The Life and Death of the Suburban Novel

Remember the suburban novel? Books about attractive white families in nice houses who turn out to be miserable? Examples include Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961), the work of the Johns (Cheever and Updike), Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995), and Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm (1994). If so, you’re probably middle-aged, or a diligent student of twentieth-century American literature. Once a staple of American fiction, novels about suburban malaise have largely stopped being written. The last to have been a hit was probably Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, about an affair between bored stay-at-home parents in a Massachusetts suburb, in 2004.

Novels that are set in the suburbs continue to be written and published. They will be as long as there are books and people living in suburbs. But the suburban novel was more than that. It questioned the idea that undergirds suburbia: that marriage-kids-house-car is the basis for the good life. The young husband and father in Sloan Wilson’s tremendously popular The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), for example, tries to climb the corporate ladder but grows increasingly concerned about the personal costs of doing so; Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom marries young, feels trapped, and tries to leave; the deeply dysfunctional couple at the center of Revolutionary Road wind up in the suburbs to prove to themselves that they are normal and can be happy (they aren’t and they can’t).

These books differ fundamentally from, say, Jonathan Franzen’s trio of novels about suburban families—The Corrections, Freedom, and Crossroads—which are set in the suburbs without being about the suburbs: the problems Franzen’s characters’ struggle with derive predominantly from qualities that are internal, particular to them as individuals, not from their lifestyles or from American culture. The suburban novel, in contrast, took aim at the American Dream, asking whether it was enough, or even the right thing, whether we were using our collective affluence toward the right ends, or if our way of life left many of us materially comfortable but spiritually and emotionally dissatisfied. For a while such questions struck many readers and critics as pressing and important—as grappling with a fundamental aspect of the American experience. And then they didn’t.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the suburban novel was never about the American experience, in some essential sense, but about a certain iteration of it. It was both a product and a reflection of that period in our history when we could plausibly—well, somewhat plausibly—claim to live in a middle-class society. In the decades after World War II tens of millions of previously poor Americans enjoyed unprecedented upward mobility, purchasing homes and cars and myriad other consumer goods. Not all Americans benefited equally from the postwar economic boom. In truth, the middle-class America of the postwar era existed almost exclusively for white men, and the women and children who lived in households headed by them; black Americans in particular were excluded from enjoying their share of the otherwise widespread prosperity. Now even that limited version of a middle-class society is gone. America today is characterized less by mass affluence than by extreme income inequality and widespread financial precarity. The suburban novel’s concerns—conformity, consumerism, lack of fulfillment among plenty—have come to feel dated, almost quaint.           

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The suburban novel emerged in response to the rapid growth of mass-produced consumer goods that began in the early twentieth century and exploded in the 1920s. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), the story of a successful real estate broker and pillar of his community who finds himself unsatisfied by his comfortable, gadget-filled upper-middle-class life, was such a sensation that the name of its title character became a metonym for materialism and mediocrity among affluent suburbanites for decades.

But the suburban novel reached its heights when the lifestyle it depicted became a widespread phenomenon in the decades after World War II, and those bards of middle-class ennui, Cheever and Updike, became household names. The environment was ripe for such stories. Not only was the US the richest nation in the world, and getting richer with every passing year, its wealth was distributed more equally than ever before. The economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo coined the term “The Great Compression” to describe the period from the early 1940s through the 1970s, when the share of national income that went to the richest 10 percent of the population fell by nearly a third, and the bottom 90 percent enjoyed a much larger share of the nation’s wealth than it had previously—or has since.

This more egalitarian economy wasn’t an inevitable result of the postwar boom. It was a product of specific policy measures, from taxes—which were extremely progressive, with the wealthy subject to much higher rates of taxation than they are now—to labor protections. The well-paying jobs in manufacturing and industry that we now associate with the postwar era, for example, were dangerous and paid poverty-level wages in the 1920s. Only in the late 1930s did they start becoming the middle-class occupations we now pine for. Neoliberal economics tells us that wages are a function of productivity, but these workers didn’t suddenly become vastly more productive over the course of a few years. What changed was that Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which banned most child labor and established the minimum wage and the forty-hour workweek, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which compelled employers to negotiate with unions. Industrial and manufacturing workers unionized en masse; as a result they were able to exact a larger share of corporate profits.  The average worker in the 1950s and 1960s made far more relative to CEOs than he or she does today.

