Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life by Greg Dickinson (review)

Fans of AMC’s 2007–2015 Mad Men may recall the lovely shock at the conclusion of the premier episode. Protagonist Don Draper, a man in the 1960s working on Madison Avenue, has concluded a day of corporate scheming and sexual dalliances with a commute by train. The journey, accompanied by the heady rush of Gordon Jenkins’s “Caravan,” concludes with Draper’s disembarkation at Ossining, New York, where viewers learn at last that the rambling advertising executive has planted a wife and children in another world distant from the treacherous board-rooms and bedrooms of the city and far from Manhattan’s mean streets. As his spouse looks lovingly and achingly on the domestic tableau, while Vic Damone sings “On the Street Where You Live,” viewers are left to wonder what types of secrets may yet be found among the well-tended lawns and manicured lives of what Betty Friedan once termed, to her later regret, the “comfortable concentration camps” of suburbia.

Betty Friedan does not appear in Professor Dickinson’s latest book, nor does William Levitt, who once said, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” We do not encounter John Cheever’s Swimmer or Mike Nichols’s Graduate or even Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes.” Instead, we read a more contemporary perspective on suburbs by exploring their collectively turn-of-the-millennium evocation of “the good life,” excavating how they are currently manifested in suburban films, residential neighborhoods, chain restaurants, megachurches, and lifestyle centers—viewing them through a tripartite lens of memory, locality, and safety. Generally, this is a wise choice, particularly when Dickinson complicates the well-worn trope of the postage-stamp lawn by noting the impact of climate change on those formally green fantasies of pastoral innocence and, more notably, when he reads those sprawling megachurch worship congregations that serve watery coffee and lukewarm religion as “architecture, institution, and performance [that] connects to popular culture’s therapeutic obsession with individuals and families while compulsively ignoring social and structural possibilities and difficulties” (127). This analysis of how megachurches seek to suture (a word that appears frequently in Suburban Dreams and is ideally suited in this case) the quotidian with the sublime fills a yawning chasm in much of our field’s reading of the built environment by taking seriously the senses affected by these types of places and the look and feel and sound of suburban life that some readers might lose in the authority appeals of other published scholarship.

Dickinson’s tour of late modern suburbs is augmented by plenty of academic authorities, of course, as is the style of this sort of intellectual journey, guided especially by insights from Gaston Bachelard, Alain de Botton, Henri Lefebvre, and Yi-Fu Tuan. However, the tour never confuses an excess of cite for the pleasure of sight; the author packs his chapters with crisp, witty descriptions of the types of places, safe in their banality but global in their reach, that are familiar to most readers and yet all too easily overlooked by the search by many writers (this reviewer included) for the exotic, the unexplored, and the supposedly “under-theorized.” Dickinson inhabits suburban simulacra as an interested participant, eschewing all pretenses toward objectivity and, despite his ultimate argument, offering at least some sympathy for their intentions in a manner reminiscent of Henry Seidel Canby’s The Age of Confidence. As with Canby, the Depression-era writer who sought to understand the design, not just the psychology, of nostalgia, this post-Great Recession book carves deeper than mere sentimentality. Although Dickinson does not intend to “debunk” suburban life (3), he leaves little ambiguity regarding his conclusions about the blithe assurances promised by brochures and websites and by functionless neighborhood icons and ahistorical narratives of easy parking and off-ramp-friendly worship communities wherein “the best and truest selves offered in...