Canadian Suburban: Reimagining Space and Place in Postwar English Canadian Fiction 9780228012276

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CA N A D I A N S U B U R B A N

CA N A D I A N S U B U R B A N Reimagining Space and Place in Postwar English Canadian Fiction

Cheryl Cowdy

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-1064-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1227-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1228-3 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Funding in support of publication has been provided by the Book Publication Subvention Fund of the York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Canadian suburban : reimagining space and place in postwar English Canadian fiction / Cheryl Cowdy. Names: Cowdy, Cheryl, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210365293 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210365439 | ISBN 9780228010647 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228012276 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228012283 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Canadian fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. | LCSH: Canadian fiction – 21st century – History and criticism. | LCSH: Suburbs in literature. | LCSH: Suburban life in literature. | LCSH: Landscapes in literature. | CSH: Canadian fiction (English) – 20th century – History and criticism. | CSH: Canadian fiction (English) – 21st century – History and criticism. Classification: LCC PS8191.S83 C69 2022 | DDC C813/.5409321733 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 10.5/13 Sabon.

This one’s for you, Dad. William Cowdy 1945–2018 Port Hope – Scarborough – Barrie – Mississauga – Cambridge

Contents

Figures

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction: Neither Here nor There: A Canadian Suburban Imaginary 3 PART ONE: POSTWAR INNER SUBURBS TO 1970

1 2 3

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man 21 Ravines and the Conscious Electrified Life of Houses The Bomb Is Only a Metaphor Now 58

43

PART TWO: CORPORATE SUBURBIA AFTER 1970

4 5 6 7

Master Plans 77 Subdivisions 94 Transformative Catastrophes 110 Scarborough, Scarberia, Scarlem, Scarbistan, Scar-bro Conclusion: Communitas Notes

149

Bibliography Index

171

161

144

129

Figures

P.1 1.1 1.2 3.1 4.1

Tom McNeely, “Meadowvale” (1978). Reproduced by permission of McNeely. Photo courtesy of the Museums of Mississauga. x Vera Jacyk, cover of The Weekend Man. Toronto: Laurentian Library (1977). 29 Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, “The City.” Explorations 8 (1955), 38–9. 37 “Aerial Photo of Don Mills.” York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC00853; photographer: Eric Cole. 59 Gerald Lynch, Map of Troutstream. Troutstream. Toronto: Vintage (1996), viii. 79

Fig. P.1

Tom McNeely, Meadowvale.

Preface The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – It is the map that engenders the territory. 1

Jean Baudrillard

In Meadowvale, the “planned community” in Mississauga, Ontario where I came of age in the 1980s, there is a rather whimsical painting of a map circa 1978 by Toronto artist Tom McNeely (figure P.1) decorating the wall of the local library. The library was once housed in the defunct “Town Centre,” the shopping mall that developers enlarged in the late eighties, promising movie theatres and “exciting new retailers,” then demolished when Walmart pulled out early in the new millennium. The map is the kind of depiction one often finds in the sales offices of new developments; its main purpose is to sell potential homebuyers a vision of what everyone wants their neighbourhood to become: a community where people happily go about their days, and children play safely on culs-de-sac and sidewalks. On the map, The Meadowvale Town Centre is figured as the centre of the community. It is surrounded by a vast sea of parking spaces and then a variety of housing types  – single-family homes, townhomes, and the odd high-rise apartment building – idyllically set beside two “man-made” lakes, Aquitaine and Wabukayne, both of which are really stormwater management facilities. Presumably, these names were chosen by developers, and I like to think they were being cheekily subversive naming one lake after a European region with an imperial history of conflict between France and England, while the latter refers to the Anishinaabe chief who sold the land early in the nineteenth century. There are sailboats on Lake Aquitaine  – a feature I find particularly amusing as I don’t suppose anyone in Meadowvale has ever seen one there. It would be impossible to sail this small “lake,” although I do

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recall a brief period when residents could rent paddle boats and canoes. In the upper left-hand corner, there is a representation of Meadowvale Secondary School, an aspirational feature given that the school had not yet been built when the “map” was created in 1978. On the outskirts of Meadowvale, in the upper right-hand corner, Lake Ontario and the Toronto skyline are visible, as if the city is the periphery to this planned community. “Yesterday’s liminal becomes today’s stabilized, today’s peripheral becomes tomorrow’s centred,” cultural anthropologist Victor Turner remarks.2 What I find most compelling about this representation of Meadowvale is the way by which, as Jean Baudrillard insists, “the map engenders the territory.” The real and the imaginary; the past, present, and future; here and there; centre and periphery: all collide. Like the suburban communities hovering on the borders of the metropolis, a Canadian suburban imaginary haunts Canadian literature and culture, marginalized by the assumption that the suburbs are “prefabricated from no great narrative,” as the speaker in Dionne Brand’s poem “XX” from Thirsty represents the communities surrounding the Greater Toronto Area. This is not the iconic natural landscape of the Group of Seven or Tom Thomson. As Brand’s speaker muses, “Thomson would have snatched his Burnt Country away from here, / knowing that it would vanish.”3 Nor do we think of the suburbs as places that inspire dissident artistic or poetic expression. At best, we hope they may continue to produce aberrant comical geniuses such as Mike Myers or Jim Carrey, or catchy pop bands like The Barenaked Ladies and hip-hop artist The Weeknd, all of whom grew up in Scarborough, on the outskirts of Toronto. Although a large percentage of the Canadian population live in suburban communities, literary studies of place and space have tended to ignore them, focusing instead on the north, the wilderness, the prairie, the urban, or the small-town landscape as the settings by which we define who we are as a nation. Suburbs challenge this notion of Canadian regionalism and our dearly held belief in the distinctiveness of local spaces, places, and cultures. Stereotypically, suburbia represents homogeneity, globalization, corporate serfdom, and conspicuous consumption: values we associate with American cultural imperialism. Despite our attachment to regionalism, we are united by catchphrases like “The Great White North” and “We the North,” representing ourselves to the world by what we are not: The USA. Yet as a character in Douglas Glover’s short story “The Indonesian Client” observes, “Canadians are like suburban architecture, shopping malls and McDonald’s franchises  … They are forerunners of the universal

Preface

xiii

world culture.”4 However much we may resist the analogy, “Canada has become a suburban nation,” as historian Richard Harris writes with conviction, making “the suburbs … a fundamental part of [our] national experience.”5 The suburbs can no longer be held to be an accidental part of the Canadian landscape, nor as a space that disfigures the continent only on the other side of the 49th parallel. The strip mall, the automobile, the single-family home, the developing subdivision: all are features of everyday life in Canada. And if art reflects and constructs our “national experience” for us, then the ubiquity of suburban representations in contemporary Canadian art, fiction, film, and popular culture substantiates Harris’s assertion. Think of Arcade Fire’s wildly successful 2010 album The Suburbs, or the Leona Drive Project, which briefly transformed a suburban Toronto neighbourhood into an art installation prior to its demolition in 2009. There is Calgary filmmaker Gary Burns’s 2006 film The Radiant City, Melissa McClelland’s 2004 album, Stranded in Suburbia, or the cover of Michelle Berry’s Blind Crescent, published in 2005. Such representations both invoke and dispel myths of suburban homogeneity; in the process, they compel us to question the notion that suburbia is there and not here. The title of this book gestures back thirty years to Linda Hutcheon’s seminal The Canadian Postmodern, which made a case for a distinctive form of postmodernism in English Canadian literature. Just as Hutcheon asserted the arrival of postmodernism in Canada, I proclaim the presence of a distinctively Canadian suburban imaginary, one that functions as a kind of liminal, postmodern third space, what Hutcheon calls the “ex-centric,” challenging the hegemony of other places by which we identify ourselves as a nation. “To render the particular concrete, to glory in a (defining) local ex-centricity – this is the Canadian postmodern.”6 As Canadian as our third-party political system, the suburbs – if they exist anywhere – occupy an imagined space between the North (wilderness) and the South (city). They are, as Ottawa playwright Jordan Tannahill recalls of the neighbourhood where he grew up, “a far cry from the mundane suburbs depicted in popular culture,” and which he “experienced … as a place full of narrative, conflict, diversity, sex, fear, and the possibility of radical reinvention.”7 This book is an invitation to venture out of the city, the north, the small town, and the wilderness to discover a distinctly Canadian suburban literature from which narratives and artistic expression  – like insistent vegetation exploding from asphalt driveways – break out.

Acknowledgments

This book has spent many years in the liminal stage of its development, and I am grateful for a nurturing community that has sustained me during seasons of fallow and of productivity. To the editors at McGillQueen’s University Press – Mark Abley and Jonathan Crago – thank you for your patience, your enthusiasm, and your insightful contributions to my thinking and my writing. I am deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers who pointed me in the directions I needed to go during the last stages of my writing journey. I am the beneficiary of support from York University, Toronto, Canada, where Canadian Suburban first launched as a PhD project in the English Department, and where it has since landed as a book in the Department of Humanities. I would like to thank the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, for the financial support it provided to this work. My gratitude also to the York University Faculty Association for generously funding and supporting this project with sabbatical resources, and to the SShrC, for supporting my research in its early years. Special mention must also be made of the loving staff at Lee Wiggins Childcare of York University, especially Leslie, Carmelita, and Rita; without those who love and care for our children, far fewer women in academia would be publishing books, teaching, and researching. My family and I still remember you all with much fondness. I have been blessed with the intellectual support and nurturing of many colleagues over the years: my mentors Susan Warwick and Ray Ellenwood, Len Early, and Aritha van Herk, who so generously provided feedback long ago but whose insights shaped the book as it is today. To the colleagues I count as friends – those who are still among

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my circle and those with whom I may have lost touch – I see in these pages the influence of all your contributions to the ways I think about what place means to me and to Canadian Literature. With special appreciation to Darcy Ballantyne, Elena Basile, Dunja Baus, Andrew Burke, David Chariandy, Elicia Clements, Kerry Doyle, Douglas Glover, Alison Halsall, Megan Hillman, Derek and Susan Irwin, Christine Kim, Andrea Medovarski, Janet Melo-Thaiss, Bobby Noble, Candida Rifkind, and Robert Stacey. Some of you shared books you knew I should read; some of you wrote books for me to read; some of you shared your stories of growing up in the suburbs and exploring its ravines; and some of you fed me and played with my kids while I wrote. My work has also been enriched by colleagues at York I don’t know personally but whose research is at the forefront of suburban studies in Canada: my thanks to those affiliated with the City Institute at York University and the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies for enriching my explorations in the suburbs. I am so fortunate to count among my friends those who navigated the crescents and courts of Meadowvale as teenagers with me: Debbie, Michele, Cathy, and Chris. And most importantly, my deepest appreciation goes to my immediate family: my late father, whose tall tales filled the many suburban homes in which we lived, and whose personal history traversed the developing suburbs around Toronto. My mother, who made a home of every house in which we lived. Thank you, Nick – for coming along late in my life and sustaining me through the end of this project, inspiring me to become reacquainted with Mississauga. And finally – most emphatically – my deepest gratitude to Cassandra and Cadence, who grew up before this book could: thank you for inspiring me every day with your energy and creativity, and for reminding me to play. Miigwetch to the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat for your caretaking of Tkaronto, the area in which I live as a settler and work as scholar. Their children are among those with whom I played as a child, growing up in Mississauga, Ontario, now home to many First Nation, Inuit, and Métis communities. I acknowledge the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region. This book exists because of this covenant and is a reminder of my own responsibility. To the authors who made of the suburbs a place of and through story: thank you all for your vision.

