The end of suburbia – Adelle Waldman in NYRB:

‘Remember the suburban novel? Books about attractive white families in nice houses who turn out to be miserable? Examples include Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), the work of the Johns (Cheever and Updike), Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm(1994). If so, you’re probably middle-aged, or a diligent student of twentieth-century American literature. Once a staple of American fiction, novels about suburban malaise have largely stopped being written. The last to have been a hit was probably Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, about an affair between bored stay-at-home parents in a Massachusetts suburb, in 2004.’

(…)

‘In retrospect, it’s clear that the suburban novel was never about the American experience, in some essential sense, but about a certain iteration of it. It was both a product and a reflection of that period in our history when we could plausibly—well, somewhat plausibly—claim to live in a middle-class society. In the decades after World War II tens of millions of previously poor Americans enjoyed unprecedented upward mobility, purchasing homes and cars and myriad other consumer goods. Not all Americans benefited equally from the postwar economic boom. In truth, the middle-class America of the postwar era existed almost exclusively for white men, and the women and children who lived in households headed by them; black Americans in particular were excluded from enjoying their share of the otherwise widespread prosperity. Now even that limited version of a middle-class society is gone. America today is characterized less by mass affluence than by extreme income inequality and widespread financial precarity. The suburban novel’s concerns—conformity, consumerism, lack of fulfillment among plenty—have come to feel dated, almost quaint.’

(…)

‘This more egalitarian economy wasn’t an inevitable result of the postwar boom. It was a product of specific policy measures, from taxes—which were extremely progressive, with the wealthy subject to much higher rates of taxation than they are now—to labor protections. The well-paying jobs in manufacturing and industry that we now associate with the postwar era, for example, were dangerous and paid poverty-level wages in the 1920s. Only in the late 1930s did they start becoming the middle-class occupations we now pine for. Neoliberal economics tells us that wages are a function of productivity, but these workers didn’t suddenly become vastly more productive over the course of a few years. What changed was that Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which banned most child labor and established the minimum wage and the forty-hour workweek, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which compelled employers to negotiate with unions. Industrial and manufacturing workers unionized en masse; as a result they were able to exact a larger share of corporate profits. The average worker in the 1950s and 1960s made far more relative to CEOs than he or she does today.’

(…)

‘It’s hardly surprising that the suburban novel was the province of white writers—that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright didn’t write suburban novels. Nor did women, black or white, write any of the most prominent suburban novels, despite the genre’s focus on domestic life, an arena long associated with fiction by women. Interestingly, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), a defining work of the postwar era, shares many of the genre’s concerns, namely its focus on fulfillment among the economically comfortable. Of course, one of the criticisms most frequently leveled against that book was that it focused exclusively on the plight of well-off white women. Almost two decades after The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Naylor’s novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which was made into a popular television miniseries, turned those themes on their head, exploring the difficulties her working-class black characters faced in attaining and retaining some semblance of a comfortable domestic life.’

(…)

‘Or not. If that were the whole of Revolutionary Road’s analysis, it would be a pretty forgettable book. Even a suburban novel needs more than a critique of the suburbs to succeed as a novel. But, like Cheever’s capacious, humane stories—and far more than Updike’s fiction, which tended to be pointillistic and focused on sensory detail—Revolutionary Road has endured. That’s because it is both a winking, half-ironic critique of the suburbs and an unironic critique of Frank himself, whose tendency to blame his unhappiness on the suburbs, and American culture generally, is part of his problem.
The truth is, Frank actually likes his ordinary suburban life. His job is easy, and being at the office in the city, in the company of affable colleagues, is pleasant. Then he comes home to a comfortable house in Connecticut. He remains a bit awed by April, who came from wealth and is beautiful and self-possessed, and he derives satisfaction from having a wife who is so impressive socially, even if the relationship itself is…complicated. At least his friendship with their admiring neighbors, Shep and Milly, is simpler and more gratifying. Unlike April, they look up to him.’

