The American suburb as a battlefield

On July 19, 1964, the first short story was published that threatened the idyllic nature of what has come to be called American suburbia, that is, the wealthy small town on the outskirts, with impeccable houses and neighbors always ready to bake cookies, where middle-class families with jobs in the big city settled at a safe distance from the world. In large part, to protect themselves from it. The story in question is The Swimmer, by John Cheever. In it, one of these lucky suburbanites sees his life pass (and sink) in a single afternoon when, after a party, he decides to swim home. The idea is to do so by traversing his neighbors’ pools. But as the day progresses, so does a torment — only relieved by alcohol — that has grown within him in this supposedly alienating paradise, and that not only threatens that increasingly disastrous afternoon, but his entire life, because that one afternoon is his life.

Cheever thus took charge of what the suburbs did to the individual. And he became a master in the dissection of the self-destructive suffering caused by that monotonous and risk-averse life, removed from everything that could have been, all the paths that have not been chosen but are still there, somewhere, far away. Also in the 1960s Richard Yates, whose collection of stories Eleven Kinds of Loneliness has just been republished, turned not so much the individual as the couple into the object of collapse against the same backdrop: the apparently perfect house with a garden into that comfortable and quiet non-place where hell was you yourself, and whoever had moved there with you. Since then, authors such as A. M. Homes — especially in the essential Music for Torching and May We Be Forgiven — and others such as Jonathan Franzen have done the same with the entire family.

You could say that the first thing fiction dealt with in terms of what happened in these parallel societies — where nothing bad can happen, where problems should have disappeared — was inner space. Then, in the 1970s, films like John Carpenter’s classic Halloween explored the consequences of the falsity of a community that never existed, and where neighbor could be a wolf to neighbor. They also began to map outer space. That is, the consequences of isolation and the collapse of the idea of community, especially after the Manson family murders. Which not only led to horrible things: something extraordinary could also happen to you that made you someone unique, as in Steven Spielberg’s films (for example, E.T.).

Science fiction had arrived earlier. There are unknown literary classics like Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think, in which envy of the neighbor’s garden turns into a delirious nightmare. Horror, led by Stephen King, the most illustrious disciple of Shirley Jackson, another queen of the suburbs, turned them into the perfect setting: a microcosm in which everything could be as it was nowhere else (Needful Things, It) because the damned had altered it. King invokes childish fear and equates it with that of someone who, protected in a safe place, like a child in his bed, fears the monster in the closet. But only the incorrect Donald Antrim, a twisted and essential cult author, dared to cross the line that macabrely anticipated the atomized and paranoid neighborhood society of the Trump era.

He did so in 1993 with Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, a novel recently published for the first time in Spanish, in which one of those very rich American suburbs has become a battlefield. Literally. The former mayor launched a missile that wiped out some of the residents, and that is why he is now dead: he was cut into pieces by a handful of other suburbanites. Pete Robinson, a guy who keeps torture instruments in the basement, with which he teaches the children in his alternative school at home, is thinking of running as his successor. Meanwhile, the neighbors dig ditches around their houses, with pits filled with snakes and sharp objects to prevent attacks. The parks are littered with mines. However, life goes on as frivolously as you can imagine.

Everything David Lynch said about his happy childhood “in just one block” of one of those neighborhoods, or what happens in Jenji Kohan’s first television classic, Weeds, or in the very peculiar Cluedo of manic neighbors with too much free time in Desperate Housewives, pales before the savage and increasingly less grotesque satire of Antrim’s first novel, which the seventh season of American Horror Story seemed to invoke. In it — released in 2017 and coinciding with the arrival of Donald Trump in power — the extreme right made its way, sowing terror in the suburbs with macabre vandalism. A terror that everything should be allowed. Like Antrim, the screenwriter Ryan Murphy X-rays the dangerous and ferocious infantilism of a society that still does not know that things could become (very) serious.

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