CA N A D I A N S U B U R B A N

Introduction

Neither Here nor There: A Canadian Suburban Imaginary

The first English-language novel to wrestle with the meaning of suburban culture for modern Canadians, Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians (1960), very nearly disappeared into obscurity. An international bestseller in its time, the novel was dismissed by some critics, such as Robert Fulford, as an “example of romantic commercial fiction” of the sort found in “Ladies Home Journal [sic].”1 The novel’s dismissal and eventual disappearance speaks to our collective disdain for all we associate with mass culture, including the built environment of the suburbs, women’s media, and the women who consume it from within their so-called cookie-cutter homes. The republication of The Torontonians in 2007 by McGill-Queen’s University Press suggests a new willingness among Canadian publishers and academics to recognize the suburbs as a meaningful Canadian setting and to take seriously the narratives, experiences, and protagonists born and bred in a space we still struggle to define. As a novel of manners, The Torontonians is a witty study of the artifacts of suburban culture and what its protagonist, Karen, calls its “competitive materialism” (273): a pop-up toaster and electric dishwasher meant to ease the domestic chores of the housewife; the Chinese carpet that has come to symbolize the Whitneys’ prosperity but which fails to give Karen the pleasure it once promised; the buckwheat lawn she and husband Rick planted, seeded, and grew in true suburban dIy fashion. Yet one of the novel’s most compelling symbols is Karen’s imaginary “toy,” a small “grey cube, opaque, polished, its surface a tactile

4

Canadian Suburban

pleasure to which fingers clung in spite of what was hidden within its six-sided facelessness. A child’s block, fashioned in hell, with no need for any outer markings” (7). The imaginary object with which Karen plays daily after Rick leaves for his downtown office represents her thoughts of suicide. Rowanwood is a “gilt-edged suburban labyrinth,” and Karen can see no “avenue of escape” (13). Much of the novel’s plot explores the sources of Karen’s dissatisfaction and dread. As we might expect from a retrospective vantage point, the novel anticipates the ennui of suburban housewives articulated only three years after the novel’s publication by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which Karen’s hopelessness focuses on her inability to locate herself in the labyrinth. Rowanwood “was not like living downtown, but neither was it a damn bit like living in the country” (13). She is, as one of the chapter titles indicates, “neither here nor there” (114). The novel ends with the couple’s decision to leave Rowanwood and head south, back to the city proper. As she explains to Rick, “Rowanwood may be a wonderful place to grow trees and flowers and buckwheat lawns, but it’s not a place where people can grow … It’s – it’s an evolutionary cul-de-sac (319).” This articulation of Rowanwood as a labyrinthine dead end, defined by lack and its intolerable position between here and there, resonates with dominant postwar notions of suburbia across national boundaries. Like Crestwood Heights, the fictional name given to Toronto’s upper-class Forest Hill Village in the first sustained sociological study of Canadian suburbia, Crestwood Heights (1963), Rowanwood could be a generic suburb of Chicago, Melbourne, or London. Young’s depiction anticipates not only Friedan, but the frequently cited disdain for suburban homogeneity expressed by Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961). An early critic of suburbia’s monotonous design, Mumford may have been one of the first twentieth-century critics to express academic distaste for an undifferentiated landscape of “uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould.”2 Mumford’s characterization of conformist suburbanites as homogenous mirrors of their prefabricated space has so dominated North American thought that we continue to accept the stereotype without question. And yet, the novel’s title, The Torontonians, gestures insistently to the specificity of place.

Introduction: Neither Here nor There

5

This book is an attempt to reckon with spaces and places, the general and the specific, as articulated in representations of the cultures of suburbia in English Canadian fiction published from the 1960s to 2019, while their temporal settings translate roughly into two distinct and historically significant periods of suburban development in Canada. Geographer Alan R. Walks identifies two contiguous eras and boundaries of suburban development in Canada. The first, “developed between the end of the Second World War and 1970,” Walks refers to as “the inner suburban zone.” He elaborates, “the remaining portion of the metropolitan area, largely developed after 1970, is labeled the outer suburbs.”3 In his excellent history of suburban development in Canada, Creeping Conformity, historian Richard Harris argues that while “suburbanization began before 1900,” the streetcar encouraged an increase in land speculation and subdivision that marks 1900 as “the beginning of a new suburban era” in Canada. Following the Great Depression, the Dominion Housing Act (dhA) in 1935 and the National Housing Act (NhA) in 1938 standardized mortgaging as a means of financing homeownership. By 1958, Harris argues, “half of all homes in urban areas were built under the auspices of the NhA,” and “the peculiar character of modern-day suburbs had been established.”4 The “peculiar character” of Canadian suburbs is more challenging to define. At the most basic level, as Harris suggests, “suburbs are usually defined in physical terms, commonly as residential districts with low densities that are located at, or near, the urban fringe.”5 But as Harris also acknowledges, suburbs are often defined less by their physical, and more by their “social characteristics,” and the latter are notoriously difficult to pin down.6 For the purposes of this book, I have chosen works of fiction that demonstrate a degree of self-consciousness about their settings, some specifically employing “suburb” as a descriptor, others grappling in more general ways with the influence on their protagonists of social and cultural characteristics we tend to identify as “suburban.” The postwar period (1945–1969) is the subject of part one of Canadian Suburban, exploring the suburban imaginary in fiction by Margaret Laurence, Richard B. Wright, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy. Part two focuses on fiction set in the period that began in the 1970s and continues to the present, when the development of suburban communities and subdivisions follows a more corporate model of development. I consider a variety of English Canadian texts, generally set at the borders of large cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton, that employ a variety of strategies to give voice to the experiences and narratives of their protagonists.7 I argue that there

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is no one authentic definition of a Canadian suburban imaginary, only multiple and, at times, contradictory, notions and representations that participate in, while they also disrupt, the dominant cultural discourse of generic suburban homogeneity. To define a Canadian suburban imaginary is to wrestle with the Canadian settler imaginary. That each operates according to a colonial logic of appropriation and sprawl remains largely unacknowledged in contemporary Canadian society and culture, which is resistant to seeing itself as a suburban – indeed, as a colonial – nation. Suburban sprawl and settler colonialism collide in the continuing appropriation of rural and Indigenous land, not simply in Canada’s past, but in its present. Suburban studies scholars, such as Roger Kiel, are currently analyzing the ways the history of suburban development in Canada must be recognized in the contexts of colonization and “uneven spatialization.”8 In their compelling study of Mill Woods, a suburb of Edmonton, Shields, Gillespie, and Moran capture the discursive manoeuvres that elide the relationship between suburbanism and colonialism: “Both French and English dominant cultures in Canada have specified a strict binary divide between the ‘civilized’ and the frontier; the city and the country. These ‘founding’ Canadian cultures were uneasy about the vision of a settled and urbanized quasi-nature offered by suburban development.”9 Indigenous presence and land rights in Canadian suburban geographies are effaced by the cultural logics of dominant settler societies, haunting the contours of official history and spatial boundaries, in place-names, like “Mississauga,” and emerging in Indigenous title court cases and disputes over land development. One recent example of the latter is the Caledonia Land Dispute in 2006 between the Six Nations of the Grand River and the federal government.10 Suburban studies scholarship in Canada is now grappling with the recognition that suburbanization is historically a colonial process of dispossession, displacement, and appropriation. Tracing the history of the ethnically diverse suburb of Mill Woods to an uneasy relationship with the Papaschase peoples who were its original inhabitants, Shields et. al. argue that “an Indigenous presence is largely missing in the popular conception of the suburb as an immigrant community. The Papaschase presence is effectively erased, persisting only in a few street names and the occasional historical exhibit in the mall.”11 Indigenous presence is as effaced from English Canadian suburban fiction as from its official history. In literature published or set during the postwar era, the suburban dream is an impossibility for Indigenous characters  – it is as if they simply do not live there. But Métis-Cree

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author Jesse Thistle’s recent autobiography, From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way (2019) challenges this effacement from literature and geography. Thistle recalls arriving as a child in a pastoral-like neighbourhood near Toronto during the 1980s to live with his paternal grandparents. The tidy, natural setting inspires a sense of home in the young Jesse, challenging stereotypes about who belongs in the suburbs: The houses in Brampton were set in neat little rows, with perfect lawns and freshly paved roads. Everything looked so clean, orderly, and taken care of. Blue jays and robins sang to each other in the treetops; squirrels ran everywhere collecting things; and cats walked, surefooted, along fence tops. There was so much sunlight. It comforted me to see so many parents walking with their kids. I thought of my mom and dad – but in a good way, when we were happy and together. This new place was so beautiful. (47–8) In fiction by White settler authors, in contrast, Indigeneity operates as little more than a signifier of a distant prehistory, functioning in a White settler symbolic economy as that which is to be feared or desired. As Terry Goldie observes, “the semiotic field of the indigene is constantly both historical and ahistorical. It is historical because it always holds within it a sense of the indigene as an historical value, as part of the development of the country. All indigene images contain at least a residue of a pre-white past.”12 This logic rarely confronts the  literary White suburban settler of the postwar era. When it does, the complex process of suburbia’s attempts to indigenize its history results in an ineffable parody of the national strategy to claim Indigeneity as part of the development of the country. As a child, Barbara Gowdy’s Louise in The Romantic (2003) learns “how to be an Indian,” searching for artifacts of Indigenous prehistory in the ravines of Don Mills at “Camp Wanawingo” (8). Only in Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers (1969) does a suburban protagonist encounter a living member of an Indigenous community: yet Valentine Tonnerre, member of the tragic Métis family of Laurence’s Manawaka cycle of novels, functions as a cautionary tale against the perils of the urban space for women. When Stacey encounters her, she is living in downtown Vancouver, subsisting as a sex worker. Her body testifies to a life ravaged by trauma and drug abuse (236–7). There is no place for the sexualized “Indigenous Maiden” in the domesticated suburbs.

