Saving the Suburbs:
On Jason Diamond’s ‘The Sprawl’
A review by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
Jason Diamond, “The Sprawl”
Coffee House Press, 2020
256 pages, softcover, $16.95
I grew up in Kennedale, Texas, a small suburb of Fort Worth, which boasted fewer than six thousand people when my family moved there at the turn of the millennium. We lived in a modest upgrade from our previous house, just two miles to the east. Our new neighborhood boasted only three roads and no identifying entrance sign.
If you took a right from our row of twelve houses, you would immediately pass a driveway where the homeowners found a body in an abandoned car. Take another right, and you would pass an empty plot of land where a house once stood, before a man murdered his family—wife, father-in-law, and daughter—and set the house ablaze, leaving them inside. Stop there, look across the street, and you would see the church parking lot where a young man shot and killed another.
To outsiders, Kennedale is a blip, foreign. When I moved to Dallas at the age of twenty-three, locals worried about crime rates. My mother grew up in another suburb of Fort Worth. In her eyes, the murders near our Kennedale home were nothing like the crimes she saw on the nightly news from the city.
The suburbs, though often generalized as uniform, defy simple characterization. Most people are content to write off the suburbs as indistinguishable, making their variations all the more difficult to parse. Very few attempt to see them clearly, to observe the gaps between the infinite suburbs and our impressions of them.
Nearly two decades after leaving the Chicago suburbs where he grew up, Jason Diamond decided to try. “I never looked back—until I did” (xi), he confesses at the outset of “The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs.” In this work Diamond looks deep and gives shape to the endless rows of selfsame houses in the American imagination.
The suburbs defy uniformity, Diamond argues, strictly defining them by their proximity to cities. Beyond location, to identify the suburbs is to consider their multitudinous places in history and culture, a practice—Diamond contends—that is still rare. Take suburban poverty, long considered a myth thanks in part to Lyndon B. Johnson and seldom depicted (the film “Back to the Future” being a strange exception). Conflating the suburbs with abstractions like “safety and security” (7), rather than divergent places with specific and complex histories, Diamond believes our lack of attention to the suburbs is to our detriment. He’s right.
The myth of suburban security leads people to mistake all forms of social ills as city problems, confusing poverty and crime as synonymous with places suburban families visit but never confront in their own lives. Suburban murders make nightly news because they seem uncharacteristic, and hosts of other issues—from domestic abuse to drug addiction—find cover behind neighborly smiles. The idea of the suburbs betray us like so many empty promises of the American dream.
Diamond illuminates several fascinating suburban origins, such as Zion, Illinois, which was founded in 1901 by John Alexander Dowie, a Scottish-born preacher who used donations from his followers to build a town where they could work and worship. Like its namesake, Zion promised to bring its people closer to God. By 1973, however, the town was primarily home to a nuclear power station, which drove its economy until closing in 1998. The town struggled to recover until 2009, when they expected to make a comeback with the development of a baseball stadium for a small team led by Kevin Costner. The business prospect promised new revenue and jobs for the ailing town, but by 2012 it had been abandoned. Today, over ten percent of Zion’s 24,000 residents live below the poverty line. None of the metaphors—from the city on the hill to the field of dreams—saved Zion from disrepair.
Diamond does not call his examples tragedies, noting how this shared “hope of finding something” still persists. The suburbs, he argues, continue to be “sold as places where the chosen few can get a little closer to fulfillment” (32). In this light, the suburbs read as a raw deal, an impossible dream with ruin beneath the sheen. But Diamond is not ready to give up on what they might have to offer.
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After World War II, in 1948, developer William J. Levitt designed one of the first planned communities, building four thousand houses in a year on a former potato farm. Levittown, New York, became the first modern suburb, and it shared an agreement with many other American policies that came before and after: clause 25 of the houses’ leases banned occupancy to anyone other than white homeowners.
In rebellion to this clause, a Jewish family in Levittown, Pennsylvania, sold their house to the Myers, a Black family, in 1957. For two weeks, a white mob stood outside of the Myers’ residence, ceaselessly tormenting the family by shouting, singing, hurling objects, and burning a cross. Police allegedly attempted to quell the riots. The mob continued to harass the Myers for months, but the family stayed for four years. The family’s persistence is credited with influencing the creation of the Fair Housing Act, which attempted to stop property owners from discriminating on the basis of race or sex. According to the 2010 census, however, Levittown was then still 90.1% white. In the case of Levittown, the promise of this particular suburb proved to be a promise reserved for white residents, illuminating its limited meaning of community.
