REVISIT: James Tadd Adcox on SPRAWL

Near the end of Danielle Dutton’s 2010 novel Sprawl, as the narrator contemplates leaving the place she lives for “the city,” she thinks, or perhaps reports: “It’s impossible; it lies outside the envelope of my own special case” (85). This feeling, that the city is—in some difficult-to-describe but viscerally certain way—an impossible place, is one I recognized immediately, though it’s something I’ve not felt for a long time. It’s a feeling I suspect is familiar to a lot of people who grew up in the suburbs, just outside the gravitational pull of a major American city. Even though millions of people live in the city—three million or so in Chicago, four million in LA, over eight million in New York—nonetheless, for many of us who grew up in the suburbs, living in a city seemed impossible, something outside the envelope of one’s own special case. In school, kids who came from major cities and somehow ended up in our suburb were viewed almost as a different species: tougher, maybe smarter, possibly dangerous. Possessed of a coolness that if not genetic was native; the city was a language, learned so early that it had always been a part of them. People from the suburbs could only speak it fitfully, if at all.

Sprawl is set in the suburbs, though they are never precisely named as such. The book eschews traditional plotting, creating instead a kind of territory of objects and impressions and occasional memories, narrated in a single, 115-page paragraph by a woman who might be in her twenties or thirties or forties. Throughout Sprawl, the narrator always refers to her surroundings as “this place.” This place is a place filled with concrete objects—letters and books and garbage and grilled ribs—but it is defined primarily by its relationship to another place, the city, which has a realness and precision, evidenced in media, in culture, in history, that the suburbs lack: this place which is not that other place; this place, which is always in-between.

In certain respects the world of Sprawl continues to be our own, particularly in its explorations of female agency in a world depressingly and unthinkingly dominated by men. In other ways, however, it is very much a book of its time, which feels like a strange and almost marvelous thing to say about a book written just a decade ago. It is possible that 2010 is the last year that a book like Sprawl could be written. The mid to late aughts heralded a multitude of urban renewal projects in downtowns across the US; 2010 (as Leigh Gallagher writes in The End of the Suburbs) was the first year since the invention of the car that suburban growth outpaced the growth of cities. We can see the same pattern in the use of the word gentrification, which, after growing slowly starting around the late ’60s and plateauing around the time of the housing crisis in 2008, experiences a sharp, upward spike at the beginning of the 2010s. Shortly after Sprawl was published, in other words, the place it describes begins to shift, even in certain key respects to vanish.

The suburbs of Sprawl are the affluent, pastel-tinted suburbs of Sixteen Candles and American Graffiti; they are the space and the associated lifestyle parodied and critiqued in Pleasantville and Blue Velvet and The Stepford Wives. They represented a certain middle-class ideal of safety, success, bourgeois comfort—even though at times it seems easier to think of cultural products critical or wary of this ideal (add American Beauty and A Serious Man to the list, and while we’re at it, Edward Scissorhands) than those that celebrate it. 

“Sprawl,” as a title, is a description of a kind of life, but it is also an aesthetic strategy. Formally, the book enacts the suburban sprawl that gives the book its title. At first this might strike the reader as a sort of surrealism or dense formalism: one long paragraph consisting of a series of seemingly disjunctive sentences. Here is an accumulation of things; and if at first one is surprised to find “pots of soup” next to “a dead bee” next to “the syngergism of proliferation” and “the contemporary lawn,” soon enough, the accumulation assures us, we’ll understand that they are of equal value. Time passes in a slow blur. There are sections of the novel where it can feel, for pages at a time, as though nothing much is happening, where the reader’s attention might start to drift—only to awaken with a start a sentence later into the understanding that time has been passing, and faster than one realized.

Reviewers at the time of the book’s publication pointed towards Gertrude Stein’s lists as an influence, but I am reminded more closely of the Donald Barthelme of City Life and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. Speaking of “the language of the block,” Dutton writes:

“It partakes of skinned knees and competes visually with daytime television and advertisements for migraine medication and the sacred rights of citizens” (21).