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Indigenous presence continues to be an impossibility in  suburban fiction of the later period as well. It is not until Catherine Hernandez’s 2017 novel Scarborough that a fully fleshed-out Mi'kmaq family is included among the members of a suburban community, but by this time, Scarborough is no longer the White settler enclave of the postwar period. Despite the multiculturalism of the community, the Beaudoin family must struggle against systemic racism and bureaucracy, institutions that constantly seek to remind them that the dream of suburban prosperity is not for them. For Noah Richler, Canadian suburbs represent the quintessence of Canada as a “heterotopia” or placeless place, but one with a very specific literary and colonial history: “the new settlement of Don Mills was utopos, but it was, first of all, Nowhere. It sat in the Canadian bush garden as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towns of Upper and Lower Canada had done before it.”13 Richler inserts Canada’s first modern-day suburb, Don Mills, near Toronto, into the landscape of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden, infusing it with all the requisite properties of the “garrison mentality” that persists in our national foundational mythology. But of course, Frye himself was the first to liken the suburb to the garrison in his “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” when he characterized “the impact of Montreal on Westmount” as “a psychological one.”14 The suburbs have existed as complex Canadian literary landscapes for quite some time, if only we go looking for them. Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954) presents a fatalistic snapshot of the ruinous changes threatened by sprawl upon British Columbia’s virginal, natural landscapes: “The city of Vancouver is crawling on. Bulldozers are levelling the small trees and laying bare a pale and stony soil. The landscape is being despoiled, as it must, on behalf of groups of small houses, a golf course, schools, a cemetery, all the amenities of living, learning, playing and dying.”15 Such descriptions evoke what geographers Richard Harris and Ute Lehrer identify as the “transitional quality” of the suburban as a space between “city and country, the urban and the rural. By ‘urban’ we refer to territory that is fully built up at relatively high densities; ‘rural’ consists of a variable mix of agriculture, wasteland, and wilderness.”16 Curiously, this quality of transitionality often has the effect of flattening suburban prehistory. Just as Wilson paints a landscape “despoiled” by sprawl, Harris’s and Lehrer’s “variable mix” conflates agriculture with “wasteland and wilderness,” effacing not only the farming communities that once made productive use of much of the land appropriated for subdivisions, but also the Indigenous peoples who were its original

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inhabitants. Here we confront the suburb as a reproduction of the Terra Nullius, or “nobody’s land,” doctrine. Anna Johnston’s and Alan Lawson’s description of the “discursive treatment” of land as Terra Nullius in the settler imaginary can be equally applied to its function in the suburban imaginary: “Vast and empty lands, insistently recorded  in both texts and visual images, called out, obviously, to the European imagination to be filled, and they were filled by, successively, people, crops, and herds, but also by the stories and histories that, like the economically-productive crops, legitimated the settlement.”17 As Harris and Lehrer later acknowledge, “land taking, original accumulation, and accumulation by dispossession are front and centre in the suburban land question.”18 In Barbara Gowdy’s novel, Falling Angels (1989), the fictional representation of a sprawling Toronto suburb much like Gowdy’s native Don Mills is a physical and psychical labyrinth created by the curling streets of identical houses that cause her characters to become both literally and figuratively lost. The labyrinth is a functional trope for conveying the general spirit of the representation of the suburbs in Canadian literature. It can be a space where people get lost, either willingly, or as a result of a general lack of direction. As Québécois writer Jacques Ferron’s narrator explains in The Cart (1981), “the suburbs go all around the city … which means they’ve got all four cardinal points for confusing the compass if anyone’s after you. They’re everywhere and nowhere.”19 For the characters of twentieth-century Canadian fiction set in the suburbs, the consequences of getting lost in the suburban labyrinth range from grotesquely humorous, as in the works of Barbara Gowdy and Richard B. Wright, to menacingly horrific, as in Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers or Calgary author Suzette Mayr’s novel, Venous Hum. In the 1990s, characters tend to become increasingly self-conscious about the banality of their suburban existences, a metaphysical state that is captured and given cultural parlance by Douglas Coupland’s novels. Writers such as Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Lesley Ann Cowan, Catherine Hernandez, Elyse Friedman, Ian Williams, and M.G. Vassanji also challenge the invisibility of racialized and working-class bodies in stereotypically White, middle-class suburbs. For analyses of suburban culture and society more generally, I have had to rely on texts that, while relevant, focus primarily on the United States and Britain.20 Early commentators on the cultural effects of the suburban lifestyle articulate a largely negative view, similar to that expressed by Mumford and Young in the sixties. More recently, suburban studies has become a recognized field of inquiry in urban,

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cultural, and literary scholarship, and there are a number of notable scholars who have contested certain notions that were once de rigueur: for example, the idea that suburbs are entirely homogeneous or racially exclusive.21 A trend seems to be emerging toward recognizing that suburban representations and narratives are indeed as subject to multiplicity, interpretation, and ambiguity as other social spaces.22 For Roger Silverstone, for example, suburbia is “a built environment, a social space and an ongoing discourse.”23 It is also “a state of mind” with ambiguity functioning as a key quality of the suburban imaginary.24 This notion inspires my own reading of the suburbs in contemporary English Canadian fiction as spaces that exist inside our heads as ideals, or as that which we continue to hope we are not; but they are also very real places that may or may not reflect the ideal inside our heads, and from which, nevertheless, we make ourselves, no matter how far from “great” the “prefabricated narratives” of that space may be.25 As historical studies of Canadian suburbs by Richard Harris, Humphrey Carver, John Sewell, and Veronica Strong-Boag dispel certain myths about suburban development and culture, they also point out significant differences between the United States and Canada. Richard Harris and Peter J. Larkham refer to the idea that North American suburbs are “middle-class residential enclave[s]” as a myth.26 Yet as Harris also argues in Creeping Conformity (2004), this myth does not mean that homogeneity isn’t also a feature of the Canadian suburb. As he explains, “the transformation of Canada into a suburban nation eventually led to a suppression of diversity  … By 1960 people spoke freely of ‘the Canadian suburb.’ Suburbs were being created in standard ways, and those who bought into them lived a fundamentally similar way of life.”27 As far as issues of racial and economic diversity go, historians and geographers tend to argue that the difference between Canada and the United States has to do with the extent of exclusionary practices. As Harris and Larkham argue, in American suburbs, “the socially-significant contrast between city and suburb became their racial composition.”28 Jane Jacobs argues that Metropolitan Toronto has escaped some of the problems that have plagued cities in the US because problems of “racial prejudices and discriminations … were not exacerbated and intensified by creation of racial ghettos.”29 For people living within these communities in Canada, however, the perception may be quite different. Racial diversity does not necessarily mean that racism is less problematic, or even that racialized neighbourhoods do not exist outside the centre. Racialized communities outside Toronto’s core, such as Rouge Park or Jane and Finch, are frequently demonized

Introduction: Neither Here nor There

11

by mainstream media. Anecdotally, I recall hearing a woman explain to a friend that she and her family were planning a move to Georgetown, a municipality west of Toronto that has seen increasing suburbanization, because its lack of adequate public transit meant there would be fewer “ethnic” people. Yet cultural and racial diversity was very much a part of my own experience growing up in Mississauga, a suburban city named for the Anishinaabe peoples who were the original inhabitants of the area. Many suburban communities across Canada have become home to particular racialized communities, and this is reflected most in the literature of Toronto’s suburbs. In Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement (2000) and David Bezmozgis’s short story, “Immigrant City” (2019), the Dixon area surrounding the Toronto Airport is home to a community of Somali immigrants, while the apartment buildings on Rosecliffe Park Drive in Don Mills are the setting of M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1991). Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For (2005), offers a poignant depiction of a Vietnamese family’s need to fill their large suburban home in Richmond Hill with consumer goods that give them little pleasure, in a desperate attempt to feel like they have settled into their lives in Canada. Certainly, Rohinton Mistry’s novels – set in India, but written from within his ordinary suburban Brampton home  – have fascinated literary scholars, partly because of the context of their creation.30 Powerfully resonant novels such as David Chariandy’s Brother (2017), Carianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You (2018), and Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough (2018) ensure that Toronto’s east end will never be seen as just another bedroom community, but as a vibrant place made rich by the stories of the people who live there. This includes Mi'kmaq family the Beaudoins, members of which play a vital role as storytellers among Scarborough’s ensemble group of narrators, ensuring that the diverse stories of Indigenous peoples are included – not only in the distant histories and origin stories of Canada’s suburban and urban communities – but in the present as well. Class differences, on the other hand, can be difficult to discern in the Canadian suburban imaginary. While we may not “define suburbs in terms of class” as Harris argues, he also notes that “Home ownership … provides an incentive for social segregation.”31 An essential difference between Canadian and American suburbs would seem to be the existence of high-density and rental and public housing, as well as a variety of housing forms, on the outskirts of large Canadian urban centres.32 This has led to greater class diversity in Canadian suburbs, although this diversity is likely within a still predominantly middle-class population.

12

Canadian Suburban

Larry McCann argues that until the 1950s “the principal benefactors of the newly-emerging culture as it applied to suburban development were the middle and upper classes … Only they were able to afford the rising entry fee to a suburban world.”33 Scholarship within Canadian suburban studies challenges this maxim, however. In his recent work on suburban Toronto, Harris contends that “it is city folk who exhibit the strongest preference for a particular built environment and lifestyle; suburbanites buy what they can afford.”34 Canadian suburban literature reflects the levels of variety within the middle class and within housing types. Margaret Atwood’s, Douglas Coupland’s, Barbara Gowdy’s, and Elyse Friedman’s characters are notable examples of stereotypically middle-class families occupying single-family homes. Yet Lesley Ann Cowan’s depiction of a young woman’s life in an apartment building on The Donway in suburban Toronto provides a compelling contrast of the differences in lifestyle for working-class families; Snow and her grandmother struggle to remain enfranchised within their place of residence, despite their inability to participate in the consumerism that is a dominant feature of that culture. Gerald Lynch’s short-story cycle, Troutstream (1995), is in fact organized according to the varieties of class and housing types in his fictional suburb. Since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique came to dominate our understanding of North American women’s experiences of suburbia, historians have been scrutinizing the relationship between the landscape, women’s lives, and gender. Veronica Strong-Boag argues that postwar Canadian suburbs may have “varied in many particulars,” but all “shared a commitment to the gendered division of labour” in which “responsibility for child care and housing maintenance” kept women contained within their neighbourhoods.35 Strong-Boag notes the paucity of public spaces in the design of these communities, concluding that “if landscape were any guide, meeting and play were not part of the female mandate.”36 Instead, women were directed to turn their energy to “decoration and design” as a means of bringing “uniqueness to uniformity” in their cookie-cutter houses.37 The building of malls and strip plazas during this period determined the kinds of community of which women would be a part. “Once visitors got there,” StrongBoag contends, “new plazas, lacking free public space and cultural amenities, offered them little beyond a community based on a common commitment to purchase.”38 An entire chapter in The Torontonians is dedicated to Karen’s quest to find a parking space at Loblaw’s, where the suburban housewives of Rowanwood meet to exchange gossip and purchase frozen meat pies.

