Notes
- Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), 42.
- Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 36.
- Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburbs and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 139.
- Popular critiques of traffic and auto-dependence are not rare. In the popular press see Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation, How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take it Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Academic accounts include Andrew Hobererk, Twilight of Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Graham Thompson, The Business of America: The Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation (London: Pluto, 2004); Jack Boozer, Career Movies: American Business and the Success Mystique (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004); and Robert Seguin, Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
- Part of the trouble in dealing with texts that treat whiteness, heterosexuality, and middle-classness as normative givens comes in the judicious use of modifiers. American suburbia has told itself the story of the middle-class white heterosexual male as the default, hegemonic, identity. For the sake of space and clarity, although my analysis concerns textual examples of middle-class white heterosexual males throughout, I will use the term ‘suburbanite.’
- These maps are part of the Dorothy Thompson collection in the Syracuse University Library Special Collections, and were first reproduced in Helen Batchelor, ‘A Sinclair Lewis Portfolio of Maps: Zenith to Winnemac,’ Modern Language Quarterly 32 (1971): 401–29.
- Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 5ff.
- Thomas Heise, Urban Underworlds, A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 23.
- Elizabeth Stevenson, Babbitts and Bohemians: The American 1920s (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 186, 101.
- John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb 1820–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 287.
- Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 25.
- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Penguin, 1996), 21–27, 40, 161–68. Granted, much of Babbitt’s speech argues for standardized consumerism, but his big finish brags about ‘an unparalleled number of miles of paved streets’ (167) and reminds the audience that Zenith has ‘one motor car for every five and seven eights persons’ (168).
- Barbara Eckstein and James Throgmorton, ‘Introduction: Blueprint Blues,’ in Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities, ed. Barbara Eckstein and James Throgmorton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 2.
- William H. Hudnut, Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America’s First-Tier Suburbs (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2003).
- Gérard Genette, ‘Order, Duration, and Frequency,’ in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 33.
- Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 94.
- Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 22.
- It is appropriate that the train, another vehicle that drops him into a space of conflict, brings the four worlds together. Tom’s commute repeats his experiences as a paratrooper with a slight difference: ‘The men had sat in their bucket seats on each side of the aisle of the plane, as expressionless as the men on the commuter train—about the only difference was that during the war they had no newspapers’ (68). However, whatever is outside the window, the same mantra eases Tom’s fears in war and in peace: ‘It doesn’t really matter’ (69).
- See Mark Ovenden, Transit Maps of the World (New York: Penguin, 2007) on maps and diagrams (8–9), and on the epochal London Underground map (20–23).
- Gray Flannel spends five out of 276 pages (two of which are a flashback) in the in-between time and space of the train. For comparison, in Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2000) not even two out of 337 pages represent the spaces between city and suburb.
- David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2001). William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).
- David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 44.
- For comparison, see Alfred’s argument with his son Gary (152–53), his tendency to say, ‘I am dubious’ in response to real estate sales pitches (363) as well as the possibility of his children making it home for Christmas (472).
- Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2000), 377.
- John Carpenter, Escape From New York (Santa Monica, CA: MGM, 1981).
- Lewis slathers this sentiment with irony by spending the next two pages noting that what passes for understanding with Babbitt consists of clichés and property values (39–40). For the role of realtors, including fictional ones like Babbitt, played in the creation and maintenance of middle-class identity, see Jeffrey Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
- Tom Vanderbilt, ‘Revolt of the Nice: Edge City, Capital of the Twenty-First Century,’ in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton, 1997), 213.