In 1930, according to the historian Thomas Sugrue, only 30 percent of Americans owned their homes. Most home loans required a large down payment and full repayment within a short period of time—prohibitive conditions for many prospective buyers. Then came the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation, created in 1933, and the Federal Housing Authority, created in 1934, began promoting and guaranteeing mortgages on more accessible terms, like the fifteen-year mortgage. By 1960, 60 percent of Americans owned their homes. This upward trend persisted even after the postwar boom faded in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1975 three quarters of AFL-CIO members were homeowners; by 1980, “95 percent of intact white families in small cities owned their homes,” as Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 study of suburbanization in the US, Crabgrass Frontier.

It’s no accident that the latter figure does not include black families. Black Americans were almost entirely excluded from the new market for private mortgages. Banks relied on HOLC and FHA analyses of neighborhoods across the country to determine which were eligible for these generous mortgages. These reports gave low ratings to areas where black people lived, prompting banks to redline those neighborhoods. Nor could black Americans get around the problem by moving to other, more “desirable” neighborhoods: restrictive racial covenants, racist deeding practices, and sometimes, if those failed, outright violent terror made that difficult.

It’s hardly surprising that the suburban novel was the province of white writers—that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright didn’t write suburban novels. Nor did women, black or white, write any of the most prominent suburban novels, despite the genre’s focus on domestic life, an arena long associated with fiction by women. Interestingly, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), a defining work of the postwar era, shares many of the genre’s concerns, namely its focus on fulfillment among the economically comfortable. Of course, one of the criticisms most frequently leveled against that book was that it focused exclusively on the plight of well-off white women. Almost two decades after The Feminine Mystique, Gloria Naylor’s novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982), which was made into a popular television miniseries, turned those themes on their head, exploring the difficulties her working-class black characters faced in attaining and retaining some semblance of a comfortable domestic life.

Meanwhile, millions of white Americans continued to benefit from both the Great Compression’s effect on wages and the appreciation of properties in suburban neighborhoods, such that if you were a white man during those decades, or lived in a household headed by one, you were likely to feel that a relatively safe and comfortable life—in a house of your own—was available to you if you wanted it. Indeed, you might feel that you couldn’t escape it if you tried.

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That attitude is central to the suburban novel. Its air of quiet tragedy derives from the conviction that this sort of life—marriage, house, kids, car—was foisted on people too young and ignorant to make an informed choice. “Family was a bad idea he got because there were no other ideas in those days” is how the paterfamilias of The Ice Storm’s Hood family puts it. For many, including Revolutionary Road’s Frank and April Wheeler and Updike’s Rabbit, it was sex—or more precisely pregnancy—that led inexorably to suburban life. For Babbitt, the original suburban husband, it didn’t even take that much. When Babbitt was a young and lonely student, in the early 1900s, he began spending time with a nice, conventional middle-class girl named Myra. One day he kissed her. She assumed the kiss signaled love and love meant marriage, and he didn’t have the heart or the nerve to contradict her. With a wife and, soon enough, children to support, he gave up his plan to become a lawyer to the poor and instead went into business. Consolation for what he had given up came in the form of purchasing power. Babbitt was well positioned to buy the new consumer goods that were rapidly being invented and produced in freshly built factories, from alarm clocks to cigar lighters, and buy them he did.

Though it both defined and anticipated the form, Babbitt differs from the suburban novels of the midcentury in one crucial way: it is satirical, veering between a send-up of Babbitt’s boobism and self-flattery and an occasionally sympathetic portrait of a man who is trapped in a life he doesn’t quite like. Unlike the heroes of later suburban novels, Babbitt, a well-to-do businessman with a college degree, wasn’t presented as an everyman. Rather, he seemed to represent an up-and-coming type—what we’d later call a member of the professional middle class. As Babbitt says in a boosterish speech to his fellow businessmen, “It’s the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the wheel of progress go round!”

By the time the suburban novel reached its apotheosis, Babbitt’s comfortable, thing-filled lifestyle had come to be associated with the average American, or what was assumed to be the average American by many writers and critics and readers. This was essential. Even if many suburban novels focused on characters in the upper strata of the middle class—one exception being Rabbit Angstrom, a former high school basketball star who works a lower-middle-class sales job hawking a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler at a local department store—they were nonetheless portrayed not as economic winners in an exploitative system but as ordinary people: not satirical targets but deserving of the sympathies of a mass audience.

