Jason Diamond is a child of the suburbs, and in The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, he writes about them with mixed but ultimately fond feelings, realizing the idea of comfort and security they have given him.
Which doesn’t mean he didn’t escape them as soon as he could. But he does come to terms with them, something I’ve been trying to do for years in my own, still-living-in-the-suburbs way.
Diamond seeks to understand suburbs by visiting them — Levittown, New York; Roland Park, Maryland; Lake Forest, Illinois; and Fort Lee, New Jersey — and by analyzing movies and songs and books about them — William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rakesh Satyal’s No One Can Pronounce My Name and one of my favorite films, “Ladybird.”
The Sprawl is another book I picked up at the library, so serendipity was involved, and though it’s not the most lyrically written book on place, I like the no-holds-barred way Diamond describes its effect on those creative souls who grow up in places like, well, Oak Hill, Virginia:
“Suburbs in the postwar era were built with homogeneity in mind, and nothing develops a sense of not belonging like telling somebody they have to fit into a mold. While it’s impossible to figure out the roots of each and every case of suburban alienation, stepping back and seeing that there’s something downright strange about the actual concept of the modern suburb — how it’s built and the psychological impact it can have on people — isn’t nearly as hard.”
