What are the most pretentious suburbs in the Bay Area?

Yesterday, my husband and I enjoyed a day out in Marin County. We took a walk along the Tennessee Valley Trail to the beach, and it was gorgeous, breezy and clear. Then we went for lunch in Mill Valley.

Mill Valley is a pretty town: nestled up against Mount Tamalpais, in the redwoods, beautiful old houses, European-like staircases that connect homes in the hills to downtown. My dad grew up here, and I visited it a lot as a child because my grandmother lived here. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a hippie town.

It still has a little bit of that hippie feel, even though only very well people can now afford to live there. Now, it's filled with very high-end boutiques selling clothes and home decor. I guess you could call it pretentious. My husband thought Mill Valley might duke it out with Palo Alto for the most pretentious Bay Area suburb. Then he mentioned Woodside, and I pondered some of those famous wine towns up in Napa County.

It goes without saying that San Francisco and Berkeley are pretentious but those are cities, and they didn't factor into our conversation about pretentious suburbs.

Now, we get to the East Bay suburbs. I'm not gonna name names right now. There is one that is older and wealthy, and some of its residents, I have found, can be pretty snobby, especially to people who might--horror!--live in apartments. But that town looses some pretension points because its downtown is not bursting with business. More than a few empty storefronts.

Then there is another one that is also filled with very wealthy people who live in big cookie cutter mansions. The whole experience of journeying into that place is pretty surreal.

In my opinion, some suburbs earn the right to their pretensions, if, like Mill Valley, for example, they are genuinely attractive places. Where does that leave Walnut Creek?

Friday story time: How the the starter home, once a dream for this lovely young couple, becomes a trap

Tom and Betsy Rather are an attractive suburban couple in their late 20s, early 30s. They both went to good schools and graduated from college. Tom distinguished himself in the most recent war. They love each other and seem to have everything going for them, including three happy, healthy children. They also own their own home, and Tom has a respectable job in the big city, while Betsy stays home to raise the kids.

This is how we find them at a certain key point in their lives, in the home that is supposed to embody all their dreams and accomplishments:

By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths. The ragged lawn and weed-filled garden proclaimed to passers-by and the neighbors that Thomas R. Rath and his family disliked “working around the place” and couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do it.

The interior is especially troublesome: 

The interior of the house was even more vengeful. In the living room there was a big dent in the plaster near the floor, with a huge crack curving up from it in the shape of a question mark. That wall was one fall, when after struggling months to pay up the back bills, Tom came home one night to find that Betsy had brought a cut-class vase, Such an extravagant gesture was utterly unlike her. … Betsy was a conscientious household manager, and usually when she did something Tom didn’t like, they talked the matter over with careful reasonableness. But on that particular night, Tom was tired and worried because he himself had just spent a lot of money on a new suit he felt he needed to dress properly for work, and at the climax of a heated argument, he picked up the vase and heaved it against the wall…

After things settled down:

Tom and Betsy assured each other that someday they would have the whole wall re-plastered, but they never did. The crack remained as a perpetual reminder of Betsy's moment of extravagance, Tom’s moment of violence, and their inability either to fix walls properly or to pay to have them fixed.

Damn house!

A thousand petty shabbinesses bore witness to the negligence of the Raths. The front door had been scratched by a dog which had been run over the year before. The hot-water faucet in the bathroom dripped. Almost all the furniture needed to be refinished, reupholstered, or cleaned. And besides that, the house was too small, ugly, and almost precisely like the houses on all sides of it.

In their usual reasonable way, Tom and Betsy triy to talk over their mutual and growing despair:

“I don’t know what’s the matter with us,” Betsy said one night. “Your job is plenty good enough. We’ve got three nice kids, and lots of people would be glad to have a house like this. We shouldn’t be so discontented all the time.”

“Of course we shouldn’t,” Tom said.

But, as the writer of their story, points out:

Their words sounded hollow. It was curious to believe that that house with the crack in the form of a question mark on the wall was probably the end of their personal road. It was impossible to believe. Somehow something would have to happen.

*******

The excerpt I’ve just quoted comes from a novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, which was a universally acclaimed best seller when it was first published in the middle of the 20th century. I recently read the novel, thanks to the recommendation of a Crazy reader, who shares my  my continuing interest in "suburban studies." This Walnut Creek-based reader has his own excellent blog, Litterbury, where he currently looks at White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and which like, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, offers an excellent examination of the dark side of American suburban life. You may have heard of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, or of the film version, starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. Or maybe you’ve heard the term, "the man in the gray flannel suit" to refer to the anonymous corporate man, the backbone of America's mid-century financial success. That terms has become a part of our cultural lexicon.

Anyway, this book may be 55 years old, and it may be set in New York City and its suburbs (like the TV show Mad Man). But like that TV show, much of what this book has to say--about marriage, family, life in the suburbs and the upwardly mobile middle class--is just as relevant to us today. This book speaks with an urgency, timelessness, and truth that is very recognizable and even painful--to me anyway.

Jumping on the Glee bandwagon: a show for suburban high school "losers" like me

Why are my son and I, so far, glee-ful about the new Fox TV high school dramedy, Glee?