Take Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler. His father had been a salesman for a computer company who moved from one middling city to the next and barely eked out a lower-middle-class living. Frank, a World War II vet, went to college on the GI Bill. But in the prosperous 1950s he finds it easy to “fall” into a comfortable middle-class life after April gets pregnant. He coasts into a cushy, well-paying office job—at the same company in which his father had spent his whole career, longing fruitlessly for a position at the New York City headquarters where Frank now works.

But the attainment of his father’s dream doesn’t satisfy Frank, who had been living a bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Maybe, Frank thinks, everything after the baby and the job had “been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do…moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it.” And so: unpretentious, war-hero everyman from poor family makes good, only to suffer from suburban malaise.

Or not. If that were the whole of Revolutionary Road’s analysis, it would be a pretty forgettable book. Even a suburban novel needs more than a critique of the suburbs to succeed as a novel. But, like Cheever’s capacious, humane stories—and far more than Updike’s fiction, which tended to be pointillistic and focused on sensory detail—Revolutionary Road has endured. That’s because it is both a winking, half-ironic critique of the suburbs and an unironic critique of Frank himself, whose tendency to blame his unhappiness on the suburbs, and American culture generally, is part of his problem.

The truth is, Frank actually likes his ordinary suburban life. His job is easy, and being at the office in the city, in the company of affable colleagues, is pleasant. Then he comes home to a comfortable house in Connecticut. He remains a bit awed by April, who came from wealth and is beautiful and self-possessed, and he derives satisfaction from having a wife who is so impressive socially, even if the relationship itself is…complicated. At least his friendship with their admiring neighbors, Shep and Milly, is simpler and more gratifying. Unlike April, they look up to him.

Yates describes a typical evening’s conversation between the two couples, in which Shep offers up “an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness.” Frank follows up:

“It isn’t only the Donaldsons—it’s the Cramers, too, and the whaddyacallits, the Wingates, and a million others. It’s all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”

Milly Campbell would writhe in pleasure. “Oh, that’s so true. Isn’t that true, darling?”

They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

Frank’s real problem has nothing to do with “a drugged and dying culture.” It’s that April, who really is unhappy with their life in Connecticut, calls his bluff, takes his intellectual posturing seriously. She forms a plan for the two of them and their two young children to move to Paris, where she’ll get a job as a secretary for some international aid organization while Frank “finds himself”—figures out what he really wants to do, which, presumably, is to become some sort of writer. April is delighted by this plan, and Frank pretends to be, so as not to reveal to her that he probably doesn’t have much in the way of buried talent and that, moreover, he is as happy, and thus fundamentally as ordinary, as the Donaldsons and the whaddyacallits. The efforts he makes to prevent this from happening, to get out of moving to France without admitting to April that he doesn’t want to—let alone why he doesn’t want to—propel the book’s plot.

Frank Wheeler is one of twentieth-century fiction’s most well-drawn, realistic, and frightening characters: on the surface he is more sympathetic than April because he is both nice—polite, sociable—and vulnerable, while April is withering and moody; she frequently isn’t “nice” to Frank or to Shep and Milly. But over the course of the novel it is Frank, insecure and prone to self-justification, who behaves truly monstrously, cruelly manipulating April, believing all the while that he is only doing what’s right and sensible.

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By the final decades of the twentieth century, the suburbs had become entrenched, not just geographically—the McMansions, the malls, the shopping centers, the fast food chains and gas stations that had sprung up like green shoots at cloverleaf highway interchanges across the nation—but in our collective imagination: they were the de facto backdrop of the American experience. To live in the suburbs seemed like the natural endpoint to ordinary human aspiration, The End of History as applied to personal life. The critique of them had also become fully mainstream, a trope like any other. You can see this in The Ice Storm, a critical hit when it was published in 1994, then adapted by Ang Lee into a well-regarded 1997 film starring Joan Allen, Kevin Kline, and Sigourney Weaver.

Set in 1973, the book follows a family in wealthy New Canaan, Connecticut. Benjamin Hood and his wife, Elena, a homemaker, have two teenage children. All four of them are miserable. Benjamin, who works as a stock analyst, is having an affair with his neighbor, though she doesn’t seem to like him much more than his wife does. Elena is also unhappy, maybe because Benjamin is unfaithful, but maybe not. Her dislike seems bigger, and likely to have preceded the infidelity.

