Commuter Virus: Is American literature too soft on the suburbs? . - Culture & Reviews - White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel - book review

Reason, Jan, 2002 by Tom Peyser

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, by Catherine Jurca, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 238 pages, $19.95

AMONG THE ATTITUDES that seem required of American intellectuals, loathing of the suburbs ranks high on the list. Since they can be despised for so many (if often incongruent) reasons, suburbs offer a target for writers with quite disparate agendas: The suburbs are racist and exclusionary; their fleshpots blunt the activist impulses of minorities who move to them; they destroy families; they distract from communal concerns by making family the focus of life; their oppressive conformity stunts individualism; they isolate the individual from the community; and on and on. That many Americans of all races continue to move to them in droves-- dynamically transforming suburban life in the process--is a reminder of the irrelevancy of much of this chatter to the way people decide to shape their lives.

American novelists have done their bit to swell the chorus of lamentation. As Catherine jurca notes in White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, "As a body of work, the suburban novel asserts," pace Tolstoy, "that one unhappy family is a lot like the next, and [that] there is no such thing as a happy family." Jurca, who teaches literature at the California Institute of Technology; displays an admirable impatience with the relentlessly gloomy view of suburban life that has become the stock in trade of whole rafts of American writers. Thus one typically finds the suburb served up as "the parodic antithesis of the good life, where gratification on every level is nonexistent." She does much to expose the willful bias of the suburban novel by repeatedly and contemptuously dismissing men who in their novels insist "how tough it is to be a white middle-class male."

Jurca, however, does not make that point in order to come to the defense of the suburbs. Rather, she insists that, appearances to the contrary, the negative representation of suburbs in the American novel functions on some obscure level as an endorsement of the ideology that makes suburbs seem like acceptable places to live; beneath all the apparent critique of the suburbs in the novels she examines, she discovers a kind of complicity. In her view, then, suburban novels fall short not because they exaggerate the degree to which suburbs should be hated, but because the reasons the novels present for hating them ring hollow, and ultimately are not even expressions of hatred at all. Or at least not the right kind of hatred.

Jurca knows why they should really be hated, and for her, the tradition of American suburban writing is essentially a smokescreen whose real function, in spite of its apparent indictment of suburbia, is to preserve white privilege by presenting the lives of white suburbanites as a living hell. Hence, when she reads Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), whose protagonists worry about losing their identities and integrity as they are absorbed into big corporations and endlessly proliferating subdivisions, Jurca sees a complex strategy of empowerment: "The white middle class asserts its superiority to itself in the belief that middle classness has been devalued." For Jurca, the "privileged" in society get a charge out of seeing themselves as beleaguered, oppressed, in exlle. As the sarcastic title of the study makes clear, Jurca has no patience with the ideas she sees in these novels: White suburbanites have no business thinking of themselves as a people in diaspora.

If the deep meaning of these only apparently critical novels is one surprise in White Diaspora, another is Jurca's attempt to alter our idea of which books have something to teach us about the American suburb. Most readers probably think of John Cheever and John Updike as the founding fathers of such novels, but Jurca sees them as latecomers, and not particularly innovative ones at that, Thus she disposes of this pair, along with more recent figures such as Richard Ford (Independence Day), Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), and David Gates (Preston Falls), in a brief coda titled "Same as It Ever Was (More or Less)."

So what text does she put at the beginning of the tradition that leads to Updike, Cheever, Ford, Moody, and Gates? Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, which was originally serialized in 1912. At least one of the four other novels she examines in detail is just as surprising: Richard Wright's Native Son, whose protagonist, Bigger Thomas, never sets foot outside the Chicago city limits. What is going on here? By looking at the way jurca makes her arguments, and at the interests those arguments serve, we can get a good idea of what is happening in one dominant strand of academic literary and cultural criticism today.

As Jurca's concerns make clear,eason F 1.02 67 political and historical questions sit right at the center of the kind of analysis she undertakes, a mode of criticism affiliated with the movement calling itself "the New Historicism." The New Historicism is one of several critical schools that sought to replace the New Criticism, which dominated academic writing about literature in the middle decades of the 20th century. It was the New Criticism that popularized the phase "close reading;' and its adherents ran through the entire literary corpus, producing detailed analyses purporting to show the elaborate network of meanings that made literary texts capable of being endlessly interpreted (and thus endlessly scrutinized on the pages of scholarly journals).