This new series follows an idealistic teacher, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), "who--against all odds and a malicious cheerleading coach--attempts to save McKinley High's Glee Club from obscurity, while helping a group of aspiring underdogs realize their true star potential."

Oh, let me think of all the ways we love Glee:

--Given my ongoing examination of the dark, crazy side of contemporary American suburban life, this show smartly and wickedly picks apart our favorite suburban and public high school archetypes, aspirations, and symbols of success and failure. As Salon.com critic Heather Havrilesky wrote: "Every second of Glee is packed with tasty commentary on the absurdities of suburban American life.

--The show has style, flair, and great musical numbers. There is something fabulously entertaining about watching these teen characters--insecure, awkward, dorky--pulling off badly choreographed but ultimately hip-shaking, bad-ass school choir versions of Kanye West's "Golddigger" and Salt-n-Peppa's pelvis-grinding "Push It."

--And, by the way, any show that showcases the genius of hip-hop gal trio Salt-n-Pepa gets a big thumbs up from me. I hope we'll be getting McKinley High Glee Club versions of "Shoop," "Whatta Man," and "None of Your Business."

--Did I say the show is smart and wicked? Yeah I did, but it's worth repeating: "Deliciously mean-spirted behind its 'Up with People facade," as Havrilesky wrote. Glee moves with the breakneck speed, sprinkled with the sly asides, of a good farce. For my son and me, Glee ranks up there with our other favorite comedies about suburban dysfunction: the live-action shows, Malcolm in the Middle and Arrested Development, and the animated shows, The Simpsons and The Family Guy. By the way, all those shows are also Fox network products.

--Yeah, Glee is subservive. Last Wednesday, we got to witness a meeting of the McKinley High Celibacy Club, led by perky, bitchy head cheerleader Quinn whose motto is: "It's all about the teasing and not about the pleasing!"

The meeting ends with Rachel Berry, the Glee Club's smart, ambitious diva declaring that all this abstinence stuff is silly (You hear that, Sarah and Bristol Palin?). She proclaims that teens should be given information and access to contraception, and--maybe most shocking of all--that girls like sex, too! Well, this declaration certainly grabs the attention of popular quarterback Finn Hudson, who happens to be Quinn's boyfriend and who has joined the Glee Club because he also happens to be a talented singer and really wants to express himself, too. And, he's making goo-goo eyes at Rachel.

--Jane Lynch is brilliant as Sue Sylvester, the malicious coach of the Cheerios, the cheerleading squad, who makes it her No. 1 mission to destroy the Glee Club.

--One of the co-creators is Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck fame. In an interview with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, he said he loves his "loser" characters and wanted, ultimately, to create a series that depicts kids putting everything they've got into doing something they love.

--So for all its caustic humor and not-so-clean fun, the show has a sweetness to it, a heart, and some of that "Don't Stop Believin' " faith that, yeah, great things are possible.

Suburban wife-swapping and infidelity: Fiction or fact? And who has the time or energy these days?

A topic to ponder post-Cupid’s Day?

I’m slowing getting my way through Couples, John Updike’s famed fictional account of 1960s marital discord and sexual philandering amongst prosperous and dissatisfied Boston suburbanites. The book dissects the inner lives of its characters. They’re fairly ordinary, recognizable WASPs, who, despite their outward appearance of success and happiness, are miserable and lonely.

No, this book is no pick-me-up, but it is captivating to read as this very talented observer of human interaction and psychology peels away at his characters and the society that has formed them. As for the subject of this post—swinging couples and infidelity—I just finished the chapter that deals with the wife-swapping amongst two couples, the Smiths and the Applebys. The husbands, Harold Smith and Frank Appleby work in downtown Boston in jobs having to do with finance. Their wives, Marcia Smith and Janet Appleby, oversee care of their fashionably outfitted offspring and homes back in the suburb of Tarbox.

Frank Appleby, who likes to quote Shakespeare, and Marcia Smith start an affair. When voluptuous Janet Appleby finds out, she falls into the arms of Harold Smith. For some months, each of the adulterous pairs continues to meet up and have sex, all the while keeping these affairs a secret from their respective spouses. But a group of Tarbox friends, including the “Applesmiths,” take off for a winter holiday ski vacation at some New England mountain lodge.

The dreaded heterosexual foursome stay up later than anyone else drinking, smoking, dancing, and talking in rather frank and intimate ways. The one thing that amazes me about these characters is their stamina, for late night carousing and excessive consumption of alcohol. After two martinis I would be ready to curl and go to sleep at 9 p.m. I wouldn’t be able to stay up past midnight, dancing, flirting, and falling into some hot and heavy sex with my husband’s best friend.

On this particular night, as the couples are making their way up the stairs to their rooms, Frank and Harold finally acknowledge to each other that they are sleeping with each other’s wives. No hard feelings, old chap. In fact, the tipsy collegial husbands agree to switch rooms. Frank Appleby will go into Marcia and Harold Smith’s room and do it with Marcia, while Harold Smith will go into Frank and Janet Appleby’s room and do it with Janet. The wives comply, but with mixed feelings.

