Little Boxes All The Same.

Margaret Atwood may be better known for the dystopias in The Handmaid's Tale and the MaddAddam Trilogy: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, but she's penned a minor classic of the genre in The Heart Goes Last. Stan and Charmaine are victims of a financial catastrophe that has ruined most Americans and are living out of their car. Offered a chance at middle-class security again if only they will (literally) sign their lives away, they join a community called Consilience. One month is spent in a suburban house with everything provided (including divinely fluffy towels), and the other is spent at the prison, where they have what initially seem to be innocuous jobs. All is not well, however, as sex and rebellion threaten to throw Stan and Charmaine's newly settled lives into peril. Written after the Great Recession, Atwood has some sharp things to say about economic winners and losers and what the middle class will do to hold onto its position and creature comforts that resonate with the current jitters about another economic downturn. Want more books on suburban malaise? There are some classics to recommend.

Tom Perrotta is considered a master of finding the murk beneath the cheerful facade. Possibly his most famous work, The Leftovers concerns the mayor of a once-thriving community that has experienced the disappearance of a large portion of its population. Kevin tries to preserve a sense of normalcy through community traditions like parades, but even his family is coming apart. Both a satire of suburban life and an exploration of the grieving process, Perrotta manages a little sympathy for everyone.

Revolutionary Road is Richard Yates' exposure of the hollowness of the post-war boom. Frank and April both had artistic aspirations, but moved out to the suburbs for two kids and Frank's mundane job. April withers, slowly at first, but more rapidly as it becomes obvious that her dream of moving to Europe will never happen. This is Yates' first novel, published in 1961, and much imitated and echoed without really being equaled.

Sinclair Lewis wrote what was probably the first mature work of alienation in the suburbs with Babbitt. Written as an excoriation of 1920's complacency, Lewis' main character is emotionally estranged from his family and community at large. George F. Babbitt makes an attempt at an extramarital affair and helping some strikers, but is frightened back into conformity at the threat of upending his tidy existence. Probably Lewis's most well-known work, it added the word "Babbitt" to the American lexicon as a term for an unthinking conformist.

The Virgin Suicides is Jeffrey Eugenides' first book, and highly acclaimed. The five teenaged Lisbon sisters are virtually imprisoned by parents concerned for their virtue and are the subject of fascination by their male classmates, especially after they start ending their own lives. Eugenides manages both lyricism and the authentic voices of adolescent boys in this tragedy that is as poetic as Shakespeare and unrelenting as Aeschylus. 

Have more books of suburban malaise? Tell us about them in the comments.