Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe Trilogy and the Post-9/11 Suburban Novel

1. Introduction

Has the suburban novel exhausted itself? In a 2004 article entitled “Heading Home to Adultery and Angst,” New York Times critic Charles McGrath heralds the arrival of writers such as Tom Perrotta and Chang-rae Lee, the latest to cover the well-trod suburban terrain of “Updike and the ghost of Cheever, gloomily surveying the well-kept lawns and . . . wondering where all the action had gone” (E1). Though McGrath credits these new writers with conferring fresh hipness on a literary tradition largely abandoned as “too old, too square, too white and middle class” (E1), as his title suggests, he notes little change in a body of work noted for characters whose disposable incomes have only fostered bottomless longing, malaise, and navel-gazing. McGrath’s essay thus begs the question: can anything new be said by and about novels concerned with the foibles of self-absorbed suburbanites, especially in the context of the traumatic events of 9/11 and an aftermath that continues to unfold?

I would suggest that it is precisely because of recent cataclysmic events that the suburban literary tradition now warrants reconsideration. Such a claim may seem counterintuitive. Bruce Robbins argues, for instance, that “In the face of large-scale impersonal violence, many [American novels] retreat into domesticity—behind national borders, behind the door of the family home” (1097). The fact that writers are once again “heading home,” as McGrath puts it, seems only more proof that in the wake of 9/11, the American novel is in full retreat. Yet it is my contention that writers now working in the suburban literary tradition do not offer the postwar suburb as a retreat from the larger world, but suggest instead that the world has come to the suburbs.

Critics of the suburban literary tradition prior to 9/11 have read the postwar suburb as static and its representation as monotonous and trivial. Catherine Jurca fittingly titles the epilogue to her influential study White Diaspora (2000), “Same As It Ever Was,” since she maintains that the suburban novel continues to depict characters trapped in environments that are as dull as they are inescapable. In a discussion of several novels centering around the postwar middle class, Richard Ohmann reaches a similar conclusion, calling such texts “illness stories” that end “at best, in mere recovery—in the achievement of personal equilibrium vis-à-vis the same untransformed world” (217).

Yet despite their reputation as soulless buffer zones, the postwar suburbs have been steadily evolving since their inception, and the novels that represent them have duly registered the various social changes that have shaped and reshaped territory where more Americans now live than in cities and rural areas combined.¹ Suburbia has indeed become a complex environment that presents varied, vexing social, ethical, and political challenges. In his call for the post-9/11 novel to find a new form to match the new conditions now confronting Americans, Richard Gray cites a raft of statistics that indicate that immigrants, especially those coming from outside of Europe, have radically reshaped the population.² If this does not seem particularly shocking to the astute observer who has recognized that Americans have become an increasingly diverse population over the past few decades, what may be surprising is that this seismic demographic shift is happening not in the city but in the suburbs. Indeed, more immigrants and people in poverty now live in the suburbs than in urban areas.³ These dramatically different demographics have created desperate need for everything from affordable, accessible housing and healthcare to bilingual education and public transportation while putting a serious strain on the environment and a weakened tax base—issues that seriously challenge suburbia’s original premise and promise of upward mobility.⁴

These conditions have not gone undetected: suburban novelists working on the eve of 9/11 have registered these changes in apocalyptic terms. Catastrophe and trauma are central features of these novels, many of which participate in nothing less than a dystopian orgy of mass destruction, depicting their milquetoast middle-class male protagonists as crippled by panic, despair...