Wife-swapping: The practice seems like such a relic of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: the decades that introduced Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines, go-go boots, birth control pills, 1972's bestselling The Joy of Sex, and the then racy 1969 wife-swapping film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (pictured above) into the social landscape. Wife-swiping, according to literary and film chronicles of the time, took place amongst educated, liberal middle-and upper-middle-class suburbanites. Maybe the participants in these alleged practices felt the weight and regret of mid-life fast approaching--life slipping them by--and they wanted to enjoy a last grasp of youth by adopting the mores and practices of the youth- and counter-culture-driven Sexual Revolution. The mantra these middle-class sexual revolutionaries embraced was that marriage and life-long monogamy are so passé. And unrealistic, considering that improved medical care and prosperity increased life spans. The big question they asked: Could you really commit to having sex with the same person for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years?

As much as I’d like to enjoy Updike's book as a time capsule, it gets me wondering how much extra-marital boinking (do people really use this term anymore?) is going on amongst my friends and suburban neighbors. Look up the statistics on infidelity, and you’ll get varying numbers on how many men cheat on their wives, and women cheat on their husbands. One figure suggests infidelity is a factor in a third of all marriages.

If that’s the case, it must be going on, but it pains me to say that I’m a bit out of the gossip loop in my Walnut Creek neighborhood. A big drawback: we don’t belong to the community swim club where the stay-at-home moms hang out together with their kids on summer afternoons, the kids compete in swim team, and the adults enjoy a lot of hot-summer-night socializing.

I see some of these couples at school and at my son’s sports games. They present themselves as exemplars of loving, loyal couplehood. I can’t imagine any of these people doing it with someone on the side. But who’s to know? Another couple’s marriage is such a strange, mysterious creature.

At the same time, I hear about couples breaking up. For example, there was the one couple in which Dad had affair. Now he’s married to his one-time mistress, and they have a new baby. Mom has remarried, too, to a man whose wife cheated on him by sleeping with the owner of a popular Walnut Creek restaurant. Now, after all the pain and loss, everyone, it seems, is content: The adults have wound up with their true loves, and, at the very least, the adults and the kids are making the best of life around new partnerships and around new and blended family units.

A good friend, who used to work in the Walnut Creek headquarters of the Contra Costa Times, shares with me tales that depicts that newsroom as a nest of sexual intrigue and betrayal. Editors got flirty with each other and cheated on their mates, some who also worked at the paper. Bit emotional stinks occurred on a fairly regular basis.

There was the talented writer and very religious who wound up cheating on his long-time girlfriend by falling for a pretty young reporter. Then there was the driven, glamorous reporter who was married to this cool dude who insisted on an open marriage. Apparently, they threw wild parties. A real Peyton Place. You know, if the struggling Times wanted to increase its circulation, perhaps it should consider airing this bit of dirty laundry. One former staffer already aired some of her own dirty laundry. For the New York Times, the Contra Costa Times' former film critic Mary Pols wrote an essay about how her buy-out from the paper prompted a quickie affair with a co-worker.

Of course, we're talking about mostly rumpled newspaper reporters and editors. Do any of us really want to read about or imagine these people getting it on? They're not in the same glamour category as Updike’s prosperous, Kennedy-era WASPs.

As for me, I wouldn’t cheat on my husband, and not just because he is the love of my life and my best friend in the world.

(NOTE: With regard to the Mayor of Claycord at Claycord.com, as our publicists, Moe, Larry and Curly have advised, I must repeat that “we are just friends.”)

Beyond that, as I said before about Updike’s characters, I just don’t think I’d have the mental and physical stamina for an affair. Maybe it was easier back in the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe people had more energy for their social and extracurricular sexual lives. This was when professional men seemed to worked 9-to-5 jobs Monday through Friday—not 7-to-8 jobs, and on weekends, too, like men--and women--do today. And back in the 1950s and 1960s, women could focus on domestic duties during the day, and not have to catch up on laundry and bathroom cleaning at night after getting home from working all day themselves.

Another thing, parents back then—at least mine—weren’t called upon each night to monitor their elementary–school kids’ homework, because, in my experience, kids didn’t do much homework until they got to high school. For me, after trying to decipher my son’s math homework, which these days involves dividing fractions, I wouldn't have the energy to skulk out after I put him to bed and meet some paramour at a hotel.

Also, parents, in Updike’s book and, from what I remember of my mom and dad, weren’t running around all weekend to their different kids’ sports activities. Rather, parents were running around to each others’ tennis, golf, boating, and dinner parties.

I’m one of those women who believe that the promise of the 1970s feminists was a bit of a crock. This was the promise that women can have it all. No, we can’t—and that includes having a lover on the side. Something’s gotta give. And this goes for me, too.

Oh, I often come across a few women who seem to have it all—an impressive professional resume, terrific marriage, happy, successful kids, beautiful house, narrow waists and tight abs. They juggle all their responsibilities, either because they don’t sleep, they skim across the surface of life, or they are absolute mistresses of time management. And as much as they might be mistresses of time management, I can’t see them also managing to be mistresses of some secret lover. That might be asking too much, even of these superwomen.

Me? An affair? I suck at compartmentalizing my emotional life, I’m a lousy liar, and I could never pull of that kind of deception. Most of all—and I’m going against what our busy, grasping economic and social climate demands of its citizens at this time—I really don’t like multi-tasking. It seems that in order for me--or anyone else--to have an affair in our go-go 24/7 life-style, I’d have to sign up for a class in time management and multi-tasking. And I just don’t have the time or energy for that.

