Place in the Sun”: Mexican Americans, Race, and the Suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940– 1980’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Southern California, 2009); Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Allen Dieterich-Ward, Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, November 2015); Lila Berman, Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 37 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 10. 38 Ibid., 10-11. 39 Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 40 Eric Prieto, Literature, Geography and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 90. 41 Nicholas Entrikin, The Betweenness of Place (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1991). 42 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 43 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, 43. 44 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 162. 45 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92-3. 46 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16(1) (Spring, 1986), 22-7. 47 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). 48 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). 49 Massey, For Space, 29, 27. 50 Betrand Westphal, Geocriticsm: Real and Fictional Places, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 73. 51 David Kolb, Sprawling Places (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 172. 52 Ibid., 175. 53 Margaret Crawford, cited by Kolb, Sprawling Places, 175. 54 Kolb, Sprawling Places, 191. 55 Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7, 8-9. 56 Ibid, 160. 57 Ibid. 58 Knapp, American Unexceptionalism, xvi. 59 For instance, both John Updike’s 1971 novel Rabbit Redux, which I discuss in chapter one, and Lisa D’Amour’s play Detroit, which I discuss in chapter five, conclude with the conflagration of a suburban home. 60 Joseph George, Postmodern Suburban Spaces: Philosophy, Ethics, and Community in Post-War American Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5. 61 Ibid., 32. 62 Jo Gill, The Poetics of the American Suburbs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 63 Ibid., 17, 16. 64 Timotheus Vermeulen, Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 5. Vermeulen probably overstates the historicising proclivities of previous scholarship. While such studies tend to be arranged in broadly chronological fashion, typically their structure is determined by a series of thematic concerns. Noticeably, the organisation of George’s study, published after Vermeulen’s, eschews conventional historical chronology entirely. 65 Vermeulen, Scenes from the Suburbs, 4.