Escaping the Split-Level Trap: Postsuburban Narratives in Recent American Fiction

Escaping the Split-level Trap: Postsuburban Narratives in Recent American Fiction Tim Foster, BA Hons., MA Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2012 ABSTRACT My PhD engages with a number of recent works of fiction in order to understand how American literature has commented on the emergence of a postsuburban environment – that is to say a cosmopolitan landscape in which the previous city/suburb binary is no longer evident. Whilst the term 'postsuburban' is resistant to easy categorisation, I use it as a mode of enquiry both to reassess what fiction has to tell literary criticism about the foundational concept of suburbia, as well as to assess contemporary writing free from the assumptions of an inherited suburban imaginary. It is my thesis that these postsuburban environments are seen by the writers who set their fictions there as places that are far more than white middle- class dystopias, and that it is a fallacy to attribute to them, as certain literary critics do, the negative cultural clichés associated with postwar suburban fictions. After offering revisionist readings of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road (1961), I consider Richard Ford's trilogy The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006) as a representation of a classic postwar suburb that has been overtaken by development and sprawl. I focus next on T. C. Boyle's The The Tortilla Curtain Curtain (1995), and Junot Diaz's Drown (1996), which both suggest the postsuburban landscape as a place of cross-cultural exchange and re-invention. An analysis of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995) follows and proposes that the physical postsuburban spaces of innovation that exist in Silicon Valley, the novel's setting, are paralleled by the changing virtual spaces of the Internet. Lastly, I explore The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007) by Dinaw Mengestu, and Richard Price's Lush Life (2008), two novels that deal with one of the corollaries of the breakdown of the city/suburb binary and the emergence of a postsuburban environment: inner-city gentrification. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as, Tim Foster, “‘A kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings’: The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs,” Western American Literature 46:3 (2011). ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I first want to thank my supervisors at the University of Nottingham, Dr. Graham Thompson, and Dr. Anthony Hutchison. Throughout the course of this project their advice has been both pertinent and constructive, and for that I am most grateful. Thanks are also due to Professor Douglas Tallack for the comments he provided in the very early stages of my research. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and their award of a grant for the final two years of my studies. I am also thankful for the award of an Eccles Centre Fellowship, which allowed me to spend time at the British Library conducting research. I have greatly enjoyed being a part of the postgraduate research community in what was formerly the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Conversations, both academic and social, have been stimulating and inspiring. I am particularly indebted to Nick Witham, Ian Evans, Rachel Walls, and Fran Fuentes for accommodating me when my trips to campus required an overnight stay. Thanks, too, to the members of the teaching and administrative staff in the school who have offered their support and encouragement at various points over the last three years. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family for all their love and encouragement, from the moment I first proposed the idea of doing a research degree to the final months of writing-up and viva preparation. I dedicate this thesis to my wife, Sarah, and my daughter, Scarlett. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 45 “Heroically reconnecting to respectable civilian life”: Postwar Adjustment and the Suburbs in The Man in the The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road CHAPTER 2 76 “A more interesting surgery on the suburbs”: Richard Ford's Paean to the New Jersey Periphery CHAPTER 3 127 Into the Postsuburban Third Space: The Immigrant Experience in T. C. Boyle's The The Tortilla Curtain Curtain and Junot Díaz's Drown CHAPTER 4 190 “A kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings”: The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs CHAPTER 5 237 Is the City Becoming Suburban? Exploring Gentrification in Lush Life and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears CONCLUSION 273 BIBLIOGRAPHY 284 1 INTRODUCTION From Suburbia to Postsuburbia Suburbs of one form or another have been a feature of the American landscape since the revolutionary era. At the end of the eighteenth century the suburb as a residential site, or a place of business, could be found near Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. However, it was from around 1815 that, attendant on technological innovation, the pace of growth in fringe urban areas began to outstrip that of the core, and suburbanisation became associated with a commuting lifestyle. In the case of New York City the development of ferries, buses, and steam trains led to the emergence of suburban communities in Brooklyn, up Broadway north of Greenwich Village, and in Harlem. The development of the streetcar, from horse-drawn to electrified, led to a democratisation in suburban living as sections of society other than the wealthy became able to afford to live outside of the central city. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed and America emerged as the world's leading industrialised nation, the association between suburban life and the middle-class imagination began to take hold as people sought to establish the single family home as a private bastion against mass society and technology, although, ironically, the suburbs 2 experienced a further boom in the 1920s due to the widespread availability of the automobile. By 1959, 9 million of the booming American population lived in suburbs newly-created on the back of favourable mortgage deals and tax-breaks.1 However, at the end of the 1980s, and during the 1990s, geographers and urbanists began to note the ways in which the suburban landscape was undergoing dramatic change. To these observers it seemed that the classic postwar suburb which was comprised of tract housing organised in gridded subdivisions, and which maintained a dependency on the central city, had been transformed into, or superseded by, a polycentric, economically, culturally and politically self-sufficient metropolitan form. For Edward W. Soja this new configuration was nothing less than “the city turned inside out.”2 In the fields in which these writers were working, the idiom used to describe the landscapes beyond the city core changed with the topography, and a host of neologisms began to circulate. As far back as 1987, Robert Fishman was referring to the emergence of an environment “with principles ... directly opposed to the true suburb ... [which] was always functionally dependent on the urban core.” Fishman called these new peripheral phenomena “technoburbs” because of the fact that they featured a great number of science parks and much hi-tech industry, and 1 For a more complete discussion of suburbanization in America, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also, John R. Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) for an analysis of postwar suburbia's origins in the frontier spirit that animated the settling of the borderlands between the urban and the rural landscapes in the nineteenth century. 2 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 250. 3 were linked by arterial freeway networks. By the early 1990s, Fishman began referring to this new metropolitan form as a “postsuburban environment.”3 This is a term that is explicitly explored in the edited collection Postsuburban California (1995). The contributors to this volume all work on the basis that the postsuburban periphery is empirically measurable due to its spatial formation, its cosmopolitanism, and its relationship with “information capitalism” and consumerism. In this way, it marks a discrete break from the previous suburban form which, for these authors, in contrast, was economically and culturally less vital. The editors of the collection also take trouble to distinguish their model from that which Joel Garreau proposes in his 1991 work, Edge City and which views the transformation of the periphery as nothing less than the constitution of new “edge” cities beyond the limits of old ones, often incorporating previously suburban areas in the process. For Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, Garreau's paradigm ignores the “fundamentally decentered or multicentered nature of these emerging regions.”4 A host of additional terms have also been used to describe the changed metropolitan 3 Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 183-4, and, “Urbanity and Suburbanity: Rethinking the 'Burbs,” American Quarterly 46 (1994): 36. In this article Fishman also points out that the establishment of a postsuburban landscape has a corollary in the emergence of a “posturban” environment due to the changed relationship between the periphery and the urban core. This is a point that I explore further in Chapter Five in which I analyse fictions that represent the process of gentrification. 4 Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, “Beyond the Edge: the Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions,” in, Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds., Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ix, xiv; Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).

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