Get ready East Bay homeowners: your home values will continue to fall

So says a post published last week on the website, Newgeography.com: "The latest house price data indicates no respite in the continuing price declines, especially where the declines have been the most severe. No place has seen the devastation that has occurred in California."

This is especially true in California's coastal areas, which have "skidded towards disaster. Just over the past year, house prices in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose metropolitan areas have declined at more than three times the greatest national annual loss rate during the Great Depression."

This post, by Wendell Cox, a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris, or National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, which is operated by the French government and dedicated to providing education and conducting research for the promotion of science and industry. Cox is also author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” Cox bases his assertions about falling home prices on a new the 5th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. This should come as no surprised, but this survey lists the San Francisco metropolitan area as having the worst home affordability rating in the United States.

He expects California’s prices to fall much further, particularly along the coast. "I expect median house prices could fall another $150,000 to $200,000 in the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas," he says.

This is how we got here: "As median house prices climbed to an unheard-of level–10 or more times median household incomes–a sense of euphoria developed among many purchasers, analysts and business reporters who deluded themselves into believing that metaphysics or some such cause would propel prices into a more remote orbit. Yet gravity still held. A long-term supply of owned housing for a large population cannot be sustained at prices people cannot afford."

He concludes: "This may be a disaster for the speculators, architects, developers and some local governments, but for many middle class families it may seem like the dawning of a new age of reason."

Crazy Suburban Pop Culture Moments this past week: John Updike's "Couples" and the novel and new film, "Revolutionary Road"

As part of my continued interest in a field I’m calling “Suburban Studies,” or, more appropriately, “Crazy in Suburbia Studies,” I recently acquainted myself with two notable and recently newsworthy depictions of the despair of suburban life.

First, as I mentioned in an earlier post eulogizing the passing of John Updike, first man of American letters and chronicler of suburban ennui extraordinaire, I was going to crack open a paperback copy of one his novels that I have sitting on my book shelf. This is his infamous 1968 novel Couples. (I probably bought it a couple years ago at the now closed independent and used bookstore, Bonanza Street Books, formerly in downtown Walnut Creek.)

It’s not a happy-skippy book. I’m only about 100 pages into it, but I’ve already been introduced to a fair share of marital discord, sexual frustration, family dysfunction, infidelity, chronic drinking, and dissatisfaction with the whole American dream. The book has been called an “intellectual Peyton Place,” which is probably true. The characters are all prosperous, educated, well-read—some with advanced degrees—and should be able to figure their way out of the traps they think they find themselves in. Also, the author is John Updike, so the prose is poetic, smart, and precise in its depiction of the inner and out lives of people yearning and suffering for some notion, that they can’t define, of better, more meaningful lives.

Like the TV show Mad Men, Couples takes place in the early 1960s, the Kennedy era, supposedly a time of optimism about America’s new economic prosperity and central place in global political and cultural power. In America, the suburbs were booming, with new residential developments to house a growing, prosperous population.

With regard to the changing American landscape, here's a passage where one of the main characters, Piet Hanema, himself a homebuilder, contemplates the housing boom of which he’s a part. He’s driving through his hometown, a suburb of Boston, on his way to one of his building sites, located, as he soon discovers—but apparently something that wouldn’t raise eyebrows among historical preservationists back then—on the site of an old Indian burial ground.

His spirits slightly lifted as he passed the Prostestant cemetery, fan-shaped acres expanding from a Puritan wedge of titled slate stones adorned with winged skulls and circular lichen. Order reigned. Soon cemeteries and golf courses the last greenswards. … He drove through pastel new developments, raw lawns and patchwork facades, and up a muddy set up ruts besides which hydrants and sewer ports were already installed, in obedience to town ordinances, to his site on Indian Hill. The bulldozer had arrived…

This landscape passage is filled with that brooding sense of life passing you by, of loss, of death. And, again, of alienation. As I write this, my husband, who read Couples in college, points out the irony of the title, Couples. The book, he says, is ultimately about isolation and separation.

Speaking of that brooding sense of life passing you by, of loss, of death, and of isolation, I also went to see the film version of the 1961 Richard Yates’ novel, Revolutionary Road. The film stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as April and Frank Wheeler, an attractive but unhappy young couple living in a Connecticut suburb in the late 1950s. The film was one of the most hotly anticipated prestige films of 2008, and it was considered a shoo-in for Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and its two stars. Alas, it didn’t do as well as expected, critically and popularly.

I can see why it wouldn't catch on, at least as a popular hit. The characters are not easy to like and the story, like Updikes’ Couples, is not happy-skippy. Like Couples, it is full of marital discord, sexual frustration, alienation, family dysfunction, too much drinking, and dissatisfaction with the whole American dream.

Given my crazy ways, I liked the movie. Actually, I liked the movie more than I thought. I was wary of it, not because I shy away from dark, difficult, complicated movies with dark, difficult, complicated characters, but because I read Yates’ novel a year or so ago, and I loved it. It's often considered the original anti-suburban novel, way before Rick Moody's The Ice Storm or Tom Perrotta's Little Children.