Those skinned knees could be in a thousand realist essays, but it’s the way the sentence slides and skips registers after that, through media into abstraction, with each noun phrase asserting itself as equally real and present, that shows that Dutton, like Barthelme before her, is interested in making “treasure out of trash, to see out from inside it,” an ability William Gass ascribed to Barthelme in his review of Unspeakable Practices. As in Barthelme, we are presented with “nothing surrealist… [the] dislocations are real, [the] material quite actual”; when we put the life of the suburbs “end to end like words,” we find a “shitty run of category errors and non sequiturs” (Gass, “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomena”).

However Sprawl pushes against any too-easy reading of the form as a straightforward critique of suburban life. Like the skinned knee above, certain images catch us up with their tenderness or nostalgia. The narrator’s childhood friend Lisle, present in memory, appears in flashes throughout the text, bright as a jewel. She is not contrasted with “this place.” Rather, she, like the narrator, is both product and part of it. 

Within the sprawling mass of the text is a constant excess. There are little moments of linguistic play that show a joy, rather than a numbness, in the listing: “Another kid says, ‘Quack-quack.’ Meanwhile, the cat clacks his jaws…” (47). The narrator’s attitude towards suburbia, and perhaps that of the text itself, is a deep ambivalence, the sort particular to someone who has grown up in suburban America and returned to it, or never left.

One could imagine something like Dutton’s novel appearing in the sixties or seventies alongside Barthelme, but it’s difficult to imagine anything like Sprawl coming after Sprawl. Put more precisely, it’s difficult to imagine a present-day book like Sprawl still feeling vital—which Sprawl very much does. Dutton’s Sprawl represents a moment perhaps every bit as important as “the leading edge.” Call it the “final thrust”: the last moment in which the suburbs still represented an ideal that could be punctured. Certainly there will be books and movies and television shows after Sprawl that will take jabs at the suburbs, but it’s hard to imagine them doing so without feeling a year or two years or a decade late. 

Sprawl, in other words, defines a moment of apocalypse—the end of one world, before the new has quite taken hold. Its world is one we recognize but don’t quite live in anymore, now rendered uncanny by the passing of years. 

For good or ill, the era in which the suburbs were the ideal space of middle-classness is coming to an end. Perhaps it’s already over. Spaces like the this space of Sprawl still exist, but they no longer represent an ideal, even one to be punctured. The suburbs at the end of the current decade are becoming the space of poverty, addiction, and crime, while the middle and upper classes move back into the cities. In The Nation, Michelle Chen notes that “Poverty rates across the country have grown at a markedly faster rates in the suburbs than in cities”; City Lab writes that, during the first decade of the 21st century, while the murder rate in cities was still falling, “Murders actually rose by 16.9 percent in the suburbs between 2001 and 2010.” Gentrification is pushing the urban poor and working class beyond the borders of the city into housing developments with names like Sherwood Heights and Washington Terrace, many of which never recovered from the housing crisis. The fantasy of the suburbs is curdling.

And the city, which once represented the unruly, impossible possibility of escape, is becoming something else: not a new suburban sprawl but its inverse, an enclosed space filled with the stores that one might once have found in the sprawl of the suburbs. The suburbs, after all, still offered a sense of separation between commerce and the privacy of family life. One left one’s house and one’s neighborhood to go to the mall. Now we live in the midst of commerce. It is as though we are enacting a dream common to children who grew up in the suburbs (many of whom have now relocated to the cities): to stay in the mall after closing, to live there, to never leave.

This essay was begun in what we sometimes now refer to as “the previous era,” before the outbreak of COVID-19. When I wrote the above, I had my eyes on what I was thinking of as the “suburban apocalypse”; now we are living through something which bears the traces of an apocalypse more familiar from its representations in books and movies. The idea of the city as an “enclosed space” has taken on a different, more dangerous valence. There is concern about whether cities can survive in their current form—so many people, so tightly packed together, so dependent on public transit and public spaces. Perhaps we are witnessing the start of another reversal from city to suburb. How long will it take the condo owners in East Liberty, Pittsburgh or Wicker Park in Chicago to reverse course, opt for the large home with the large lawn and plenty of space between themselves and their neighbors? Will the city, in the aftermath of gentrification and its subsequent flight, become, once again—though for different reasons—an impossible space, a kind of dream?

James Tadd Adcox is the author of a novel, Does Not Love, and a novella, Repetition. He's an editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing.