American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp (review)

“Before is everlastingly gone,”¹ Frank Bascombe states at the end of Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land (2006) and Kathy Knapp’s American Unexceptionalism echoes this truism by charting its consequences for the growing body of post-9/11 suburban literature that negotiates this post-traumatic environment with a focus on the quotidian, rather than the catastrophic event itself. In response to this question of why a contemporary rise in the white, middle-class, male suburban novel might insistently attest to this “before,” which appears jarringly out of step with the post-9/11 era, Knapp shows how the alienation theme has been gradually replaced with a new aesthetic that accounts for the fraught suburban experience of individuals and communities. Her reading of recent, successful suburban novels in the context of the everyman tradition contributes a fresh perspective to ongoing critical conversations about suburban literature.

The first chapter identifies a pivotal shift from the canonical everyman to a post-9/11 aesthetic of contingency and discontinuity in the suburban novel and focuses on Ford’s The Lay of the Land to delineate this turn within his Frank Bascombe trilogy, comprised also of The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995). The examination of Frank in the earlier two novels, as a white male upper-middle-class suburbanite, who is steeped in the familiar suburban literary tradition of the dissatisfied and alienated everyman, illustrates Ford’s significant departure from a portrayal of suburbia as infused by neoliberal ideals and nostalgia towards a sense of universal uncertainty, contingency, and suffering.

This beginning rejection of American exceptionalism is taken further in Knapp’s analysis of postwar suburban consciousness as shaped by a political agenda of rehabilitation, directed at the demobilized soldiers of World War II, who were expected to inhabit these suburbs. Business and political leaders sought to invent an idealized past that buried the trauma of World War II in the advancement of racial homogeny and forgetting, while living memorials would “preserve social ideals for future generations” (32). Knapp illustrates this denial as analogous to the Bush administration’s ideological stance in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which defined the return to normalcy as a patriotic duty for survivors. As American Unexceptionalism’s reading of Changrae Lee’s Aloft (2004) shows, the institutionalized habit of forgetting creates a suburban landscape that suspends generations of the Battle family in a post-traumatic environment. According to Knapp, Lee’s contribution in Aloft to the new suburban novel lies in the deliberate subversion of such promotion of active forgetting and “picture-perfect [. . .] American exceptionalism” (44) through a counternarrative that unearths trauma and shame. This results in Hank Battle’s descent into dementia as a resurgence of repressed memories, Jerry Battle’s abuse of his Korean-born wife, Daisy, as an exploitation of racial ethnic identity in service to patriarchy (41), and his daughter, Theresa’s death, as forcing Jerry to put aside his detachment and deal with her baby as a “literally living memorial, his very being inscribed by trauma” (47). Knapp discusses Aloft as redefining the suburban ethos. The novel achieves this by excavating suburbia’s traumatic history and suggesting a new representation of suburbia as a provisional community, with the baby as a signal of hope that nevertheless cannot provide closure.

Knapp then goes on to analyze the success of male-authored novels that dramatize the middle-class experience of privileged white males, with reference to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010). She locates Freedom’s cultural resonance in the recognizable nature of its characters as “not at all special everymen.” According to American Unexceptionalism, Franzen explores the relationship between privilege and justice by exposing how ideals of social equality and environmental justice are ultimately engulfed in “universal access to the goods, service and property that are the hallmarks of middle-class membership” (56). Once again, death, Lalitha’s fatal car accident, signals the...