I was sure this film adaptation of Revolutionary Road would disappoint. Also, I was not a big fan of American Beauty, the 2000 anti-suburban Best Picture-winning film directed by Sam Mendes, the director of Revolutionary Road (and husband of Kate Winslet). I found American Beauty's statements about the dark side of the suburban dream to be a little too easy and cliché. Revolutionary Road, the novel, does its job with a lot more subtlety, and I wasn’t sure Mendes was up to the task. I also worried that the story would be overshadowed by the personalities of the film's two stars, in their first re-teaming as an on-screen couple since that overblown Academy Award-winning 1997 blockbuster Titanic.

But I came away from the movie thinking that Mendes and Co. managed to pull off a pretty good adaptation and to nail what Yates considered to be the central theme of his book: “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

The novelist Richard Ford, in a 2000 essay about Revolutionary Road, the novel, in the New York Times Book Review, picked up on another central theme of the book. He writes: “To a casual passer-by, the Wheelers' lives might not seem so different from their neighbors'—the pleasures and anxieties being the available, expectable ones: tipsy, twilight dinners with other like-minded homeowners, easy shots to and from the commuter line, the comfort of being indistinguishably in the culture while staying solidly in command of life's fundamental choices.”

But in reality, the Wheelers, like many of the rest of us, Ford wrote, “suffer from a wan inability to keep the frustrations of youth's passage precisely at bay, the fatigue of the workplace grind, and the puzzlement of keeping life interesting and vigorous while maintaining the nuclear unit intact.”

The thing about the Wheelers is that they want to believe they are “above” the conventional and stultifying, conforming aspirations of the American suburban life-style. They want to believe they are special.

To prove they are special, April, the frustrated suburban housewife and mom, comes up with a desperate plan of escape. Frank will quit his dull corporate job, and they will sell their cozy suburban home and move themselves and their two young children to Paris, where, in a grass-is-always-greener-across-the-Atlantic fantasy that Frank harbors, “people are really alive.”

But it turns out that the Wheelers are not so special. Frank, at 29, is actually, as Richard Ford writes, a “deluded, dissipated bore who imagines himself as an intense, nicotine-stained Jean Paul Sartre-sort of man,” while April struggles "to set a go-nowhere life onto new rails that will lead her family (or more particularly lead her) to Paris and a main chance at freedom."

Circumstances arise—or, as we say, s--- happens—that threaten to derail the Paris dream, and both April and Frank let themselves be done in by these circumstances, perhaps because, as Ford said, they lack “the moral vigor to control" them.

Possibly, the most poignant moment in the film comes when April faces a certain reality about herself and her husband and tells him, “We’re really not that special.” Somehow, that struck me as a terribly human realization that a lot of us have to come to: we're not that special in a way that we have convinced ourselves we need to be.

After that moment of realization for April and Frank, tragedy, of course, ensues. I won’t say what the big tragic event is, in case you haven't read the book, and you're thinking you might want to brave this movie. It might not lift your mood, but it will get you thinking. And that's not always a bad thing is it?

Meanwhile, as I write this, it’s Sunday morning in suburbia. A cloudy Sunday morning, with bare winter trees visible outside my window. Revisiting the world of Couples and Revolutionary Road is, yes, thought-provoking and a way that can be exciting. But right now, both works' sense of loss, loneliness, and essential misery at the heart of human life—whether you live in the supposedly dull, stultifying suburbs, or in more “alive” Paris—is probably not the best pick me up.

I’m about ready to sink into one of my crazy moods, and I don't really want to let that happen.

My husband just popped in the room to say that he and my son are going to head to Starbucks in a half hour. That’s their occasional Sunday-morning rituals Starbucks on Walnut Creek’s Locust Street, where they will indulge in breakfast sandwiches and hot chocolate. My husband invited me to come along, and I think I better go. Enjoy some time with the two most important people in my life. Also, I also hope those clouds mean rain today. I love rainy days.

Literary great John Updike, pioneering chronicler of American suburban ennui, dies at age 76

John Updike, one of the pioneering voices examining the craziness of the emerging suburban landscape of post-World War II America, has died. His publicist announced Tuesday that he passed away at age 76 of lung cancer.

Updike was a Pulitzer Prize winning writer whose books were also best-sellers and spanned genres, from short stories to several-volume epics that sought to say the big sweeping things about our country that you find in the proverbial Great American Novel.

The New York Times eulogized Updike as a “novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century. … In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave ‘the mundane its beautiful due,' as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the ‘50s and early ‘60s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the '70s and '80s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.”

As it happens, I have sitting on my book shelf a paperback copy of his controversial 1968 novel Couples. Although, Updike had already published Rabbit, Run, the first in the four Rabbit books for which he would probably be best identified, Couples was the book that actually made Updike a household name. The book is about a group of spouses bringing the sexual revolution home to their Massachusetts suburb.

In December, the London Daily Telegraph interviewed Updike and called Couples, “a brilliantly realized anatomical (in every sense) study of adulterous liaisons among a group of young professionals in the Massachusetts town of Tarbox—a thinly veiled version of Updike's home town of Ipswich. Never before had a writer dwelt quite so attentively on the matter of marital infidelity—‘its adventure, the acrobatics its deceptions demand, the tension of its hidden strings, the new landscapes it makes us master.’ Updike is pleased to be reminded of Couples. It was criticized at the time, he remembers—‘'for its stylistic excesses and too much huffing and puffing about not enough’—but it went on to become his first, and only, No. 1 bestseller, and remains his biggest commercial success."