Introduction: Neither Here nor There

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Yet Strong-Boag and Robyn Dowling also challenge the stridency with which critics like Friedan have attacked the suburbs as oppressively gendered landscapes. Strong-Boag maintains that the women who represent their suburban experiences as successful “rejected any portrait of themselves as conformists.”39 Dowling takes this further by arguing against the representation of suburban femininity in Canada as homogeneous: “Mothering practices, religious affiliation, family connections, choice of childcare and residential history all differentiate constructions of suburban femininity.”40 Despite changes in the latter half of the twentieth century, suburban house design continues to reaffirm “gendered divisions of labour.”41 Suburban space has been recognized as particularly menacing for women since Friedan situated the “problem with no name” squarely in the suburban homes of America. This is made evident in postwar English Canadian fiction concerned with the female experience of the built environment, where the recurring figure of the agoraphobic, imprisoned in her home and reified in her role as housewife, comes to function as a metaphor for the numbing, stultifying effects of this lifestyle for women. Models of ideal suburban neighbourhoods can be found in many literary representations, particularly those set in the fifties and sixties, yet the gendered division of their homes is a recurring motif. Just as Karen quietly weeps in her kitchen while she plays with her grey cube of suicide in The Torontonians, Gowdy’s mothers try to escape the kitchen, and the fathers are almost always to be found in the den, the garage, or finishing the basement. Feminist theorists of space have helped inspire me to read Canadian literary representations of suburbia as ambiguous spaces where the potential for social struggle is unquestionably fraught with danger. Doreen Massey reminds me that “the spatial organization of society … is integral to the production of the social, and not merely its result.”42 Massey calls attention to the binarized system in Western thought that has categorized time and space in relation to gender. Her strategy for challenging gendered dualisms involves “rethinking the concepts of space and place” in terms of relations rather than boundaries.43 This also rings authentically in Canadian suburban fiction, in which characters fluidly cross borders, venturing into the city for respite or escape, for instance. As Robyn Dowling insists, “suburban femininity is multiple  … rather than singular” and “just as identity is multiple, so too is place.”44 The meanings of suburban subjectivities and spaces are in constant flux. Massey argues that our view of the spatial must be as “an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification.”45

14

Canadian Suburban

Literary heroines of Canadian suburban landscapes are frequently represented in their attempts to negotiate the complex relationship between spatial concerns and gender. In Gowdy’s and Atwood’s novels, female protagonists come of age during the height of the suburban experiment in the fifties and sixties, when gender ideology was still very much associated with the notion of separate spheres for men and women. For the female protagonists of novels set in the late twentieth century, spatiality and gender are just as multifaceted, especially for the children of “broken” marriages or families in which the ideal nuclear family does not function successfully. Other novels of the suburbs, namely Richard B. Wright’s The Weekend Man, Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream, and Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing (2004) demonstrate that masculinity and suburban spatio-cultural concerns are equally complicated. In the figures of the businessman, the bureaucrat, and the developer, these novels explore parallels between the construction of suburban masculinity and suburban space and culture. Significantly, one of the North American ideals many critics take issue with is the belief that the suburbs are good for families and children. On the contrary, fictional suburbs breed adolescent discontent, providing little stimulation for young people beyond what the local mall can offer, and James Howard Kunstler blames suburbanization for children’s loss of “personal sovereignty.”46 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck are urban planners who write passionately of the “cul-de-sac” kid who “lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment.”47 Kent Garecke takes this argument even further, suggesting that the “simplistic environment of suburbia” itself “fosters a state of permanent adolescence.”48 Mumford said much the same thing in 1961, observing that “As leisure generally increased, play became the serious business of life” and seeing in this correlation between childhood and the suburban lifestyle a kind of protracted adolescence.49 As a member of “Generation X” who came of age in a Canadian suburb, I grew up believing the lyrics to Rush’s song “Subdivisions” (1982) were an accurate reflection of my own disaffection. As Geddy Lee so aptly put it for us, “the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.” Adolescence is so pervasive in Canadian suburban fiction that it comes to function as a trope suggestive of the state of  suburbia more generally. On the one hand, the relationship between suburbia and adolescence is one of conflict. In their book Suburban Nation, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck warn that “the sterility of the suburbs  – their very unreality  – could make the

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leap to fantasy more possible” and link this to a potential for neurosis among the youth who grow up there.50 Certainly the in-between of reality and fantasy troubles many adolescent protagonists in Canadian suburban fiction, most notably Louise in Gowdy’s The Romantic and the unnamed narrator of Judy MacDonald’s Jane, whose romanticism is implicated in her complicity with a murderous boyfriend in a narrative disturbingly similar to the infamous Paul Bernardo case. Yet in other novels in which protagonists come of age in suburban neighbourhoods, particularly those of Margaret Atwood, negotiating the in-between of reality and fantasy inspires the developing artist to find and articulate her artistic vision. My understanding of Canadian suburban space is informed by a spatial turn within cultural theory. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974) is primarily valuable for its insistence that we make note of the relationship between systemic power and how spaces are built, used, and represented. His work reminds me that the suburbs are more than a web of subdivisions and culs-de-sac plopped willynilly by developers on formerly rural land but are in fact part of a complex network of interactions: temporal, cultural, social, economic, and philosophical.51 Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the “simulacra” or hyperreal is also useful in this context, for suburban landscapes are frequently characterized as simulations of a simulation, making the impossibility of the real inescapable. “Illusion is no longer possible,” Baudrillard cryptically states, “because the real is no longer possible.”52 Others associated with the spatial turn within cultural theory influence my reading of Canadian suburbs as spaces in which creative resistance to the hegemonizing impulse is made possible by their very ambivalence and ambiguity. Most notably, Edward Soja’s notion of “thirdspace” is a concept that challenges binary constructions of the real. He defines “thirdspace” as a “purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings.”53 His discussion of Lefebvre is a reminder of the importance of power relations in spatial analyses. Soja insists that “social reality is not just coincidentally spatial. There is no unspatialized social reality.”54 There are also important home-grown Canadian theorists whose work has had a significant impact on spatial studies  – most notably Marshall McLuhan. Richard Cavell’s McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (2002), convincingly argues that McLuhan continues to be relevant, not simply as a theorist of media and communications, but as one who places these within the context of space. Cavell’s revitalization

16

Canadian Suburban

of McLuhan as a spatial theorist is essential to any Canadian discussion of space and place, for it enables recognition of a national tradition of interrogating the importance of such concepts both in art and theory. Like Cavell, I consider McLuhan’s Canadianness in relation to his place within a postmodern turning-away from temporality to spatiality. The fiction that is the subject of this book has been as profoundly influenced by the Canadian spatializing sensibility as the likes of McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Harold Innis, or Earle Birney, all of whom Cavell classifies as “thinkers about space.”55 Informing my understanding of suburban spaces as ambiguous or marginal are the concepts of liminality and communitas. “Liminality” is a term used in cultural anthropology that was first coined by Arnold Van Gennep and later developed by Victor Turner to describe the  middle phase of tripartite rites of passage. Turner’s description of  the liminal has compelling applicability to thinking of suburban space, both as a social construction and in cultural representations. “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous,” his work suggests, “since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.56 My understanding of Canadian suburbs as liminal is strategic. Evident in Turner’s description is a conceptualization of a ritualized, psychic state as culturally and spatially experienced; liminars are “neither here nor there” when their social status is indeterminate. In contrast to those theorists who wish to salvage suburbia from ill repute by celebrating it as a liminal space, I prefer to think of the Canadian suburban imaginary functioning in postwar English Canadian fiction as an “expression of liminality”57 that seeks to articulate models of human interrelatedness in amorphous suburban space that we might call “communitas.” Communitas emerges during the liminal period of the ritual process, according to Turner.58 He opposes “the spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas” to “the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure.”59 For Edith Turner, likewise, “communitas is  … a gift from liminality, the state of being betwixt and between.”60 Yet communitas “can only be grasped in some relation to structure,”61 and this book moves toward an analysis of a trio of recent novels set in Scarborough in which the spirit of communitas emerges where social structure fails those individuals and bodies made

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invisible by, and to, previous manifestations of the suburban imaginary in Canadian culture. What is most appealing to me about the spatial turn in cultural theory goes beyond the insistence that we scrutinize spatiality. Despite the varying degrees of pessimism inherent in theoretical critiques of our spatialized social realities, theorists are open to the possibility that lived social spaces might also function as what Linda Hutcheon calls the “ex-centric” and Soja, “counterspaces,” or “spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning.”62 There is no question that suburbia’s classification as “subordinate, peripheral or marginal” is debatable; while its physical positioning between city and country/wilderness renders it profoundly undecidable, the territorializing impulses of neoliberalism and suburban consumer culture constantly threaten the potential for resistant subjectivities to emerge from it. In his historical study of suburban development in Canada, Creeping Conformity, Richard Harris wryly laments that “chains such as Tim Hortons and Indigo, which were weaned and grew strong in the suburbs, have returned to conquer the city.”63 In spite of the potential for a reterritorialization of its “other” spaces – country, city, wilderness – the tentativeness and ambiguity of suburban space can be liberating. Not surprisingly, contact with the wilderness is one of the most popular expressions of liminality sought by Canadian literary suburbanites, and they find it in their dreams, in the ravines of Toronto, or just beyond the front door of their suburban Vancouver homes. Suburbia is the domain par excellence of simulacra. And as Baudrillard observes, “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’ ”64 This undecidability is itself radical. For Soja, the ambivalent and paradoxical can be “the space of all inclusive simultaneities, perils as well as possibilities: the space of radical openness, the space of social struggle.”65 This tension between peril and possibility is remarkable in every suburban text that is represented in this book. Like the city, the wilderness, and the small town, suburban space is a product of our society and culture, inevitably changing what space means in relation to assumptions about national and cultural identity. As a space that is frequently characterized as ambiguous and amorphous, the suburbs may work well as a spatial metaphor for a postmodern, postmillennial Canadian sensibility that is as vague and contradictory as the dream of suburbia itself.

PART ONE Postwar Inner Suburbs to 1970

1

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man

Although historians generally locate the birth of the modern Canadian suburb in the postwar baby-boom decades of the 1940s and ’50s, my understanding of the Canadian suburban imaginary is filtered through the lens of my Mississauga childhood in the 1970s. Like other members of Generation X, I remember lunch hours spent in front of the television when the end of a Flintstones episode signalled the time to return to school. Against the admonition of my parents, I furtively explored the ravine spaces of the Credit Valley with other young people from my neighbourhood. The Mississauga Train Derailment of 1979 encapsulates so much about Canadian suburban spacetime for me: my memories of the eerie desertion of suburban streets and playgrounds while residents evacuated to the safety of other suburban communities will always represent my watershed moment, akin to the Cuban Missile crisis for earlier generations, if on a smaller, local scale. The derailment failed to materialize into the type of blockbuster disaster for which my consumption of 1970s catastrophe films had prepared me. But it also echoes as an unprecedented moment of a shared sense of community and purpose that transcended the sprawling, deserted streets. Mississauga became a place on the national map, no longer simply an appendix of Toronto. This chapter explores two novels that are significant for their sustained treatment and representation of Canadian suburban cultures and landscapes, both published during a period of transition from the sixties to the seventies, an era of “messy weirdness,” as cultural theorist Andrew Burke argues, that “captures the contradictions and complexities of contemporary Canadian life.”1 Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister, and Canadian nationalist sentiment was at its peak following the

22

Canadian Suburban

1967 Centennial celebrations and the hosting of Expo ’67 in Montreal.2 Buoyed by the patriotism of everyday Canadians and supported by a growing uneasiness about Americanization, a “Canadianization movement”3 helped define “a new nationalist Canadian identity,” one based on an indigenized Canadian culture, particularly among middle-class citizens.4 Certainly, the suburbs would have been considered among those products of American cultural imperialism that did not fit with those “national myths, symbols, figures, events, references, and other signifiers” of “all-things-Canuck” with which Canadian cultural workers and academics identified the new nationalism.5 Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers (1969) and Richard B. Wright’s The Weekend Man (1970) stand out for their contrasting depictions of their protagonists’ gendered experiences of the suburban landscape, yet they share remarkably similar concerns about modern life as they evoke the time and space of their respective communities. Their protagonists may struggle with the homogeneity of the suburbs, but they do so in uniquely Canadian ways. For Stacey MacAindra and Wes Wakeham, the threat of crisis and catastrophe is an ever-present feature of their engagement with the technologies of mass communication, and the novels each demonstrate the conceivable influence of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s thought on their experimentations with narrative and on their treatments of time, space, and media. While The Fire-Dwellers offers the fragmented perspective of a housewife from the confines of her detached home in suburban Vancouver, The Weekend Man is a contemplation on the effects of suburbanization from the apartment-tower perspective of a salesman and suburban Everyman in a fictional community called Union Place, near Toronto. Following Burke, I understand “the 1970s” in Canada in relation to Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” as “a means to understand period and history by way of a moment’s affective and sensorial integrity.”6 I do not suggest that either Laurence or Wright were directly influenced by McLuhan or the Canadianization movement (although Laurence certainly did express publicly her belief that what “is special about Canadian literature is that it is ours”).7 Instead, I regard these two suburban novels as resonant with a “structure of feeling” in the 1970s that was both nationalistic and McLuhanesque.

Gender and the Suburban Imaginary circa 1970 In his 1969 review of Laurence’s novel, The Fire-Dwellers, author Barry Callaghan described Stacey MacAindra, as “a dumb, starved, and boring lady of neither the night nor the day but of limbo.”8 His words reveal

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man

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intriguing biases prevalent at the time of the novel’s publication about appropriate or interesting subject matter for fiction, taking for granted that the uneventful lives of suburban housewives in twentieth-century Canada were neither compelling nor relevant for readers seeking in literature a reflection of “universal” themes or archetypes. Indeed, Callaghan faults Laurence for contributing to the “lost dimension” of “the world of fiction” by creating a character that “is not in contact or conflict with certain values.”9 What becomes evident, however, is that the values Callaghan seeks are not “universal” qualities; inherent in his criticism is a conviction that literature should reflect themes associated with masculinity, here conflated with the city, while femininity was associated with the suburbs in the binary imagination of the period. As environmental psychologist Susan Seagert observed in 1980, “urban life and men tend to be thought of as more aggressive, assertive, definers of important world events, intellectual, powerful, active, and sometimes, dangerous. Women and suburbs share domesticity, repose, closeness to nature, lack of seriousness, mindlessness, and safety.”10 Stacey is irrelevant, not simply because she is female but because she is insistently “flesh and bones,” the very embodiment of the quotidian life of a suburban housewife in late 1960s Vancouver.11 In his dismissal of Stacey, Callaghan conflates time with space when he characterizes her as a lady of “neither the night nor the day but of limbo.” It is as if the spatial metaphor (limbo) is somehow less valuable than the temporal ones (night/day), a gendering of the categories feminist geographer Doreen Massey associates with Western culture that aligns time with masculinity and historical significance, and space with femininity and “absence or lack.”12 Callaghan’s metaphor also suggests a discomfort with liminal or transitional states; he faults Laurence for allowing her character to inhabit a space between two extremes and is critical of Stacey’s unwillingness or inability to choose a side in time with which to align herself. Her habitation of limbo, her willingness to inhabit space rather than a particular time, suggests a refusal to participate in those temporal values coded as masculine, hence she is “dumb, starved, and boring.” Limbo is a spatial as well as a temporal metaphor, and Callaghan’s review also reveals a discomfort with suburbia as an appropriate literary setting, perhaps because it is an ambiguous space so rooted in the quotidian that “contact” with those “certain” universal values Callaghan expects in literature is, he assumes, impossible. This may explain why Laurence’s most experimental novel  – and one of Canada’s first sustained fictional representations of the suburban landscape – has received relatively little critical attention compared to her

24

Canadian Suburban

other novels.13 Canadians have been slow to recognize the suburban landscape as a meaningful setting for our stories, especially those about the presumably mundane lives of girls and women. Seven years after the publication of The Fire-Dwellers, the narrator of Carol Shields’ Small Ceremonies (1976) would blame the paucity of storytelling during her childhood in Scarborough for her “girlhood hunger for an expanded existence” and for her adult need to poach the stories of others.14 While The Torontonians and The Fire-Dwellers explore and critique the psychogeography of suburbia in the domestic lives of women during the sixties and seventies, The Weekend Man is the first to offer a sustained exploration of the effects on male subjectivity when men are removed from the space of the city. In contrast to Laurence’s novel, early criticism of The Weekend Man cast its protagonist as a combination of “philosopher and ordinary guy” and as “a contemporary Everyman,” noting the influence of American urban novelists on his characterization.15 His depiction offers readers of the seventies a cautionary tale against a perceived crisis of masculinity, a state of impotence initiated by the suburbanization of men. Wright’s “weekend man” is a passive, complacent narrator who seems incapable of developing beyond adolescence, despite having taken on the responsibilities of marriage and family in his twenties. Although he enjoys many of the privileges of a White, middle-class suburban male, Wes meanders from job to job, securing employment based on his ability to curry favour from more powerful male connections. Like many of the White men with whom he interacts, Wes maintains an illusory sense of power and control by objectifying the bodies of others; he and the men from his office bond over their consumption of female bodies and their scrutiny of the bodies of racialized others. At a party, for example, Wes and another man discuss the size of black men’s genitalia (136). The moment highlights the xenophobia of the suburbs in the seventies, as well as the corporate sexual and racial politics of these “weekend men.” His voyeurism and musings on suburban life are frequently from the bird’s-eye view his position on the eighteenth floor of his apartment building affords him. Recently separated from his wife and child, Wes has become an outsider to the nuclear family unit, allowing him to comment on their rituals passively and from a distance. Referring to himself as a “Sunday-morning birdwatcher,” he derives an illusory experience of omniscient power as he surveys – then narrates – the daily lives of his fellow suburbanites shopping at the Union Place Shopping Plaza or driving along “The Parkway” (27).

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man

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Wes’s ennui, his impotence and passivity, echo a notion of masculine suburban subjectivity that was ambient during the postwar period in North America generally. As Robert Beuka argues in SuburbiaNation, American fiction and film of this period “situate the crisis of masculinity in the suburban sphere,” reinforcing the anxieties of postwar “social critics” like William H. Whyte and Lewis Mumford who “decried the emasculating potential of a landscape whose uniformity deemphasized masculine agency and ambition.”16 Wes seems the quintessence of Whyte’s “organization man,” demonstrating the lingering influence of the 1956 book not only on the ethos of America, but on the Canadian cultural imagination as well. In The Organization Man, Whyte situated the crisis in the movement of men to the suburbs, arguing that the “great package suburbs that have sprung up outside our cities since the  war” reflected “the values of the organization man  – and of the next generation to come.”17 Wright’s fictional community also resonates with notions of suburban isolation and a concomitant vulnerability to absolutism warned against by historian Lewis Mumford, who articulated this most forcefully in The City in History (1961), declaring that “suburbia has become the favoured home of a new kind of absolutism: invisible but all-powerful.”18 Mumford assertively cites as the reason for the easy manipulation of suburbanites the alienating design of their communities, which breeds a passive dependence on technological means to bridge geographical distances between individuals: “With the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” Mumford warned. “With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels.”19 Mumford anticipates a societal shift in which “each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit.”20 Wright’s Union Place does not exhibit the same degree of uniformity Beuka holds responsible for the emasculation of the American suburban male in fiction, however, suggesting there is something else about it that robs Wes of his agency and ambition. Union Place contests the more limited American model of suburbia as a wholly residential space on the margins of the cultural and economic centre of the city. Indeed, John Sewell points to a clear difference between Canadian and American suburbs in his history of Don Mills, a Toronto community that was the

26

Canadian Suburban

model of mid-century Canadian suburbia. Influenced by Humphrey Carver’s ideas that the suburbs should not be “ghettos of middle class blandness,” chief planner Macklin Hancock designed Don Mills to be “a self-sufficient community” that included “places for people to work.”21 Likewise, Wright’s suburb is a diverse assemblage of residential and commercial architectural structures, a fairly self-sufficient community that is “a part” of the larger metropolitan Toronto area, although it has “wandered east” away from the city, seemingly because it does not need it (4). If Canadian suburban design in the postwar period was less characterized by uniformity than that of US neighbourhoods, Wright’s novel suggests that sprawl and its effects on human communication and consciousness are the primary culprits responsible for a crisis of masculinity in the 1970s. In the Canadian context, American expressions of concern for masculine suburban subjectivity coalesced in the work of Marshall McLuhan and his collaborators. In his co-edited and co-authored interdisciplinary body of publications, the focus of American cultural critics on “packaged suburbia” and the restlessness of the North American male is joined with McLuhan’s unique brand of media and communication theories. In a piece in volume eight of the journal Explorations (1957), for example, McLuhan and his co-editor, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, interpret Whyte’s influential book as “a study of what happens when a society in which there is the most extreme application of print technology in history, suddenly swings off on the oral tack for the first time.”22 1972’s Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, co-authored by Barrington Nevitt, describes a “Crisis of Identity” for “private individual man,” implicating “Suburbia’s Blueprints for the Young” in its cynical depiction of “the paralyzed child” that the authors predict will be the next crippled “emperor of America.” When McLuhan and Nevitt describe the “narcolepsy or apathetic somnambulism,” of the “over-advantaged child of suburbia,” they could be talking about Wes Wakeham.23 Inspired by Richard Cavell’s reclamation of McLuhan as a spatial theorist, my understanding of McLuhan’s work highlights intersections between his philosophical concern with subjectivity and with space – geographical and medial – arguing that suburban sprawl is the perfect environment from which to examine the relationship between the individual and the technologies of communication that radically changed human subjectivity.