The problem is that it’s hard to know what exactly her dislike is rooted in. Moody is precise, often grotesquely so, when it comes to details, especially sensory and period details—a shag carpet, for example, “could conceal crumbs, ancient pieces of chewing gum, spittle, disease-carrying fleas and ants and silverfish”—but he is vague when it comes to the things that are usually at the heart of fiction. The contours of the Hoods’ characters or the actual fault lines in their marriage are barely gestured at. He treats the family’s unhappiness as a simple fact, like hair color or weight, that need only be stated. Dinner at the Hoods’ is described this way: “They were back in the kitchen. Disappointment in the room like a sullen dinner guest. The peas bobbed in their sulfurous oil slick. All was ready.” Instead of giving us an account of them as individuals, Moody relies on what had by the Nineties become a cliché; he could, and did, count on the reader to intuit that these characters are miserable because the suburban lifestyle is empty and fake and makes people miserable. But as analysis, this is much like Frank Wheeler’s faux-sophisticated conversation: neither convincing nor original.

Perhaps because by the 1980s and 1990s the suburbs, and the critique of them, were no longer new, many later suburban novels tended to turn to crises more dramatic than ordinary suburban dissatisfaction. Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of Ford’s The Sportswriter as well as four later books, grapples with not only suburban ennui but divorce and the death of a child. David Gates’s Jernigan (1991) is about a suburban father reeling from his alcoholic wife’s sudden death.

The 1999 hit movie American Beauty was in a sense a return to form. In subject matter (attractive family, nice house, private misery) and perspective (suburban life is corrosive to the soul), it was an almost perfect Hollywoodization of the classic suburban novel, albeit one with regressive sexual politics. (Its sympathies are tilted far more in favor of its male protagonist than Yates’s were in Revolutionary Road, more than forty years earlier.) Though American Beauty won the Oscar for Best Picture, this would turn out to be less an indication of the genre’s enduring relevance than its high-water mark. In the years after American Beauty’s release, the suburban novel began its rapid fade, even as Hollywood put out dutiful, largely forgettable film versions of Little Children (2006) and Revolutionary Road (2008).

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The death of the suburban novel, a relatively short-lived subgenre of American literature, may be of interest primarily to academics and literary hobbyists. The death of the middle-class society from which it sprung, on the other hand, is a national tragedy.

It wasn’t a natural death. In The Ice Storm, Moody—who is more astute at sociological observation than interiority—gestures slyly at the forces that eventually doomed that version of America. Benjamin and Elena attend a neighbor’s sex party. (It was the 1970s, after all.) Before the sex begins, the guests, the male half of whom are mostly Wall Street types, are praising the ideas of Milton Friedman:

Supply and demand…less restriction, Moellering was saying.… Several feet away, by the mantel, Bobby Haskell, normally a guy who concentrated on paddle tennis to the exclusion of all other forms of conversation, was proposing that unions were a kind of labor monopoly, just an antitrust problem in the arena of labor…. These Friedman arias swooped around one another like the diverging themes of a duet.

A few years earlier, Friedman’s ideas had been treated as kooky, but by the early 1970s they were becoming mainstream. As Moody puts it, “America rose and fell on the melody of New Canaan’s songs of the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by WASPs who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.”

The economic downturn of the period—a recession in the first half of the decade, followed by years of high inflation and high unemployment—created an opening for his views. Members of both political parties began to embrace neoliberal ideas. Tax rates for the wealthy came down; corporations were given freer rein. Those who believed in such policies for reasons that weren’t cynical or self-interested thought they would lead to increased dynamism and a bigger economic pie, which would benefit all Americans. Instead, of course, economic gains began flowing disproportionately to the wealthy.

In retrospect, the solutions neoliberalism offered don’t seem particularly well suited to the stagflation of the 1970s, which included an exogenous oil shock and increased international competition from companies in Japan and Europe. Many parts of the manufacturing and industrial sectors had become sleepy and complacent after decades of global dominance. But instead of thinking about how to make American companies more competitive globally—which would have required real investment in modernization—neoliberals, who in a different era might have been described as laissez-faire, simply accepted that American firms could no longer compete and were content to shift to a service-based economy. This became the de facto national policy.