It looks like, if I get the time this weekend, I’ll finaly crack open Couples to find out what all the fuss was about, and I'll contemplate how much it relates to any messing around going on around in our fair suburbs.

(But, these days—with the economy in shambles, and people all depressed about finances or stressed out and working harder than ever to keep the jobs they have—who would have the time or energy to put into the effort required to have an affair?)

Big, Ugly Houses: Chapter I, Walnut Creek's own Xanadu

Okay, go ahead and call me mean and a scold for singling out the above-pictured home, which sits oh-so conspiciousy on top of a ridge above an elementary school playing field in unincorporated Walnut Creek; Or for calling it "ugly." But, hey, that's my opinion, and whoever built, bought, and/or currently resides in this house was obviously eager to be the center of their neighbors' gaze. Given the home's visually prominent position--you cannot miss it if you drive around certain parts of town--the builder and/or homeowner very much wanted it to be seen, and to even make a community-wide statement that says, "Look at my house!"

Also, if there is anyone out there who disagrees with me essentially calling this house an eyesore--who wants to argue that this home is appropriately sized, aesthetically pleasing, artfully designed, and Architectural Digest-ready--please do so.


I know the neighborhood association wasn't happy about it being built, but there wasn't a lot they could do. Because the home was to be built in an unincorporated part of Walnut Creek, the association had to deal with the county, not the city, and the county seems more willing than the local city government to rubber-stamp horrific looking residential developments. (We're all familiar with those homes above the Stone Valley Road exit of Interstate 680 in Alamo; they're planned to be subjects for future posts.)

My interest is shall we say, more academic, and I'm going to start photographing and searching for other local "big, ugly" houses to display and to contemplate. (If you have any photos you'd like to share, please do. Don't give me names and addresses, just towns.) Anyway, I am really fascinated by the motives and tastes of the developers, architects, land owners, real estate agents, and home buyers who push these Super McMansions into our neighborhoods. What's going on here?

I imagine all the excess cash (or, in these days, the illusion of excess cash) involved in the construction and sales of these homes, as well as the inflated egos, bad taste, hubris, and general lack of consideration for the sensibilities of neighbors, communities, and, in some cases, the local environment. Of course, there is something particularly American about all this--in holding homes like these to be some kind of pinnacle of the American dream. At the same time, it just doesn't register to all involved in building these "dream homes" that these ostentatious displays of real estate just don't fit in, at least visually, into the surrounding landscape.

And why does the proliferation of Super McMansions seem to be a particularly suburban phenomenon? Well, most probably because, unlike in a city, there is more land on which to spread out. And settling in the suburbs: that's very much in the usual narrative of the American dream, including for builders and owners of Super McMansions.

I've dubbed this house "Xanadu." That name applies, first, to the the massive, gilded fortress built by Charles Foster Kane, the melagomanical protagonist of Orson Welles' classic 1941 film Citizen Kane (and a character based on fabled newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst). I have no idea who built or owns this above-pictured Xanadu, so I don't know what their motives were in erecting the house in this location and in this very distinctive "style." But like this Xanadu, Kane built his atop a hill, in a spot that afforded him 360-degree views. And in Kane's case, he built his fortress to show off his power and to make people admire and love him. He also used his fortress as a way to escape the sorrows of his rich but lonely, disappointed life.


Xanadu also refers to Shangdu, the fabled summer palace built by the 13th Mongol emperor Kublai Khan west of Beijing. More to the point, Xanadu refers to Kublai Khan's opulent, dreamy palace as envisioned by the great English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem, "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment."


The poem begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree

(These lines, by the way, are recited in Citizen Kane.) In his poem, which Coleridge claimed was inspired by an opium-induced dream, the poet goes on to describe Kubla Khan as desperately power hungry, and crazed for his subjects,and the rest of the known world, to believe that he was glorified by the divine power of God. Coleridge ends his poem with this description of the maniacal master of Xanadu:

Beware! Beware!,
his flashing eyes! his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
and close your eyes with holy dread!
for he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise

Not to get too literary on you, but after re-visiting Coleridge's poem, I have to wonder how many Kublai Khans we have out here in Walnut Creek and the surrounding suburbs, how many have felt driven to build their own Xanadus, not just to impress their neighbors, but to prove something to themselves: that somehow, because they can manage to afford to build and/or to own an overwhelmingly big, opulent, gaudy house, that they have seized for themselves universal respect, power, admiration, awe, and, most illusively, love.

Of course, with the recession, many local Kublai Khans might have lost a fair share of their millions. So, maybe construction plans for their new Super McMansions might be put on hold. That would be one small silver lining in this economic crisis: a slowdown in the local Super McMansion construction industry. Then again, that means that many ordinary construction workers won't have jobs--men and women who have rental or mortgage payments on their own much more modest homes to pay and families to clothe and feed.

Top Pop Culture Reference to Suburbia: Revolutionary Road, the Novel and the New Movie

Coming to a movie screen near you on December 26: the already critically acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated, and Oscar-buzz-worthy film version of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel Revolutionary Road.

The film re-teams that Titanic duo of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as April and Frank Wheeler, a suburban 1950s couple who are slowly and tragically coming unraveled. (This film is directed by Winslet’s husband, Sam Mendes, who directed that other critically acclaimed examination of suburban anomie and despair, 1999’s American Beauty.)

April and Frank Wheeler are former bohemian urbanites (Greenwich Village, no less) and somewhat intellectually superior snobs who nonetheless felt drawn to move to a somewhat smug suburban housing development in Connecticut, especially with the arrival of their two young kids. As the novel opens, Frank commutes to Manhattan to his boring corporate job, while April stays home with two small kids. Frank and April each are spiritually dying inside from boredom, depression, and their growing disenchantment with each other. It's the same sort of emotional misery and unraveling you see depicted in Don and Betty Draper, the outwardly happy, attractive couple in TV's Mad Men.

Talk about Crazy in Suburbia.

I read the book about a year ago and loved it, so I can’t wait to see the film. Christopher Hitchens, in his essay “Suburbs of Our Discontent” in the December issue of The Atlantic, has a good analysis of the novel. He looks at the book from a literary standpoint and from a cultural, historical one. He aptly points out:

“Most Americans now live in the suburbs than anywhere else, and more do so by choice. Anachronisms of two kinds persist in respect to this phenomenon. The first is the apparently unshakable belief of political candidates that they will sound better, and appear more authentic, if they can claim to come from a small town (something we were almost spared this year, until the chiller from Wasilla). The second is the continued stern disapproval of anything ‘suburban’ by the strategic majority of our country’s intellectuals. The idiocy of rural life? If you must. The big city? All very well. Bohemia, or perhaps Paris or Prague? Yes, indeed. The suburbs? No thank you.”

He goes on to say: “The achievement of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road was to anatomize the ills and woes of suburbia while simultaneously satirizing those suburbanites and others who thought that they themselves were too good for the ‘burbs.”

Things start to fall apart for this couple. There is, as in Mad Men, lots of drinking and, as Hitchens calls it, that “other suburban sport, adultery,” which is full of “bathos and degradation.” Hitchens says: “Revolutionary Road is replete with moments … [that convey] with great economy the experience of boredom and disgust" of its characters.

To Yates, according to Hitchens, April and Frank Wheeler are living in a “microcosmic hell on Earth.”

Hmm. Can any of us say the same about Walnut Creek or surrounding East Bay communities? Are we living in our own versions of hell on Earth? What do you think?

In his Final Days, Adolph Hitler Deals With His Own Real Estate Downfall

Yes, any headline with “Adolph Hitler” and “Real Estate Downfall" needs an explanation.

To begin, one of my favorite films of the last few years was Downfall (or Der Untergang), a German-made examination of Hitler and Co.’s final 12 days in that Berlin bunker. It was nominated for the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

If you like historical drama, are a World War II buff, or if you like truly great films—and even ones with subtitles and dark, disturbing themes, as crazy Soccer Mom does—this one should absolutely go into your Netflix queue. It shows the madness and tragedy at the heart of Hitler (played by the great Bruno Ganz, pictured here) and his German war machine as it unravels within the intimate, subterranean confines of that bunker.

Fast forward to “Real Estate Downfall": Some very skilled, culturally savvy people have taken a pivotal scene in that film, when the Fuhrer is getting some very bad news about his prospects for survival, and added their own mortgage-meltdown-related subtitles and created a very amusing, brilliantly twisted YouTube video. Unfortunately, some of us in our affluent suburban community might actually be able to identify with some of the disbelief expressed by this YouTube Hitler, especially over the downfall of his personal financial fortunes and the loss of certain symbols of his once good life (granite counter tops!). You can check out Real Estate Downfall here:

Mom on the Verge: “I can’t talk to anyone. It’s so horrible. I’m so sad.”

These are the poignant lines uttered by a suburban mom on the verge. She’s Betty Draper, the young, blond, pretty seemingly perfect 1960 housewife in the critically acclaimed TV show Mad Men.

I woke up early this morning, couldn’t get back to sleep, so I burned through the final two episodes of the first season of Mad Men. This Thanksgiving weekend, I finally decided to get on the Mad Men TV-viewing bandwagon. There are many reasons to watch this show, but, given the title of this blog, Crazy in Suburbia, I was particularly intrigued to acquaint myself with the drama, because, among its many features, it depicts American suburban life, at that post-World War II time when the suburbs were moving to the forefront of our nation’s cultural consciousness.

Despite my Soccer Mom nom de plume and the photo of the skinny, prosperous looking blond at the top corner of this site (Yes, it’s Victoria Beckham), I’m not that woman and I'm no Betty Draper. I’m not as young as Betty, who is 28. I’m also not blond; rather I’m a wanna-be-blond, as my son teases me. In fact, after delaying my usual routine of feminine maintenance, I’ve got an appointment today to get my highlights retouched. Not sure when I’ll get around to the rest of my routine: leg waxing and pedicure. Like a lot of families these days in these tough economic times, ours is feeling a little tight on money.

Also, unlike Betty, I’m not a housewife, perfect or otherwise. I’m a working mom, and don't do housekeeping all that well.