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man

27

Marshall McLuhan and The Suburbs as Media In McLuhan’s spatial imagination, as Cavell argues, it is not only “words and metaphors” that function as mass media, “but buildings and cities as well.”24 The Weekend Man and The Fire-Dwellers are each situated within a cultural context current during the 1970s in which the relationship between the individual and technology, media, time, and space was influenced by McLuhan’s thought, and this is reflected in their distinct representations of Canadian suburbia. Both novels implicate postwar suburban design and development in their protagonist’s frustrated desire for connection, and in their attempts to engage media as extensions of the human across geographical space. They also communicate a spatialized sensibility that could be described as McLuhanesque, and that signals a developing Canadian postmodern attitude towards space, wherein the suburb functions as a liminal “margin or border” Linda Hutcheon describes as “the postmodern space par excellence, the place where new possibilities exist.”25 In this section, I explore the representations of suburban dwellings and their locations in both novels, comparing Stacey MacAindra’s seemingly typical suburban single-family home to Wes Wakeham’s more unconventional suburban apartment. Both dwellings challenge stereotypical notions of suburban architecture, primarily through the ways by which their inhabitants engage with media, technology, and space that resonate with McLuhan’s work. Like Karen Whitney of The Torontonians and the postwar suburban housewife of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Stacey MacAindra’s subjectivity is closely tied to and enclosed by the house in which she frequently feels she is trapped, not only by its “four walls,” but by the mountains that “form the city’s walls and boundaries” and surround her street (63). The house on Bluejay Crescent is at the heart of The Fire-Dwellers, both formally and symbolically, functioning as a thirdspace that is liminal, relational, acoustic, and associated with air, the element of the imagination. Its physical placement is rather ambiguous; we only know for certain that it is somewhere just beyond the city limits and that Stacey must in fact drive through the city when she leaves Bluejay Crescent for the wilderness of British Columbia’s Sound. From the window of her home, Stacey can look at the city that is “both close and far away” (122). Yet beyond the city the mountains are also visible, symbols of British Columbia’s wilderness but also of its spatial and temporal ease in limbo: “In the distance, the mountains form

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Canadian Suburban

the city’s walls and boundaries, some of them snow mountains even now, as though this place belonged to two worlds, two simultaneous seasons” (63). Symbolically, the home is both a refuge from the menacing horrors of the city and a trap that inhibits Stacey’s physical mobility and prevents her from pursuing the romantic possibilities of the wilderness. As “limbo,” it is also a space whose fluid boundaries allow Stacey to cross both space and time in her memories and in her fantasies (272). The porosity and permeability of her four walls are made evident by technological forms of media – what Stacey calls the “Ever-open Eye” of the television set – but also by the persistence of the “mind’s eye,” Stacey’s imagination. Moreover, the suburbs are associated with the element of air, a metaphor feminist critic Luce Irigaray associates with the imagination and uses to “describe the difference between fixed architectural structure and fluid, ephemeral space,” and which she associates with “open conceptual possibilities.”26 Air is also the element of acoustic space, which, for McLuhan, “exists in the realm of sight as well as of hearing and tactility.”27 Finally, this metaphor works well, given the importance of the four elements in the symbolic economy of Laurence’s text. Each of the four elements tends to be loosely associated with a particular space: fire is most frequently and most obviously associated with the city and its apocalyptic potential, while water and earth are the elements of the wilderness and its promise of spiritual renewal. Any of the four can function at times as a threat or as life-affirming in the contexts of other spaces. But suburbia holds importance as an unsettling “third dimension,” or what urbanist Edward Soja refers to as a “thirdspace.” In contrast to Stacey’s more conventional suburban home, Wes lives in a high-rise apartment building called Union Terrace (as depicted on the 1977 Laurentian Library paperback edition. See figure 1.1), a structure that is unfamiliar in the stereotypical American suburban context but that exists in the environs of Toronto, as Wes explains, because of recent changes to “zoning by-laws” (5). Wes’s spatial positioning lends his description of Union Place the dislocating effect of an aerial photograph or map that forces us to see the territory in an unaccustomed way: “It’s much like the environs of any modern city” he explains; “flat farmland which has been paved over and seeded with trim brick bungalows, small factories and office buildings, service stations and shopping plazas, all of it since 1950. In the past few years they’ve changed the zoning by-laws and now at least 3 or 4 dozen high-rise apartment buildings have climbed to the sky” (4–5).

Fig. 1.1

Vera Jacyk, cover of The Weekend Man.

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Wes’s map suggests what it might be that robs him of his sense of agency: the disparate parts of the sprawling community can be seen in a glance, directing our attention to the configuration of natural and artificial structures, and foregrounding the landscape’s appeal to visuality. According to Beuka, representing suburbia as an “intensely visual landscape” is also a rhetorical strategy that highlights the interdependence of suburban design and the crisis of masculinity.28 As Beuka argues, “the postwar suburbs eliminated any visual evidence of difference between residents, thus positioning new suburbanites as interchangeable elements of a planned environment, rather than as individuals active in the shaping of their own space and identities.”29 In contrast, according to Cavell, “space was the medium of communication” for McLuhan, and it is often the way Wes attempts to experience this medium as a means of communication that makes him so compelling as a suburban philosopher and Everyman.30 He is keenly and ironically aware that as media, the buildings around him are the message, and the message here is both an affirmation and a slight contradiction of the suburban stereotypes Beuka associates with masculine subjectivity in American texts. While it might be less homogeneous than American suburbs, Union Place is a planned community whose primary aesthetic and sensory appeal is to visuality, with little regard for how its disparate elements function together or provide its inhabitants with opportunities for contributing to how it is shaped. Wes’s experience of emasculation has more to do with the effects of sprawl and the challenges the suburban design poses for interpersonal relations. He experiences life in Union Place as an encounter with invisible, diffuse forms of power that induce his complacent pursuit of diversion and a resignation to the numbness of daily life. Although his occupation as a salesman seems typical of the more cosmopolitan Everyman, the organization Wes represents, Winchester House, suffers the anxieties of being the “Canadian subsidiary” of a larger American publishing firm called Fairfax Press (4). Fairfax is the lesser sibling to a large American conglomerate, just as the suburbs are regarded as subordinate to the city. During the three or four days before Christmas that frame Wes’s story, Winchester House and Fairfax Press are sold to United Electronics Corporation (76). Although his official job is to sell textbooks to public-school educators, Wes experiences pressure to push sales of the company’s new “Tele-Visor Series 40 Projector,” signalling a profound shift from print to electronic forms of media. Such details add an interesting dimension to the text, situating Wes’s tale of suburban angst within a spatiotemporal setting that is

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marked by a period of cultural change in which electronic media are taking over the position of power once held by print. The change is met with resistance by many of the novel’s characters, in particular the generation of men who have enjoyed a certain degree of privilege as the vanguard  of print culture. Lamenting his struggles to teach “old-line grammar” to the television generation, one teacher observes, “it’s pointless and self-defeating to ignore the influence of these new media” (127). The technologies of “these new media” warrant a closer look, given their importance to both novels’ relationship to realism and to the genre’s narrative conventions, their representation of Canadian suburbs, the influence of McLuhan on the authors’ understanding of space, communication, and culture, and the compelling ways gender mediates their protagonists’ experiences with the forms of media and technology that impinge on them as subjects of the modern Canadian suburb.

Technologies of the Suburban Self As Wes watches the activities of his fellow suburbanites from the elevated position of his apartment, he is a model of absolute detachment, fostered by an illusion of distance achieved by his voyeuristic use of a telescope. Distance provides Wes with his ironic detachment and cynical perspective as a narrator, yet it also prevents him from engaging in meaningful relationships with the people around him. The closest they come is to “reconnoitre,” a term Wes uses to describes the high-rise dwellers’ practice of “stepping out onto our balconies” (233). As Wes explains, “At any hour of the day or night you will find us doing this. Some, like myself, even have telescopes” (233). The telescope is an ironic symbol in the text, representing the ability to see that which is far away, but also preventing contact between members of the community. It permits Wes the pleasure he experiences consuming the bodies of the flight attendants who share an apartment directly across from him, despite his uneasy feeling that he is invisible to them, “just another pleasant indefinite North American male face” (228). The telescope is one of several forms of technology that serve as metaphors of visuality and the ambivalent condition of the suburbanite’s sensory relationship to others and to his or her environment. As a technology of the suburban self, the telescope represents Wes’s need to recuperate a sense of agency that he no longer feels he has in his life. And in Wes’s attitude toward such technological apparati, we discern the influence of McLuhan. According to Cavell, technology for

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McLuhan was “part of that which is human” rather than ‘a force over which humans have no control.”31 Wes’s attitude toward the media that surround him demonstrates a similar understanding of technology as an extension of the human that has both negative and positive effects on his subjectivity. Although these tools most frequently fail to fulfill their promise of bridging emotional distances between people, Wes’s attitude reveals an implicit faith in their potential to help him overcome the suburban divide and the feelings of powerlessness it induces. The novel’s rather straightforward representation of Wes’s attitude likewise reveals its author’s faith in the conventions of realism. From his telescopic perspective on his apartment balcony, Wes’s mimicry of god-like omniscience permits him to be master of the narrative. As a technological form that enables suburban sprawl, the automobile is as vital as the television as an icon of suburban culture. In suburban novels, both devices frequently function as tropes of isolation. As Jane Holtz Kay argues, “the world through the windshield and the world through the television alike isolate us from our surroundings.”32 Or, in the words of Marshall McLuhan: “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”33 In Laurence’s text, the dangerous potential of the automobile is evinced by Stacey’s husband’s friend, Buckle, who has a penchant for playing chicken on the road – a practice that ultimately leads to his death. In The Weekend Man, Wes’s Dodge Dart is both protective and isolating. He describes his automobile as an object whose novelty is “beginning to wear thin,” causing him to “become quite gloomy” when he thinks about it” (11). The voice of the “Tom Thumb” traffic helicopter broadcasting over his car radio is a persistent reminder of the suburbanite’s reliance on the automobile. It conveys the artificiality of the relationship between Tom the traffic reporter and “Mr. Motorist,” who relies on the radio both for information and for companionship within the lonely space of his car (45). Significantly, the voice of the radio also draws our attention to the auditory as an experience of space that McLuhan offers as an alternative to our valorization of the visual. As Cavell argues, “visual space was only one kind of space” for McLuhan,34 and he theorized acoustic space as a more relational paradigm of spatial deployment, one in which, to quote McLuhan, there is “no centre and no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously.”35 The loneliness of the enclosed space of the automobile, and of the suburbanite’s privileging of looking, of the visual over other sensory experiences, becomes palpable to Wes when his Dart sits uncomfortably beside a man  – whom he dubs “The Moustache”  – in a Chrysler at

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an intersection. As Wes relates, “the Moustache and I find ourselves staring out at each other and, as so often happens in situations like this, we both look away briefly and then return again at the precise same moment to stare into each other’s eyes once more. Our heads are in perfect synchronization. It is embarrassing. One can look away and fiddle with the radio dial or check the fuel gauge, but there is an irresistible urge to look back” (46). In spite of the layers of metal and road that hinder communication between commuters, this encounter exposes the illusion of privacy and distance the automobile represents. At this moment, Wes experiences an urge to cross the barrier that prevents intimacy in order to tell the man that his staring is really an expression of his desire to connect and to empathize with another: “all I am doing is searching his face for something to go on; some clue that will help me understand how he does all this without blowing his brains out some Monday morning about ten minutes past seven” (47). In this rare moment of inter-automotive interaction, Wes experiences the complexity of human empathy and aggression, just as he recognizes that the technologies of suburbia are extensions of the human that cannot separate people from each other. If the car is the enabler of sprawl, it is also required for getting away from it. Stacey appropriates her husband’s automobile – and the experience of freedom and mobility it represents – one night when she escapes from the responsibilities of domestic life to the wilderness spaces of British Columbia. Her pilgrimage to “the Sound” mimics the freedom of movement she associates with her husband as she drives through the city “along streets now inhabited only by the eternal flames of the neon forest fires” to the wilderness highways “and at last away from habitation, where the road clings to the mountain and the evergreens rise tall and gaunt, and the saltwater laps blackly on the narrow shore, and the stars can be seen, away from human lights” (148). The very act of being alone in her husband’s “Chev” driving swiftly through the city and the mountains is vital to Stacey’s sense of autonomy and agency. Speed and motion supply her with a rare moment of independence from familial demands, symbolized by the “habitation[s]” and “human lights” she leaves behind. Natural spaces offer Stacey escape from her “four walls” and the limiting role she plays within them, but also the opportunity for healing and redemption. At the Sound, Stacey indulges in a fantasy of self-sufficiency that mimics the kind of life she associates with men. She imagines herself as a teacher, living by a lake in “Cariboo country” where “everything mysterious” is “waiting to be discovered” (154, 155).

