White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the TwentiethCentury American Novel. By Catherine Jurca. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. viii, 238 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-69105734-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-691-05735-4.)

At the beginning of the 1999 film American Beauty an aerial shot of a suburb, which could be "Anywhere, U.S.A.," cranes toward an undifferentiated house on an undifferentiated street. The film ends with the camera pulling backwards and upwards, away from the leafless streets. The suburb is a place you may have to visit, but you do not want to live there. As Catherine Jurca points out in White Diaspora, a pathbreaking study of representations of suburbia in twentieth-century American fiction, the repudiation of suburban life arises almost as soon as suburbs come into being. Moreover, from their inception, suburbs are implicated in discourses of...