Toward a safe and sane Halloween and other tales of suburbia. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1985 by Timothy Noah

Toward a safe and Sane Halloween and Other Tales of Suburbia.

Toward a Safe and Sane Halloween and Other Tales of Suburbia. William Geist. Times Books, $16.95. The rise of suburbia since the end of World War II has contributed to the decline of daily journalism. Newspapers are easy to distribute inside a city, but difficult to get to far-flung suburban subscribers. This is particularly true for afternoon papers, which must fight commuter traffic jams. To reach the swelling ranks of suburban subscribers, newspapers have had to build satellite printing plants and hire more trucks, driving up costs. The result has been a hastening of the trend toward more and more one-newspaper towns and the proliferation of bland suburban newspapers and inane local TV news shows. Meanwhile, even the best of big-city newspapers that manage to survive find themselves pandering to upscale, largely suburban advertisers. Leading the pack in shamelessness is The New York Times, which has in recent years boosted its flagging revenues with such embarrassments as the "Home' section, the "Living' section, and tony supplements like "The Sophisticated Traveller.'

William Geist is one of the few good things to come out of journalism's new orientation toward the suburbs. In 1981, perhaps in penance for its sins, the Times hired Geist away from the Chicago Tribune, where he'd been writing about the suburbs, yes--but in a lively, humorous, and often illuminating way. Wandering through this mysterious world of shopping malls, Tupperware parties, plastic flamingos, and Weber grills, Geist finds the suburbs to be something more than an advertising base. They're a story.

Those of us who grew up in the suburbs have long suspected that they weren't quite as barren as the press made them out to be. Hadn't novelists like John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth successfully mined them? Even the most satirical novels set in suburbia revealed that important things were happening there; for example, in Goodbye, Columbus Roth dramatized with equal measures of paid and hilarity the agonies of assimilation that plagued ambitious young Jews in New Jersey.

But in 1972, when Geist graduated from journalism school, who wanted to be stuck out in the suburbs? As Geist relates in his introduction, he was "eager to put public officials--each and every one--behind bars.' Instead, he found himself working at the Suburban Trib, a tabloid insert of the Chicago Tribune. Geist found little consolation in the knowledge that Bob Woodward, who'd grown up in the Chicago suburbs, had been turned down by the Suburban Trib before going on to glory at The Washington Post: "If they had hired him, perhaps his slot at The Washington Post would not have been filled when I applied there. As he and Carl were becoming the most rich and famous journalists in the world, I was attending suburban board meetings.'

In time, Geist came to see the anthropological possibilities in his suburban beat and persuaded the Tribune to give him a column. This collection, drawn from both the Tribune and the Times, is the fruit of Geist's years observing the habits of suburbanites--who, Geist reminds us, make up more than one-third of the population.

Geist is full of wonderful facts. A Cornell University study estimated that $200 million is annually spent on Long Island lawns. Gypsy moths were brought to New York by a French naturalist in 1869, escaped from his lab, and bred out of control because none of their natural predators lived there. George Stephen, an employee in the Weber Brothers Metal Works in suburban Chicago, invented the first Weber grill in 1951. More than 2,635,000,000 copies of National Geographic have been published ("and casual empiricism suggests that none have been thrown away').

Like Tom Wolfe, Geist has a gift for zeroing in on the familiar but unexamined aspects of everyday life and showing why they're important. For example, in a column about the decline of the front porch, which stopped being standard in American architecture about 50 years ago, Geist observes that instead of spending their leisure time chatting with neighbors and taking in the action on the street, today's suburbanites are more apt to invite people with similar demographic profiles a week ahead of time to sit in a fenced-in backyard. A story about architecture thus becomes a story about the decline of community values. In another piece, about an ordinance in River Edge, New Jersey against parking vehicles with commercial license plates in residential driveways, a truck driver complains that he's being treated like a "second-class citizen.' The mayor answers candidly, "The ordinance may be snobbery to a certain extent, but I think the trucks do depreciate property values.'

Geist buffs will be disappointed to find that his two most famous stories aren't here. One was about a Korean grocer who created a furor by proposing to sell vegetables in a store on fashionable Park Avenue. (A resident said Belgian chocolates would be all right but no vegetables.) The other exposed a New York City effort to put decals on the windows of abandoned buildings in the Bronx in order to create the illusion that families lived there. Both the Korean grocer and the "Potemkin village' story were drawn from Geist's new beat, which is New York City. (He now writes the "About New York' column for the Times.) New York's gain is suburbia's loss.