Although Diamond writes at length about Levittown, as well as movies set in suburbia, I waited in vain for him to mention the much-maligned 2017 film “Suburbicon.” Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the initial script, and the setting is a fictional town loosely based on Levittown. The film is about a man who hires hitmen to kill his wife to profit from her life insurance policy and to be with her sister. The story bears a striking resemblance to an incident Diamond tells of a woman in Long Grove, Illinois, who killed her husband and blamed intruders. She was later found to be having an affair with her brother-in-law and trying to cash in on her husband’s substantial life insurance policy.
The Coen brothers often satirize white suburban anxieties throughout their work. Within the Coen universe, the principal figure is typically a white male dissatisfied with his wife, disinterested in his children, and desires only money. The Coens do not preach meritocracy, as their men never work hard, and prefer harebrained get-rich schemes which almost always involve felonies. These schemes often result in no money and the deaths of several people. In their debut, “Blood Simple,” a man discovers his wife, played by Frances McDormand, is having an affair, so he hires a hitman to kill her and her lover. In “Fargo,” William H. Macy plays Jerry Lundegaard, who believes he can stage his wife’s kidnapping to get ransom money from his father-in-law. Ultimately, Lundegaard’s wife and father-in-law are killed, and he lands in jail in the final scene. In each reimagining of this Coen formula, money drives white men to disastrous ends for themselves and the people closest to them.
George Clooney was to star in “Suburbicon” years prior to the 2017 filming, but the Coens focused on other film projects. Yet, Clooney, wary of contemporary conservative rhetoric, set out to make the film anyway. Acting as Director, Clooney took the Coens’ script and included the story of the Myers’ move to Levittown, changing the story from a satire exclusively about white people in suburbia to a Civil Rights story. By juxtaposing the public violence of the white mob with the private violence of the white Lodge family Clooney hoped to highlight the racist history of Levittown as an allegory for unclaimed American baggage.
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Although Diamond does not mention “Suburbicon,” he describes a real-life story that would seem like a farcical sendup of the film if it weren’t so sinister. In Highland Park, the mostly-white Chicago suburb residents became angry in 2013 when Chief Keef, the controversial young rapper, bought a home in the neighborhood. As Diamond reports, homeowners became upset with Chief Keef’s parties, begging law enforcement to “get these thugs out” (35). Highland Park boasts the nation’s longest running music festival, Ravinia, which has welcomed performances by rappers like Common and 50 Cent. Yet, residents were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black rapper making Highland Park his home.
Diamond connects the pressure to rid Highland Park of Chief Keef to the larger history of racism in planned communities. In the 19th Century, unofficial “gentlemen’s agreements” served to keep Black families from the suburbs alongside the state-regulated Black Codes which instituted curfews and policies to restrict travel for Black communities (36). As an “American obsession” (1), the plan of the suburbs was to remain white. Diamond writes, “The stereotypical midcentury picture of the white, middle-class family and their perfect normal lives was the past, present, and future model of the country that companies and advertisers wanted to portray.” Once sold, white families worked to uphold what was advertised.
Of this insidious plan, Diamond argues, “But the thing about utopia is that its opposite is dystopia, and what one person considers good and pure can be scary and evil to another” (43). True enough, but also: the inability for white Americans to see this utopic vision as an empty sham is not only dangerous to the people deemed “Other,” but also to the people who believe in its mirage. Hence, suburban poverty and crime read as anomalous, fictitious, suspect until surprisingly, cruelly real. A white family kills itself while the mob outside worries over their racist superstitions. Perhaps the opposite of utopia is reality.
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Upon the release of “Suburbicon” in late 2017, many critics took issue with Clooney’s attempt to tell an allegory about racism, since the Myers’ subplot only functions to contrast the racist white mob with the self-destructing white family. The Black family barely speaks, props in service of the morality tale for white viewers. “Suburbicon” ultimately falls short of its goals, even as Clooney’s decision to point to the similarities of the white mob and the white family aims at one significant manifestation of racism. The film’s exploration of violence attempts to reveal another aspect of that criticism, if less artfully: that of the white family doing harm not only to Black Americans, but to itself.
Diamond praises Jordan Peele’s film “Get Out,” released in the same year, for its depiction of the facets of suburban evils. Daniel Kaluuya’s character travels to his girlfriend’s home outside of the city, where he learns her family’s outward liberalism is a front for something far more sinister. “Get Out,” like “Suburbicon,” makes whiteness visible through its treatment of Black bodies, but does so by depicting the imploding white family as central to the anti-Blackness depicted in the film, rather than in contrast to a peripheral “Other.” “Get Out” examines racism by giving Black bodies agency and whiteness as corrupt on arrival.