The loss of manufacturing and industrial jobs that resulted from this approach wouldn’t have been so painful if there had been other well-paying jobs available to workers without college degrees. But there weren’t. What had, in the past, turned those miserable, poverty-level jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry into good jobs was unionization. But the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 had dramatically slowed the rate of union expansion, and neoliberals were not about to do anything to change that. They considered unions passé—a “labor monopoly,” as Moody’s Bobby Haskell puts it—not only unnecessary but deleterious to a modern, “knowledge-based” economy. Today the biggest employers in the US—Walmart, which employs 1.6 million Americans, and Amazon, which employs 1.1 million—are un-unionized, in spite of ongoing efforts by workers at some Amazon fulfillment centers, and offer mostly poor-quality and often poverty-level jobs.¹

Moreover, in the 1980s, under the Reagan administration, antitrust enforcement waned, making possible the rise of chains like Walmart in the first place. Banking regulations put in place in the 1930s in response to the crash of 1929 were rolled back, paving the way for the mergers and acquisitions mania of the 1980s, the rise of shareholder capitalism (in which corporations are more likely to be run for the short-term benefit of shareholders than for long-term sustainability), and the ballooning size and influence of finance, which is now 7.3 percent of our economy, up from 2.8 percent in 1950 and 4.9 percent in 1980. The result was an economy in which the price of housing, medical care, and education rose significantly faster than the income of the median worker.

Over time, these changes transformed American life. Naturally, they showed up in our fiction, including the suburban novel. Jernigan, for example, reflects a vision of suburbia that has all the alcoholism, depression, and marital dysfunction of Yates’s portrait but is physically much uglier. Jernigan lives in “a God damn tract house in New Jersey,” on a street called Heritage Circle that is lined with nearly identical houses. At one point, his father, who came of age in the America of the 1950s and 1960s, in Frank Wheeler’s America, asks why he doesn’t find something nicer, “some handyman special in Westchester or something. Rockland. Something with a little charm to it,” to which Jernigan retorts: “You price any handyman specials in Westchester lately?” Jernigan, who once wanted to be an academic, works a real estate job that he hates. He does it because “it beats junior-professor money.” Nevertheless he gets fired. By the book’s end his and his son’s financial future is highly uncertain.

Likewise, American Beauty’s Lester Burnham finds his job at a magazine intolerable under new, profit-maximizing corporate ownership. He winds up quitting before he is fired and taking a job at a fast-food joint. Jernigan and American Beauty reflect a landscape in which the American Dream was no longer quite so attainable, or maintainable, even for men like Jernigan and Burnham: white, college-educated, book-smart people not all that different from Frank Wheeler or Benjamin Hood.

This theme is even more pronounced in Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land (2004), a book that is a very bitter twist on the suburban novel. It’s set in a uniquely suburban sort of hellscape—the smell of the mall the protagonist hangs out at is “the scent of scents canceling each other out. Perfumes, pizza, leather, sweat”—but the book’s protagonist, Lewis Miner, is not a breadwinner beaten down by the dullness of his life. He’s a white male who failed to make it through the meritocratic gauntlet—he didn’t finish college and has no other extraordinary talent to compensate. In his early thirties, Miner has no wife, not even a girlfriend, and no kids. Severely underemployed as a freelance writer, he occasionally works bussing tables at the catering hall his dad owns. He doesn’t have a car, let alone a house. He rents.

Miner feels society lies when it claims “that we are all of us blessed with talents, skill sets, and if we just stay the course, apply a little elbow grease, ride out the bumps and grinds of decreasing economic indicators, life will shine like our new ‘professional’ kitchens.” To which he replies, “Dream on, worm bait.”

In the heyday of the suburban novel, the suburbs seemed full of prematurely aged adults—thirty-year-olds like Frank Wheeler with two kids, a mortgage, and a commute. By 2003 a single, childless, largely prospectless man like Miner was becoming, to echo Babbitt’s phrase, “the new up-and-coming type.” America at the beginning of the twenty-first century was a country better described by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone than by The Organization Man: more alienation and isolation, less sheeplike blending into the crowd.

The change was not just psychological but topographical. It’s no accident that Miner hangs out at the mall. By 2003 the main streets that were once the centers of suburban enclaves were largely gone or emptied out. The ones that survived did so by becoming upscale luxury amenities, faux main streets that are less hubs of commerce than tourist attractions aimed at locals, replete with high-end cafes and boutiques. Preserved in amber (zoning restrictions ensure that ugly chains are built only in less affluent areas), they are simulacra of an earlier version of America, an America that was, ironically, destroyed by the economic policies preferred by the wealthy classes who now maintain, for their own enjoyment, these amusement park-like replicas of it.