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Like Wright’s, Laurence’s conception of space demonstrates the influence of McLuhan’s theories concerning the interrelatedness of technologies, forms of mass media, and conceptualizations of space and subjectivity. Explaining his mantra, “the medium is the message,” McLuhan reminds us that “the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”36 Stacey’s recognition that all forms of technology are extensions of the human is partially responsible for her agency – it is her ability to engage critically with the media that come into her home that enables her to resist being immobilized by fear. At first, she can only respond by shutting off the radio or television when their messages trouble her: “I can’t listen. It’s too much too much too much. What can you do, anyhow? Nothing. Just agonize” (83). At times, the images she views cause her to question the line between what is real and unreal, and to wonder if her children are able to tell the difference: The program ends, and then the News. This time the bodies that fall stay fallen. Flicker-flicker-flicker. From one dimension to another. Stacey does not know whether Ian and Duncan, when they look, know the difference. –Everything is happening on TV. Everything is equally unreal. Except that it isn’t. Do the kids know? How to tell them? I can’t. Maybe they know more about it than I do. Or maybe they know nothing. I can’t know. (51) When Stacey comments on the “depressing” effect the news has on her, her husband Mac’s response is “Don’t look then” (51). As Stacey’s thoughts suggest, however, it is not just the violence of the images that disturbs her but her inability to distinguish between the real and the unreal. There are several possible responses to inhabiting the terrifying ambiguity of limbo, of the space between the real and the unreal, Laurence suggests; Mac’s is the way of avoidance and complacency. Similarly, Wes’s attitude towards forms of media is analogous to the ambivalence he feels for his car. As the prefix tele in nouns like telescope, telephone and television remind us, each of these media has a particular relationship to space in that it serves to overcome the limitations that distance and architecture place on communication or vision. “The telephone: speech without walls,” as McLuhan puts it in Understanding Media.37 Like the automobile, such technologies

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make suburbia possible since they enable sprawl, but they also hold the potential for overcoming it. As extensions of the human, their success or failure at overcoming limitations on communication depends on those who employ them. The very first sentence in the novel alerts us to the importance of the telephone as an instrument that can both enable or prevent communication. The story begins when Wes arrives back at his office after lunch to a number of telephone messages that have been recorded on official slips of paper. “Today there are three telephone messages on my desk when I return from my lunch-hour walk around the Shopping Plaza: three small yellow slips, rectangular in shape, and each entitled ‘Someone Called While You Were Out’” (3). For Wes, the translation of these messages from an electronic to a print form of media seems to add to the weight of their obligatory call for return – a demand he resists. Part of the problem for Wes is that he has transfered his frustrated desire for meaningful interpersonal communication into a desire that seems easier to satisfy – diversion. Wes’s narrative of diversionary experiences functions more as a cautionary tale than as an opportunity for vicarious escape, as his description of a “weekend man” implies: “A weekend man is a person who has abandoned the present in favour of the past or the future. He is really more interested in what happened to him 20 years ago or in what is going to happen to him next week than he is in what is happening to him today. If the truth were known nothing much happens to most of us during the course of our daily passage  … This is not really such a bad thing. It is probably better than fighting off a sabre-tooth tiger at the entrance to the cave. But we weekend men never leave well enough alone. First off we must cast about for a diversion. A diversion is anything that removes us from the ordinary present. Sometimes we divert ourselves into our own pasts” (9). For Wes, diversion is not simply an indulgence; it is a means of evading temporarily the experience of dissatisfaction and powerlessness that characterize his “ordinary present,” and which he contrasts with the more “heroic” actions he thinks men once performed. Wes’s consumption of television highlights his nostalgia for narratives of masculine power and agency. He frequently describes the programs he watches, confessing that no other diversion holds his attention like television (49). He consumes science fiction films in which men eradicate imagined threats to “mankind” (50). In reruns of Gunsmoke and Run for Your Life, Wes identifies with the strong protagonist whose heart he imagines “singing in its aliveness,” in contrast to his own (105).

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An alternative response to Wes’s preference for avoidance and diversion, one that Stacey ambivalently pursues, is to recognize the possibilities that are created when one chooses to look, to listen, to remain open to that which is unsettling. As Cavell suggests, “McLuhan argued that a moralistic rejection of mass culture was not the point – it was too important to reject; what was necessary was to understand it critically.”38 Critical engagement requires the recognition that “perception is a form of sensory interrelationship.”39 Throughout the novel, Stacey enters into dialogue with various forms of mass media such as the radio, the TV, the newspapers and women’s magazines that invade her consciousness. Moreover, her busy life managing the household means that she rarely has the luxury of passively consuming TV by primarily visual means, as the other members of her family do. Stacey usually listens, an activity that undermines the privileging of the visual in contemporary mass culture. According to Cavell, McLuhan’s work “sought to revalorize the role of our other senses in the production of a multiplicity of other kinds of space” by “devalorizing the visual.”40 McLuhan uses the metaphor of the auditory, moreover, to construct a notion of “acoustic space” as a relational concept that opposes the more linear notion of visual space. It is “a space that was emphatically aural (and thus non-linear) and a space that was conflated with time – the space you hear, rather than the space you see.”41 In an interview with Robin Ford on CBC Radio in 1969, Laurence describes The Fire-Dwellers as “almost an audio-visual novel” an observation that further suggests the influence of McLuhan on her experimentation with form.42 Indeed, the arrangement of text in the novel resembles McLuhan’s Explorations 8 (see figure 1.2), utilizing changes in typeface and the space of the page to construct meaning non-linearly and to render “the simultaneity of things,” an experience of spacetime Laurence sought to replicate in her suburban novel.43 The Fire-Dwellers employs a sophisticated method of rendering the audio-visual experiences of her characters’ engagement with forms of media as spatialized experiences. Laurence employs four formal strategies to differentiate between voices in the text: regular font indicates dialogue and the voice of the third-person narrator; “The ever-open eye” of the mass media is signaled by uppercase letters; Stacey’s imagination, her memories, dreams, and fantasies, are indented or presented in italicized text; her unspoken thoughts are preceded by a long dash. The arrangements of text and variety of type styles on the first five pages of Chapter Four, for example, narrate a typical, chaotic morning in the MacAindra household as Stacy gets her children ready for school:

The Lady of Limbo and the Weekend Man

Fig. 1.2 Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, The City. Explorations 8 (1955).

Chatter buzz wail Okay, Jen, I’ll be up in a sec. Are you finished? Don’t try to get off by yourself – I’m coming. You going to get your hair done, Stacey? Yes, of course, whaddya think? I only asked, for heaven’s sake. No need to I’m sorry, Mac. Yes, I’m getting it done this morning. Want an egg? Please. Mum, it’s not here, and Mr. Gaines will be mad as fury. I got to find Okay, Ian, one minute and I’ll look. Where have you looked? Everywhere. (80–1)

37

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The chapter begins with the cacophony of voices in the household, which are represented by regular typeface. Characteristic of this dialogue among the family members are broken, unfinished sentences, clichés, gaps, and ellipses that indicate inferences and things left unsaid, for example the irritation and unspoken resentment between Stacey and her husband. Interrupting the familial discourse are the intrusions of the mass media into the MacAindra household, indicated by uppercase letters: these include sound bites of the news and programs from both radio and television which contrasts global events, such as the destruction of the Vietnam war, through juxtaposition with the seemingly mundane yet equally violent events of the local scene: ThIS IS The eIGhT-o’CloCK NewS BoMBING rAIdS lAST NIGhT deSTroyed FoUr VIllAGeS IN (80) The encroaching violence of the global situation is contrasted with the simultaneity of: “roAd deAThS UP TeN Per CeNT MAKING ThIS MoNTh The worST IN” (81). Note that both reports are left open-ended here and the locations remain unidentified, suggesting that the apocalypse Stacey fears could very well reach her front door. Interestingly, the voice that brings such doom and gloom into the MacAindra residence is not differentiated from the voice of advertising. Like the news, inane advertisements rife with clichés are also represented in uppercase letters, such as: word FroM oUr SPoNSor IF yoU hAVeN’T SeeN Tooley’S New ShowrooM yoU’re IN For A reAl Cool SUrPrISe (80) Interspersed with the voice of the media, the dialogue, and the voice of the narrator, is Stacey’s imagination – flashes of dreams, fantasies, memories, usually italicized or indented from the rest of the text. Lastly, we encounter Stacey’s unspoken, often ironic or self-deprecating thoughts, preceded by a long dash and rendered as a stream of consciousness. Like McLuhan, Laurence experiments with the medium of print to represent space and time – in this chapter and the text overall – as more “relational” than “sequential” – and this is a tendency that some critics, such as Richard Cavell and Linda Hutcheon, have identified as a particularly “Canadian” contribution to postmodernism. Like Wright’s, however, Laurence’s text shares a “faith” in the possibilities of realism. While the fragmentation of verbal discourse and of Stacey’s stream of consciousness, combined with the intrusion of mass media, anticipates