Writing to his nephew in his book from 1963, “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin said what white Americans believed and endured, “does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear” (8). In his estimation, it was not merely that white Americans needed to stop terrorizing Black Americans: it was that white Americans could not stop and examine themselves. He wrote, “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other,” at which point—however distant or potentially impossible—the notion of white supremacy would no longer serve as a violent stand-in for self-worth (22).
What Baldwin pointed to then, and what many white Americans still have yet to learn, is that whiteness is a problem long before it commits an explicit act of racism. The origins of race are a centuries-long process of creating the notion of whiteness over and against all those deliberately categorized as lesser. For example, when we are watching a Coen movie, we are watching a movie about whiteness. Yet only directors of color like Jordan Peele are asked to account for the presence of race in their films. Until whites learned to confront the tragic nature of the human condition as a fact of life, Baldwin believed they would continue to destroy themselves and others.
The origins of many suburbs worked—still work—in service of this myth. Baldwin argued, “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind” (97). In “Suburbicon,” the white mob will always be a mob until and unless they can observe their own ideals of suburbia as bankrupt promises from a nation built on abstract principles that leave people empty and longing for something more. In “The Sprawl,” Diamond asks us to examine the particular shape and structure of suburbs as human creations, not utopias, extending his logic to related issues of capitalism and other systems that appear to be God-sent.
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Alongside Diamond’s critiques of suburbia, he embraces certain possibilities. In examining suburban memorabilia for what it reveals about the people who call the suburbs their home, Diamond looks to Victor Gruen, a Jewish socialist architect who fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the U.S. In 1956, Gruen created a public, walkable mall in Edina, Minnesota, in an attempt to bring isolated people in the suburbs together for recreational purposes.
Unfortunately, corporate interests also saw opportunity in the mall, and they replaced Gruen’s socialist ideals of community with capitalist ideals of commerce. Malls became places to spend money at chain stores. Disillusioned, Gruen disowned his creation and returned to Vienna. As with his critique of the suburbs, Diamond is not ready to write off malls. Citing them as places where young people have always gone to hang out, he hopes renewed interest in the mall from Gen Z can make them “into places that serve a greater purpose” (179).
As customers, young people are welcomed into malls because they serve the corporate function of the structure. But for young people who go to spend time rather than money, they are often treated as loiterers, criminalized for gathering without buying. Public spaces are few and far between, and Diamond rightly mourns their disappearance. But though he believes in the potential of the youth to transform mall culture, he does not account for the corporate interests who would undoubtedly work against that transformation.
Diamond critiques the soullessness of ‘the sprawl’ which he differentiates from the suburbs: “The sprawl is building more stuff on top of stuff; it’s design without thinking; it’s building without caring” (xv). He laments the shuttering of mom-and-pop shops, the way chains like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods take over suburbs and funnel money out of communities and into corporate hands.
At times, his belief in the transformative potential of the suburbs reads sentimentally, forgoing the roadblocks to salvaging Gruen’s socialist vision, and sometimes accommodating them. Diamond writes that he spent much of 2016 and 2017 traveling around a divided America, taking solace in the very sameness he criticizes elsewhere: “Yet no matter where I was, north, south, liberal oasis, or old Southern Republican stronghold, it didn’t matter: I could go to a suburban McDonald’s or Barnes & Noble and the experience was the same if I were outside Portland, Oregon, or in the Florida panhandle” (185). Taking solace in these creature comforts, Diamond occasionally loses sight of the family-owned restaurants and independent bookstores that offer something different, and arguably better, than the familiar.
Diamond believes in the salvation of the suburbs, praising the spirit of youth and art that rises against the tide of sameness, though his optimism sometimes clouds certain concepts in practice. He does not explicitly link the possibilities of socialism with the possibilities of suburbanism, and his desire for community does not always translate to reality. Still, Diamond provides timely nuance for examining places that all too often go unseen. “The Sprawl” takes a slow drive through the suburbs to gain clarity on a phenomenon with great consequences to our national imagination. If some of this phenomenon still remains unclear, perhaps it’s upon each of us in or from the suburbs to see what’s salvageable.
Ben Lewellyn-Taylor lives in Dallas, Texas. He is an MFA student in Antioch University’s low-residency program. His essays and reviews appear in The Adroit Journal, New South Journal, No Contact Mag, and New Critique, among others.