Not-So-Grand Plan. - Review - book review

Reason, June, 2000 by Tom Peyser

The New City, by Stephen Amidon, New York: Doubleday, 445 pages, $24.95

In 1971, when novelist Stephen Amidon was 12 years old, he moved with his family from suburban New Jersey to Columbia, Maryland, a "model town" founded on the idea that comprehensive, centralized city planning opened the royal road to improved quality of life. According to Amidon, Columbia was a "social experiment, a city where poor, rich, black and white were supposed to commingle in near-perfect harmony." Looking back on it now, he sees the city, with its "dizzying, naive optimism," as "a distillation of the country's values and recent history." Amidon's lumbering new novel The New City is clearly based in part on his teenage impressions of Columbia. (The book's press kit includes the autobiographical statement I just quoted.) That being the case, we have to conclude that he finds the country's avowed values fraudulent and its recent history a disaster. Although Amidon seems unusually determined--even for a young American novelist--to believe the very worst of the United States, his latest book is worth tak ing seriously, if only because it reflects many fundamental attitudes of the disaffected in the generation that will be taking over soon.

As its title suggests, The New City tries to capture the emergence of a new way to plan social space. Set in the early '70s, its action unfolds at the moment that ideas now associated with "the New Urbanism" started taking shape as a leading orthodoxy. The New Urbanism is the planning establishment's attempt to atone for the disasters it wrought in the name of urban renewal and related movements. (See "Dense Thinkers," January 1999.)

In older cities, its advocates foster the creation of the kind of high-density, multiuse neighborhoods that their predecessors razed to make room for immense housing projects and downtown arteries (this time, say the planners, we'll get it right). In new developments, like the one depicted in The New City, New Urbanists try to combat what they see as the baleful influence of "sprawl," which they dislike more for ideological reasons than for pragmatic ones. What they call sprawl, after all, is often the market's way of responding to the large number of people who want a house on a bit of land (which is inevitably cheaper on the outskirts of developed areas). But that means that these people will drive en famille to the store, the school, and the dentist, instead of doing the virtuous, democratic thing by taking the bus or tram with their fellow citizens.

To New Urbanists, "sprawl" implies individualism and not collectivism, and for that reason it is unacceptable. City planning is often a stalking horse for social engineering; as a characteristic manifesto of New Urbanism declares, "Community planning and design must assert the importance of public over private values." The New City, however, is not a paean to the virtues of planning. It's more of an elegy: Amidon's bedrock, if paradoxical, assumption is that centralized control of development is both necessary and doomed to failure. That such a dark vision is based on a fundamentally false premise does nothing to lighten the ostentatious blackness of his despair.

The New City takes place in fictional Newton, Maryland, circa 1973. The plot centers on the families of Austin Swope, the man whom Newton's corporate backers have put in charge of the development, and Earl Wooten, his chief foreman. The friendship between the men and their wives is cemented by their teenage sons, Teddy and Joel, who themselves become best friends roaming through the half-built town and daring each other to jump from the roofs of construction sites. There are no fences, the streets are lined with quaint gas lamps, and, in keeping with anti-car ideology, "you're never more than a quarter mile from a playground or park."

There is, however, a serpent in this Eden. The Swopes are white. The Wootens are black. Once Joel Wooten gets in trouble for his intimacy with a white girl, and once Austin hears a rumor that his employers are plotting to give Earl, instead of him, the coveted job of city manager, the races close ranks, and the horn of plenty is undone.

In the end, Amidon is willing to sacrifice his characters and plot to his big idea: Consciousness of race poisons everything in American life. It overrides every principle and undermines every bond. As is so often the case in novels with a tendentious case to prove, at a certain point in The New City characters stop acting in accord with what we have been shown of their nature, and start acting in the way that they must if the truth of the Thesis is to be confirmed. In the final chapters, Amidon seems almost wholly taken up with the task of getting his characters to bump into each other at precisely the moment that will yield the highest return of poetic justice or bitter irony. At such moments one wishes that Amidon had written the straightforward melodrama that The New City at times resembles.

Surprisingly, given his palpable ambition to say something about the latest phase of suburbia, Amidon does not seem very interested in creating a sense of place. After a few shrewd, early scenes showing how in planned communities something as simple as building a wall can become the subject of endless, touchy negotiation, the plot almost wholly detaches itself from its environment, and the spruce enclave becomes little more than a painted backdrop for a series of increasingly lurid confrontations.