What We Talk About When We Talk About The Suburbs

From a NY Times piece on the resurgence of the suburban genre.

Heading Home to Adultery and Angst; A New Generation of Authors Discovers the Suburbs

Alcohol flows through these novels like a seductive potion: not just in Cheever, with his lonely, hungover husbands, but in David Gates’s bleak novels ”Jernigan” and ”Preston Falls,” in which everyone is either an alcoholic or a druggie or both. And where would the suburban novel be without adultery? The sharp tang of sex is everywhere, an anodyne and occasionally the way to transcendence.

Sunday can’t come soon enough.

“It is the peculiar and original genius of Novelist John Cheever to see his chosen subject—the American middle class entering the second decade of the Affluent Society—as figures in an Ovidian netherworld of demons. Commuterland… is given by Cheever’s fables the dignity of the classical theater.”

Ovid in Ossining, Time Magazine, 27 March 1964.

The alert reader will learn something of creator Matt Weiner’s debt to Cheever, and at the same time the reader can reconsider Mad Men as a fable.

• footnote - by Brenden Dean Kemp

Betty and Don live in Ossining, NY the suburb that novelist John Cheever called home.  In American literature, Cheever is considered the Chekhov of the suburbs. 

A description of Cheever’s work could just as easily be applied to Mad Men:

“The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” These stories are said to explore the “separateness” of the characters’ existences. As their lives are divided between their city work and suburban homes, so are they split between their normal outer appearances and their chaotic inner experiences. Critics often note that Cheever’s talent lies in being able to blend the commonplace with the mythic.

• footnote - by Brenden Dean Kemp