I should despise this Betty Draper character, and I should be brimming with Schadenfreude, taking delight in her suffering. In a way, I am, I must confess, but I suspect that other fans of the show are also gaining satisfaction in learning her life ain't so great after all.

Because she seems to have much to envy, so much going for her. She comes from a well-off East Coast family, graduated from top college, and was beautiful enough, in a Grace Kelly way, to model for a while in Manhattan before meeting her Prince Charming, the handsome, successful Don Draper. She also has a natural flair for keeping her house in beautiful shape, as well as herself. She certainly doesn’t put off her feminine maintenance routine.

Actually, I see a lot of women around Walnut Creek, in my neighborhood, or at community events, who appear to also have Betty’s gift for looking good and, more than that, for looking happy.

I confess to being bitter at times that I’m not these women. I confess to feeling envy, and then spite, and of trying to convince myself that I have other qualities that make me superior to these seemingly perfect women. I know that’s not a good way to think, and, when I’m in envy mode, I despise myself so much than I could ever despise Betty Draper or the Betty Drapers of central Contra Costa County.

But as the first season of Mad Men goes on, Betty reveals an actually not-so-surprising level of depth, humanity, and misery. She’s quietly going crazy in her seemingly perfect life. She, of course, would have made a perfect case study for the groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan.

Her psychiatrist--Betty Draper's, that is--labels her as highly anxious. Her husband, Don, is mystified, but then he’s off working most of the time, drinking, smoking, and having affairs.

Betty terrifies and surprises herself with sudden displays of anger. Over the past year or so, I've terrified and surprised myself in similar ways (though I've done nothing to get myself arrested for). She gets mad as hell and decides she’s not going to take it anymore. She slaps a neighbor in the grocery store who has insulted her. Then, after losing a chance to return to her modeling career part time, she takes a rifle and opens fire on pigeons belonging to her next-door neighbor, out of revenge for his threatening to shoot her children’s dog. She also takes to sipping glasses of red wine during the day (If only she'd had Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck around back then) and fantasizes about luring the door-to-door air-conditioning salesman into her home for a quickie.

Betty really loses it after it dawns on her that, yes, her husband isn’t the man he has always pretended to be and that he has been unfaithful to her for a long time. That’s when she suddenly breaks down in a bank parking lot on a cold November morning and confides her misery to a 9-year-old neighbor boy, with whom she has formed an unconventional, yet sympathetic bond.

Betty walks up to him as he sits in the car waiting for his mother to come out of the bank. She blurts out: “I can’t talk to anyone. It’s so horrible. I’m so sad.” Then she pleads to the boy, who, with his own dysfunctional family life, also has reasons to be sad, “Please tell me I’ll be okay.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had moments when I have felt just like Betty Draper. Actually, lots of moments, particularly in the past few years. When I just want to open up to someone and say, this is horrible—whatever this is. Life itself? And I just feel so sad, and I want someone to just tell me it’s going to be okay.

Yes, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, and I should not be feeling sad, but I should be feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all the good things in my life.

It’s Saturday morning. When the sky became light, I could see that a thick cold gray mist lay heavy around my house and over my cul-de-sac. The mist has since lifted. The leaves on the trees outside my bedroom window are sparkling bright yellow in orange in the sun. It could be another beautiful fall day here in suburbia. I told my husband I was feeling sad, we talked, and now he’s preparing chocolate chip waffles for my son. I’ll go running and breathe in the cold, clear air.

I can't wait for Season 2 of Mad Men to come out on DVD. I missed the second season when it actually aired on AMC. I’ll have to get the DVDs and see if things start to get better for Betty Draper. I hope so.

New Federal Report: Poverty Spreading to the Suburbs

The day after Black Friday when we were all supposed to be crowding Target, Best Buy, Macys, and the malls, spending money we might not have on things we think we need but probably don't comes a study showing that "poverty is spreading and may be re-clustering in the suburbs."

The study comes from the Federal Reserve's Community Affairs department and the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. The summary of this study comes from this Reuters report:

Poverty in the United States is spreading from rural and inner-city areas to the suburbs, a situation that can worsen as the economy confronts what may be a protracted recession.

With the U.S. economic outlook rapidly deteriorating, poverty could get worse. ... The U.S. housing market collapse has unleashed the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, forcing business to scale back on investments and driving the unemployment rate to a 14-year high.

The suburbs are not doomed!

That’s the message of growth trend expert Robert Selbert, writing on the website, NewGeography.com. He refers to recent predictions that rising gas prices would make people consider trading down their exurban mini-mansions for more modest-sized homes closer to where they work. Also, he mentioned the urban renaissance that is supposedly underway, with people wanting to move back into cities for “culture, food, music, hipness, don’tcha know.”

Selbert points out that:

Suburbs are the nexus of American life, have been for decades, and will certainly remain so (because, like, where else are we going to put the next 100 million Americans). Suburbs are where the majority of Americans today, and in the future, live, work, shop, create, consume, recreate, educate and, perhaps most importantly, procreate.

To back up this point, he cites the U.S. Census to show that, from 2001 to 2006 90 percent all metropolitan population growth occurred in the suburbs. He adds that job growth in suburbia expanded at 6 times the rate of that in urban cores.

So, the suburbs are here to stay.