White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (review)

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Catherine Jurca. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 238. $49.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In The City in History, Lewis Mumford, the great critic of America's socialscapes, employed two widely divergent descriptions of the suburban man. In ideal terms, he was to be both "monk" and "prince." He was to cultivate his "own unique self" by building a "unique house, mid a unique landscape," where social "privileges and benefits" could be maintained, and "the chronic defects of civilization" fended off. ¹ But in actuality the suburbanite and his neighbors embodied the antithesis of civilization; they were "people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold" (ibid.).

Privilege and deprivation, idiosyncratic privacy and manufactured conformity, civilization's last stronghold and a desolate, barbaric wasteland: such are the dichotomies that shape representations of suburbia and that form the crux of Catherine Jurca's excellent book. She explores twentieth-century suburban discourse to chart the process whereby the suburb is conceptualized as at once an idealized object of desire and a source of threat to the self, whereby white, middle-class exclusivity and advantage get reimagined as disenfranchisement and abasement. The book's title, which may at first seem unpalatably cooptive, in fact captures with precision the irony enfolded in that process. White Diaspora is about the emotional and rhetorical maneuverings that allow prosperous suburbanites to fancy themselves "diasporic," displaced and dispossessed subjects in an alien land, away from their "authentic" home.

In tracing the development of the dichotomous discourse of suburbia, Jurca makes some predictable stops: Sinclair Lewis's Babbit (1922), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and John Updike's Rabbit series. And while she is sensitive to the material and ideological conditions that separate Lewis's writing in the twenties (when for the first time the growth rate of the suburb exceeded that of the city) from, say, Updike's Rabbit at Rest (1990, the year the U. S. census revealed that there are now more inhabitants in the suburbs than in urban and rural areas combined), she argues that these novels share a structure of feeling. Collectively, they show that "nothing comes more naturally to the affluent white middle class" and produces more pleasure "than feeling bad . . . about being the white middle class" (19).

It is when Jurca digresses from this canon of suburban self-pity, however, that her study is at its most fascinating. A chapter devoted to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes (1912), for example, persuasively reads its plot as (re)producing the siege mentality and exclusionary racial logic of the emergent suburbs (designed to offer "escape" from the "urban jungle"), an argument that appears far from tenuous considering that Burroughs invested his book's profits in a racially exclusive Los Angeles subdivision named "Tarzana." Other chapters, on James A. Cain's Mildred Pierce (1941) and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), likewise highlight the suburban fantasy of flight—be it from the mass-producing marketplace or the black urban underclass—and analyze this fantasy's complex affective structures and social dangers. These chapters trace not only the dreaded trespass of the urban "native" into white suburban territory, or that of market forces into pristine bourgeois homes, but also the trespass of genres such as hard-boiled fiction and the urban novel into the domain of sentimental, middle-class suburban literature.

But White Diaspora's contribution stretches beyond its readings of individual authors and texts. If, as J. Hillis Miller argues in Topographies (1995), no account of the novel could be complete without an analysis of the landscapes or cityscapes it contains, Jurca's study demonstrates what we should expect such...