Suburbia: Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

If you live in a city and are anything like me, it starts to wear on you fast. Especially on those hot summer days where the city grime basically seeps into your skin and you pool sweat at your feet on the subway platform.

You quickly begin to long for the open fields, fresh air, and sparkling night sky of the country. Hell, you'd even settle for suburbia!

But, as the folks over at Flavorwire point out, the suburbs have their own brand of drama. In honor of the ups and downs of non-city life--and of the recent release of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen--they've compiled the perfect top-ten list: 10 Classic Stories of Suburban Ennui

Forget summer in the city. This year, the heat is on in the suburbs. Whether in music — Arcade Fire’s third album is an extended rock homage to the burbs — or on television — Mad Men is back for its fourth season and still toggling back and forth from the leafy mid-century hamlets of upstate New York to the cutthroat world of Madison Avenue — or in books — Jonathan Franzen’s breathlessly awaited follow up to The Corrections, Freedom, centers on life and its discontents in suburban St. Paul — the vast sprawl is having its moment in the cultural spotlight.

In anticipation of Franzen’s book (due in stores on August 31), we found ourselves thinking about the literary tradition of the suburban novel — the fictive portraits of damaged domesticity, day drinking, and disillusion. As an American invention, novels of suburban ennui are only as old as their subject, but we’ve polled the last half-century (and beyond) to bring you these ten essential novels of suburbia and its displeasures.

1. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The mother of all suburban novels, this harrowing tale of April and Frank Wheeler is haunted by the specter of lives unlived and paths not taken. Though the book will be turning 50 next year, its insights into boredom, escapism, and class are as relevant today as ever. The 2008 film was faithful to the book, but lacked the power and precision of Yates’s perfect prose. Read it rather than rent it.

2. Couples by John Updike

American suburbs, meet bed hopping. Want to know how sexual liberation plays out in the suburbs? This is book for you. Deemed scandalous and risqué at the time of its release in 1968, Couples — which tells the story of five twosomes in fictional Tarbox, Massachusetts — propelled Updike onto the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The Adulterous Society.” Celebrated as a poet of suburban angst, Updike famously pushed boundaries by peering into American bedrooms.

3. The Stories of John Cheever

Like Updike, Cheever made a career of training his astute eye on inner conflict and dualism (perhaps a reflection of the author’s own struggle with his sexuality), and most of his work would be at home on this list. So perhaps it’s disingenuous to include this Pulitzer-prize winning collection of short stories on a list comprised chiefly of novels, but Cheever excelled in this format, and these masterfully crafted tales testify to why critics dubbed him the Chekhov of the suburbs. “The Swimmer” may be one of Cheever’s most anthologized stories, but read it once and you’ll agree it deserves the acclaim.

4. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Set in the affluent suburbs of Connecticut in 1973, Moody’s atmospheric novel centers on neighboring families — the Hoods and the Williams — in parallel states of decline. Redolent with the spirit and pop culture of the era, The Ice Storm is a bleak look at human failure, tragedy, and sex. Its detachment and distance evokes the disassociation of its subjects.

5. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The tale of the deaths of the five Lisbon sisters is told in flashback from the perspective of the curious neighborhood boys who used to lust after them, a narrative trick that too renders the reader an astonished, helpless observer. Set in the Michigan suburbs of the early ’70s, The Virgin Suicides asks how much we can ever know about anyone else and forces us to confront the power of the talismanic artifacts of tragedy and infatuation. Eugenides’s precise descriptions will haunt you long after the last page.

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The other books on Flavorpill's list? White Noise by Don Delillo, Little Children by Tom Perotta, Music for Torching by A.M. Homes, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

Sadly, the only one of these I've personally read is Madame Bovary...and boy, was it BORING!

What about you? Are any of these tales from Suburbia on your have-read list??