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I just returned from the rugged mountains of Colorado with research for an upcoming book complete, T-shirts for the kids, and the thought that we here in Westchester and Connecticut are total hill wimps.
In fact, every time I come back from anywhere it is with the takeaway that we have the suburbs wrong, big time.
Shake a writer awake and he'll describe Westchester or Connecticut as "hilly, leafy bedroom communities." True: there are bedrooms here. And some leaves. But hills? At least hills like Colorado and the rest of the world knows them?
Puh-lease.
Why this undeserved reputation as mountain-man territory? We may benefit from nearby plank-flat Long Island, but I blame John Cheever. In fact, when it comes to misperceptions of suburbia, I blame John Cheever for everything.
He lived in Ossining, but wrote about fictitious suburbs that could have been set in Westchester, Connecticut or anywhere in the suburban ring around New Yorkplaces given loaded names like Shady Hill which wereyou guessed ithilly, leafy bedroom communities.
Cheever's world has been resuscitated by the television show "Mad Men" and its archetypal suburbanite Don Draper, who also lives in Ossining. And so the mid-century vision of the suburbs lives on in popular culture.
In Cheever's view all suburbanites like us did was drink cocktails and conduct illicit affairs. If only, huh? Sometimes we'd secretly rob each other's homes or get taken by the notion of swimming across town backyard swimming pool by backyard swimming pool. Maybe it's just the current economy, but in most of Westchester, dive in your neighbor's backyard and you'll come away with a bruise on your forehead the size of Bolivia. With apologies to Cheever's eye, we're pretty landlocked here.
Two years ago, a New York Times Magazine story called "The First Suburbanite" lamented that though Cheever was a literary giant in his day a generation ago, his work barely sells now. "Cheever," wrote Charles McGrath, the former editor of the Times' Book Review section, "has largely faded from the map."
The article throws a kitchen sink of reasons at why: Cheever's personal life was revealed to be a touch complicated, his reputation was more for short stories than novels, even the general vagaries of the literary world.
But can't the answer be that the man who has come to define suburbia was simply wrong? Why are the suburbs stuck with an image that seems dated, at best, or -- to use a less generous phrase -- faintly ridiculous?
There are a lot of interesting stories in suburbia, but they seem more nuanced, textured and diverse than Cheever conjured up in his limited imagination: 30,000 Yonkers students forging on year-after-year in an ever-teetering school district. Or the marked proximity of wealthy and poor in places like New Rochelle or Bridgeport, which also boast a racial balance that would be the envy of more cosmopolitan spots. Even Cheever's Ossining is, according to the US Census, well under half white. It is, in fact, an ethnic split of White, Hispanic, Black and Asian that would be the envy of many neighborhoods of Manhattan--that rarified land to the south where, without a Wall Street job or trust fund, it's hard to make a go of it.
I could be wrong about Cheever and perceptions of our area. But every time I leave suburbia and come back anew, I'm ever more convinced that I'm right. Why should the first suburbanite have the last word?
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Marek Fuchs is the author of "A Cold-Blooded Business," called "riveting" by Kirkus Reviews. He wrote The New York Times' "County Lines" column about life in Westchester for six years and teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville. When not writing or teaching, he serves as a volunteer firefighter. You can contact Marek through his website: www.marekfuchs.com or on Twitter: @MarekFuchs.
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