Suburbia

TOO MUCH STUFF

I’ve been on a campaign to reduce the massive buildup of STUFF in our house, and my garage is filling up with decades of flotsam and jetsam.  A garage/yard sale is imminent.  So the plague of too much stuff has been very much on my mind here in 2010, but I was surprised to see that people in 1968 were beginning to have similar feelings.

Here’s an illustration from an article entitled “How Do You Lose a Swimming Pool?” from the April 1968 Readers’ Digest.  It was condensed (”digested”) from a somewhat longer piece in the Denver Post Sunday magazine called Contemporary.  The Digest (published in Westchester County, outside New York City)  cast a fairly wide net for its articles, gathering them in not just from readily recognizable cosmopolitan magazines, but also from the American heartland.   In this way, Digest editors were able to keep their finger on the pulsebeat of America, especially for “lifestyle” articles.

I’ve already written once about this issue of the Digest– way back in August 2009, when I remarked on the list of articles, which reads in retrospect almost as a catalogue of 1968 themes:  the Pill, civil rights, grim news from Vietnam, homefront protests, recreational drug use, the crisis in the nation’s inner cities, even a “pre-echo” of 1970s environmentalism (Charles Lindbergh’s “Wisdom of Wildness”).   Add to this catalogue this article.  At first glance satirical and “light-hearted’ (the Digest was well known for leavening each issue with wholesome humor), this piece actually sounds themes that were beginning to be heard in 1968, a violent and divisive year, yes, but also a year that was the high-water mark of the postwar “age of affluence.”   Consumer goods proliferated wildly after the war, and the pace of production and consumption only accelerated in the turbulent 1960s, especially in suburbia.

The prosperity brought with it new pressures and new anxieties about class and status, and the tidal waves of consumer goods produced a problem that probably felt pretty new in 1968, but 42 years later no longer does.  The problem is well stated here in the first paragraph by the writer, Will Stanton:

“I happen to be a member of the new affuent middle class.   My neighbors are in the same bracket and we all have the same problem– one unique to our country and time.  There’s no place to put anything.”  The article’s tagline restates it:  ”There’s no limit to what money can buy– and that’s the root of the problem.”    The author elaborates:  ”There used to be rich people and poor people.  The poor had no room to keep things in, but they didn’t have anything to keep anyhow.  The people that owned all the stuff had castles.  It worked out fine.  But the new middle class . . .”    Stanton says that when he and his wife, Ethel, bought the house “the thing that impressed us was the size. . . . We had always lived in an apartment.  Then suddenly we had all that space and all the beautiful catalogues and charge accounts everywhere.”   They also had two kids, then three (that’s when they bought a station wagon and then a second car); they develop hobbies, all of which consumed space and demanded more consuming (restoring furniture, photography, gardening); they buy a boat, “because the children would only be young once,” but they have to keep it in their now-shrinking yard.

They buy a large, portable pool, with a folding metal frame and a plastic liner, that somehow gets lost one year when it’s packed away amidst all the rest of the stuff.  Will doesn’t want to tell anybody, because he’s worried that people won’t understand:  ”The trouble is some people are 50 years beyond the times.  They just don’t understand the problems of the affluent middle class.”

Where does all this lead?  You guessed it:  the creation of the U.S. self-storage industry (”U-Store-It,” “Stor-More,” and so on), which begins in the mid-1960s and rapidly expands in the 1970s.  Today, rentable self-storage units in the United States account for more than 2.35 billion square feet of storage space.

No Comments »

Couples: John Updike in 1968

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review about American male novelists and their fictional portrayals (or avoidance of portrayals) of sex had me returning to John Updike’s Couples.  (The NYTBR essay is by Katie Roiphe, and you can read it here: http://bit.ly/92OgMV)

A 1968 shocker

Born in 1932, John Updike died in January 2009.  By 1968, he had already gained a reputation as l’enfant terrible of American letters, on the strength of his first four novels, which included Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).  But Couples was — like a lot of other things that happened in 1968– a real shocker.  It is filled with exceedingly graphic sex scenes, but since it’s Updike, the scenes are richly drawn, complicated, on a sentence level dazzling and satisfying, though ultimately kind of wearying, too.

What becomes of the “greatest generation”?

The novel is set in the village of Tarbox, outside Boston, during the years of the tragically brief Kennedy administration. There is so much detail about politics and current events at the endless cocktail parties you can almost date the chapters precisely:  the USS Thresher disaster; the death of the newborn Kennedy baby; and a lengthy, boozy, and irreverent party on the night of the JFK assassination.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around a set of 6 or 8 (I lost track) married couples– most of them in their 30s,  making them the tail end of the “greatest generation.”  Some of the men are World War II veterans; most of them are college-educated (including the women); and some of the men commute into Boston or Cambridge for work.  There are children, of course, but the adults don’t seem all that interested in them.

“A black mass of community sex.”

The milieu of Tarbox (widely assumed to be Updike’s Ipswich MA by another name) is not quite suburban, not exactly Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit territory, but close, very close.    Television’s Mad Men comes to mind, though Updike has almost no interest in the work life of men and much more interest in fornication.  The title could well be “Coupling,” given the novel’s virtually un-mappable network of marital infidelities, all of them within the tight confines of “the group” of couples.  The affairs are supposedly clandestine, but it’s clear that “everyone” knows about everybody else’s business in this fishbowl.  As TIME magazine’s editors put it:   “The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike’s couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex.”

Couples– and the sensation it caused–landed Updike on the cover of TIME on April 26, 1968.  (Updike’s second TIME cover came in October 1982, after his third “Rabbit” novel, Rabbit is Rich, received the Pulitzer Prize.) The extent, the casualness, and the voraciousness of the dalliances truly astonished American readers–and, in fact, I was also more than a little incredulous.  ”This is my parents’ generation,” I thought to myself:  ”Was this really going on?”  (Probably not, I assumed: the class/religious differences probably meant that my parents’ circle of couples–Catholic, working-class, “traditional”–was more chaste.  But . . . doubts linger.)

Tarbox and the material world

There is such a wealth of period detail in Couples!  It’s as if Updike had set himself the task of delineating a precise place and time– the minutiae of household decor, of dress and hairstyles, of music (the couples play records and dance in their living rooms at parties).  The couples engage in tedious, often inebriated chit-chat about “the world” outside their world, which could mean the next suburb over, or another hemisphere away.  There is talk of the space race, the Cold War, and the barely audible sounds of conflict coming from Vietnam.  And then there is “the Pill,” which–they all acknowledge–has given “everyone” so much freedom to play around.

The novel’s timeline edges just into 1964, and thus misses the upheavals and notorious events of 1968.  Still, Couples still provides a remarkable “picture window” into the affluence, cynicism, and complacencies of the entire postwar era.

No Comments »