Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe Trilogy and the Post-9/11 Suburban Novel

Abstract

Has the suburban novel exhausted itself? In a 2004 article entitled “Heading Home to Adultery and Angst,” New York Times critic Charles McGrath heralds the arrival of writers such as Tom Perrotta and Chang-rae Lee, the latest to cover the well-trod suburban terrain of “Updike and the ghost of Cheever, gloomily surveying the well-kept lawns and … wondering where all the action had gone” (E1). Though McGrath credits these new writers with conferring fresh hipness on a literary tradition largely abandoned as “too old, too square, too white and middle class” (E1), as his title suggests, he notes little change in a body of work noted for characters whose disposable incomes have only fostered bottomless longing, malaise, and navel-gazing. McGrath's essay thus begs the question: can anything new be said by and about novels concerned with the foibles of self-absorbed suburbanites, especially in the context of the traumatic events of 9/11 and an aftermath that continues to unfold?