In our new, post-middle-class America, the lifestyle described in suburban novels—the backyard barbecues, community theater, bridge clubs—may look more benign. After all, even the suburban novel itself suggested, perhaps inadvertently, that the suburbs were nightmarish to some people, but not to everyone. For every April Wheeler, who really did yearn to travel in artistic circles, there was a Frank Wheeler, who just wanted to have a few drinks after work and talk smack with his neighbors; for every George Babbitt, who at least briefly longed for something different, there was a Myra Babbitt, for whom hosting a dinner party was the height of ambition.

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Several years ago the critic Becca Rothfeld wrote an essay about what she termed “sanctimony literature.” She was irritated by fictional characters who perform guilt about their privilege—characters like Bobby in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, Adam Gordon in Ben Lerner’s Topeka School, and Mia Warren in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. Rothfeld attributes this tendency to a compulsion on these authors’ part to politicize personal life, in order to demonstrate the correctness of their thinking. Rothfeld’s essay is well-observed and elegantly written, but the neurotic virtue-signaling she derides is less of any individual novelist’s making than it is a function of the same social and economic shifts that killed the suburban novel.

Earlier generations of fiction writers were less likely to feel (or express) guilt about devoting attention to issues like ennui or lack of connection or purpose because those “middle-class problems” were much more widely—if still far from universally—shared. Because writers and critics of the postwar era largely ignored the fact that many Americans were excluded from this middle-class society, the issues raised by the suburban novel—as well as novels about middle-class problems more generally—seemed both broadly relevant and important. Now that we live in a society more like Babbitt’s, in which a wealthy upper-middle class flourishes while average Americans largely do not, these justifications seem to have lost much of their force.

The situation is compounded by the fact that the liberation movements of the late 1960s expanded our ambitions for a more fully egalitarian society, one that would not exclude marginalized groups, materially or otherwise. But we began to aspire to a fuller egalitarianism at just the moment that the economic basis for what limited egalitarianism we had achieved began to crumble. This has created a chasm between our ideals and our reality. We now live in the gulf between what Lewis Miner was taught—that with a bit of hard work, anyone can be rich and successful—and what we know to be true.

It’s awkward to write novels about middle-class problems in a society that is no longer even nominally middle class when you hold egalitarian ideals. This is the predicament that many American fiction writers now face. The abandonment of the suburban novel and the performative guilt Rothfeld mocked are only some of the ways they have responded. Another is an increasing reliance on satire or semi-satire. It’s hard these days to find literary novels about characters with middle-class problems that treat them with unalloyed sympathy. Like Sinclair Lewis, who also wrote in an age characterized by extremes of wealth and poverty, contemporary authors often treat well-to-do-characters ironically, or as objects of anthropological study, with moments of sympathy interspliced with a tone of remove.

Others have turned away from domestic realism entirely, to genres once considered niche. To judge by some of the most critically acclaimed novels of recent years, the suburban novel’s prominence may have been usurped by the dystopian novel, which concerns itself not with the dullness of American society but with its fragility. While novels like Revolutionary Road and The Ice Storm showed us a suburbia that was pretty on the outside but stunted, and stunting, underneath, dystopian novels are often set in the ruins of those worlds, in societies that are barely functional, let alone superficially appealing. Compared to the hellscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the old suburban lifestyle, whatever its spiritual limitations, seems positively idyllic.

Historical eras are generally defined by wars, electoral upsets, or other cataclysmic events. Literary eras, in contrast, begin and end with a whisper. But they are worth noticing. Even among so many other manifestations of social and economic change on our fiction, the end of the suburban novel tells us something about what we have lost. The genre’s concerns, though they may seem a little frivolous today, are also touchingly hopeful. When Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler complained of “a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue” populated by “good consumers” who “have a lot of Togetherness and bring [their] children up in a bath of sentimentality,” it was meant as a withering criticism—and perhaps it was, at the time. Imagine a writer who looked at America today and saw nothing worse to worry about. Most of us would probably be tempted to channel the immortal words of Lewis Miner: “Dream on, worm bait.”