(…)

‘The death of the suburban novel, a relatively short-lived subgenre of American literature, may be of interest primarily to academics and literary hobbyists. The death of the middle-class society from which it sprung, on the other hand, is a national tragedy.
It wasn’t a natural death. In The Ice Storm, Moody—who is more astute at sociological observation than interiority—gestures slyly at the forces that eventually doomed that version of America. Benjamin and Elena attend a neighbor’s sex party. (It was the 1970s, after all.) Before the sex begins, the guests, the male half of whom are mostly Wall Street types, are praising the ideas of Milton Friedman: Supply and demand…less restriction, Moellering was saying.… Several feet away, by the mantel, Bobby Haskell, normally a guy who concentrated on paddle tennis to the exclusion of all other forms of conversation, was proposing that unions were a kind of labor monopoly, just an antitrust problem in the arena of labor…. These Friedman arias swooped around one another like the diverging themes of a duet.
A few years earlier, Friedman’s ideas had been treated as kooky, but by the early 1970s they were becoming mainstream. As Moody puts it, “America rose and fell on the melody of New Canaan’s songs of the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by WASPs who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.”’

(…)

‘Moreover, in the 1980s, under the Reagan administration, antitrust enforcement waned, making possible the rise of chains like Walmart in the first place. Banking regulations put in place in the 1930s in response to the crash of 1929 were rolled back, paving the way for the mergers and acquisitions mania of the 1980s, the rise of shareholder capitalism (in which corporations are more likely to be run for the short-term benefit of shareholders than for long-term sustainability), and the ballooning size and influence of finance, which is now 7.3 percent of our economy, up from 2.8 percent in 1950 and 4.9 percent in 1980. The result was an economy in which the price of housing, medical care, and education rose significantly faster than the income of the median worker.’

(…)

‘The situation is compounded by the fact that the liberation movements of the late 1960s expanded our ambitions for a more fully egalitarian society, one that would not exclude marginalized groups, materially or otherwise. But we began to aspire to a fuller egalitarianism at just the moment that the economic basis for what limited egalitarianism we had achieved began to crumble. This has created a chasm between our ideals and our reality. We now live in the gulf between what Lewis Miner was taught—that with a bit of hard work, anyone can be rich and successful—and what we know to be true.
It’s awkward to write novels about middle-class problems in a society that is no longer even nominally middle class when you hold egalitarian ideals. This is the predicament that many American fiction writers now face. The abandonment of the suburban novel and the performative guilt Rothfeld mocked are only some of the ways they have responded. Another is an increasing reliance on satire or semi-satire. It’s hard these days to find literary novels about characters with middle-class problems that treat them with unalloyed sympathy. Like Sinclair Lewis, who also wrote in an age characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, contemporary authors often treat well-to-do-characters ironically, or as objects of anthropological study, with moments of sympathy interspliced with a tone of remove.’

(…)

‘When Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler complained of “a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue” populated by “good consumers” who “have a lot of Togetherness and bring [their] children up in a bath of sentimentality,” it was meant as a withering criticism—and perhaps it was, at the time. Imagine a writer who looked at America today and saw nothing worse to worry about. Most of us would probably be tempted to channel the immortal words of Lewis Miner: “Dream on, worm bait.”’

Read the article here.

Well, to many Americans Frank Wheeler is still relevant. The risk of falling deeply (downward mobility) in the US is much bigger than in most countries in Western Europa, and income inequality is a problem, for society, for democracy, but the claim that the middle class and the typical middle-class problems faded away is not my observation.

In the world of literature, in the world of the arts, there are, as in every other world, certain requirement to participate.

Who is against ‘fuller egalitarianism’? But the question if you want to pay more taxes to get this egalitarianism on the road is a different question.

What’s fashionable in literature changed maybe more than suburbia. And yes, the middle-class became more fearful.
But for good reasons? The less riskier life is the more fearful people tend to become.

Maybe the middle class in suburbia largely stopped reading serious fiction. The romance novel might have replaced Updike and Cheever.

And the tone of remove seems to me essential to any novel, at least if you want to avoid the trap of sentimentality.