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the kinds of strategies of later postmodernist texts, Laurence’s experiments with form seem grounded in a desire to achieve verisimilitude, to render as closely as possible, as she put it, “the simultaneity” of Stacey’s life in a modern suburb of Canada. Recalling Callaghan’s critique that Stacey is just “a sack of frenetic flesh and bones” too mired in the body to be universal, it is interesting to consider that McLuhan insisted on the materiality of acoustic space: “his point is that the invisibilia of electronic media are likewise material; “the acoustic is just as material as the visual.’”44 Stacey’s very materiality enables her resistance at times. Near the end of the novel, her ironic response to that which she hears merges with the voices carried by the airwaves into the “acoustic space” of her home: eVer-oPeN eye STreeTS IN CITIeS NoT So FAr AwAy Are BUrNING BUrNING IN rAGe ANd Sorrow SeT ABlAZe By The ChIldreN oF SAMSoN AGoNISTeS VoICe: rIoTS Are SAId To Be well UNder CoNTrol IN (274) Listening to the dialogue between her voice and that of the visual metaphor of the “Ever-open eye” of the television, Stacey becomes more critically aware of her own role in the conversion process that turns the palpable words that enter her ear into pictures in her imagination: “I see it and then I don’t see it. It becomes pictures. And you wonder about the day when you open your door and find they’ve been filming those pictures in your street” (274). As Stacey approaches her fortieth birthday, she is no longer in denial as the apocalypse gets closer to the suburbs. The Fire-Dwellers contests the stereotypical depiction of suburbia as a “fortified” community, cut off from the other environments surrounding it, by representing the permeability of its structures and of those who inhabit them. The suburban home in which she houses her protagonist models the narrative form Laurence sought for the novel. As she articulates in her 1980 essay, “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel,” Laurence was concerned “with finding a form which will enable a novel to reveal itself, a form through which the characters can breathe.”45 If the walls are permeable enough to allow the flow of air and world into her home, it is through her imagination that Stacey frequently travels beyond them. Many of her fantasies and daydreams have wilderness or fantastic settings that enable her to travel beyond the confines of her home and permit her experiences from which she has been barred as a wife and mother. In one, she is the “Dragon Lady of Terry,” pursuing lusty relationships with pirates (77). Others enable

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her to confront her anxieties concerning the safety of her children (25). Stacey indulges in most of her fantasies of wish fulfillment and nighttime dreams from within her home, making it the site of transition in the text, much as an airport or train station functions as a transitional state between two destinations. Imagination functions differently for Wes, who is motivated by diversion and the frustration of his desire to experience, through his narrative mastery, the “great quivering now” as an antidote to the banalities of quotidian suburban life. Wes has had one experience of living intensely that he attempts to preserve by refusing to consume the Scotch in his “Holocaust Bottle,” a material souvenir of the only time he felt “consumed by the fires of my own aliveness” (107). This occurred in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Wes refers to as “the greatest diversion of them all” (120). On that day, Wes sat with his bottle of “Chivas Regal” listening to his landlady’s television as she switched channels, alternating between the news and an infomercial featuring the “omelette man” (120). Wes recalls that he was “watchful of everything in my aliveness, my five senses thrumming like plucked strings” (120). The crisis is significant not only as a diversion that reminds Wes he is “fearfully alive,” but as a moment when his senses become free from numbness – a moment he can relive through storytelling. This experience brilliantly captures the ambivalence of the period – the “age of McLuhan,” as Robert Fulford characterizes it – toward television.46 Like Stacey, Wes listens to the television during the crisis but does not watch it, immersing himself in a more acoustic experience of media and spacetime that disrupts the primacy of the visual in the suburban landscape. His feeling that all five senses come alive at that moment is reminiscent of McLuhan’s assertion that the basis for resistance to “the matrix of a totalized (or environmental) technology” is “based on an ‘interplay of all the senses.’”47 Like Stacey’s daydreams, moreover, diversion also has a more positive function for Wes, for it requires a reorganization of time and space as psychological, moving away, as McLuhan’s work does, from the dominant view of time as linear or sequential and separate from space by theorizing spacetime as acoustic rather than as visual.48 Similar to the psychological spacetime of the weekend man, McLuhan’s is a model that emphasizes the two as relational rather than oppositional terms. Wes’s narrative ends rather ironically with a return to his high-rise view as he watches the comings and goings of Union Placers shopping on Christmas Eve. His sardonically confessional narrating voice has guided us throughout his journey, encouraging us to agree with his

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assessment of the banality of his kind of life – and through our identification with him – our own. When he decides that “all this musing on the mystery and wonder has only set up a wild howling in the soul. My father was probably right. It is far more sensible to submit to the numbness of the daily passage,” we have come to know him well enough that we suspect – and hope – he doesn’t really mean it (239). He returns to his balcony, fully cognizant of the many sensory experiences involved in this small act. He feels “the damp cold” as it seeps through his “Sisman loafers” and hears the “cooling tubes” of his television “crackle” (244–5). This time Wes decides to experience the night sky without his telescope: “Perhaps in the New Year on another fine night I will take out the telescope and have another look. Right now it is enough to gaze upward and bear witness to all this light, travelling from its fiery origins with a perfect indifference, across the immensities of space and time, to strike the retinas of my eyes at this moment – To bear witness to this remarkable light and try to remember what it is I was supposed to do” (245). The result is a revalorization of the visual that rejects technology as an extension of the human body; yet the moment also signals Wes’s humble acceptance of the universe’s absolute and “perfect indifference” to him. As befits a pioneering suburban “weekend man,” Wes Wakeham’s tale of angst in 1970 attempts to work within the conventions of realism. Although he never fully gives up being the master of his story, Wes’s narrative does displace other absolutist paradigms that were seeking dominion in the new corporate suburbs of that time, such as the privileging of visual over other kinds of sensory experiences of space. Wes ends his narrative abruptly with a half-hearted attempt to remember what he “was supposed to do,” leaving his readers to wonder as well. Is he submitting to the “numbness of the daily passage”? Should we? As one of the first contemporary texts to explore the relationship between constructions of masculinity and the particularities of the Canadian suburban landscape, The Weekend Man is remarkably ambivalent about the possibility of agency of any kind. The universe is as “indifferent” to the wild keening” in Wes’s soul as is his more immediate environment. Open-ended yet doleful, the final sentence suggests an uneasy and ambivalent surrender, not to numbness – he is far too aware of his sensory experiences for that – but of the need to maintain a feeling of agency over his narrative and within his geographical space. Situated geographically between the city and the wilderness, Bluejay Crescent is the liminal locus from which Stacey journeys to either space, both physically and imaginatively. Remarkably, given Laurence’s

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privileging in her essay, “Gadgetry or Growing,” of the forest as a spatial metaphor for the novelistic form she was experimenting with in The Fire-Dwellers, Stacey’s house is both an “enclosing edifice” that she experiences as a “trap,” but also the space from which she participates in imaginative flights of fantasy and imagination.49 It is as if Laurence herself was comfortable leaving the dichotomy unresolved, allowing the ambivalent relationship between form and content to tell the story of this young Canadian landscape. By the end of the text, it is through imagination that Stacey expands her spatial relations: “I was wrong to think of the trap as the four walls” she reflects. “It’s the world” (272). Stacey goes so far as to prefer imaginative settings to the real, choosing her home and the life of her imagination even over the romantic possibilities of a life in the wilderness. “Well, in the head isn’t such a terrible place to dance,” she reflects. “The settings are magnificent there, anyhow” (272). Through the consolations of fantasy and dream, the suburban house on Bluejay Crescent becomes a flowing, relational space from which the city and its excessive desires “recede” at the novel’s end (277). While the novel opens with the menacing threat of fire in the ladybird rhyme, it ends as Stacey “slides into sleep,” listening to the sound of Mac’s “steady breathing,” which reassures her that “temporarily, they are all more or less okay” (277). A return to breath, to air, with the slide into sleep, the space of dreams.

2

Ravines and “the Conscious Electrified Life of Houses” Ravines are the chief characteristic of the local terrain, its topographical signature. They are both a tangible (though often hidden) part of our surroundings and a persistent force in our civic imagination. They are the shared subconscious of the municipality, the places where much of the city’s literature is born. Robert Fulford

1

To go down into them is to go down into sleep, away from the conscious electrified life of the houses. The ravines are darker, even in the day. Margaret Atwood

2

The ravines that Robert Fulford characterizes as the “topographical signature” of suburban and urban Toronto are often represented as the unconscious side of the personified city’s collective, binarized mind, its converse described by Margaret Atwood as the “the conscious electrified life of the houses” that populate suburban neighbourhoods, such as the Leaside neighbourhood where Atwood grew up.3 In Canadian literature, ravines share many of the characteristics associated with Freud’s system of the unconscious: they are dark, hidden, frequently the domain of childhood, and when they communicate, ravines have a language that seems to operate according to a logic of condensation or displacement like that of Freud’s dream-work. For Toronto author Hugh Hood, the metropolis’s ravines are also a metaphor of the human unconscious, functioning as “dark wounds in the ground” beneath a surface which “conceals black likelihood.”4 The ravines of our collective unconscious have much in common with the actual ravines that are all around the city; once we see them, they seem to be everywhere, making their appearance in texts by the likes of Catherine Bush, David Chariandy, Barbara Gowdy, Hugh Hood, Anne Michaels, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Alissa York. As Fulford points out, their

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status in our popular mythology is extremely ambivalent, representing an “emotional geography” characterized by adventure and freedom on the one hand, and our most irrational fears on the other.5 In Atwood’s poem, “In My Ravines,” for example, they are ominously populated by “old men’s / dreams of slaughter / dreams of / (impossible) / flight.”6 This is particularly true for children and adolescents who come of age in the suburban spaces of Toronto. If adolescence is a time of transition and liminality, ravines are the spaces that mirror this state of ontological instability. They are hidden, disruptive, and ambivalent. Their frequency in Canadian suburban Bildungsromane, or coming-of-age narratives, invites us to consider their function as geographies of young people, in which they function as a “republic of childhood,” as Fulford suggests, representing “a savage foreign state, a place of adventure and terror. A ravine provides a Torontonian’s first glimpse of something resembling wilderness; often it is also the earliest intimation of nearby danger. A Toronto child usually learns about the ravines from an anxious parent’s warning that evil strangers lurk down there.”7 While often represented as the only spaces in which child and adolescent protagonists find freedom from the vigilant gaze of adults, they are not free from the threat of adult transgressions; in Atwood’s novels, sexual predators and rescuers enter this “republic of childhood,” and distinguishing one from the other is not always a straightforward endeavour. The symbolic importance of Toronto’s ravines resonates most potently in the fiction and poetry of Margaret Atwood. In her novels Lady Oracle (1976) and Cat’s Eye (1988), ravines likewise function as liminal spaces of peril and possibility for developing author Joan Foster and visual artist Elaine Risley, who come of age within the sterile environments of Toronto’s inner suburban neighbourhoods during the postwar period. This chapter explores the significance and function of ravine and suburban spaces within the two novels, arguing their importance as sites of creative potential in Atwood’s most sustained attempts to rework the Künstlerroman, a type of coming-of-age narrative in the tradition of the Bildungsroman that explores the development of the artist from childhood to adulthood. These texts challenge the notion that suburbia, with its “hedgemonic,” homogeneous landscape, is antithetical to the development of an artistic, imaginative vision.8 As Frank Davey argues, “Atwood’s Canadian suburban spaces operate as transitional spaces between uncoded and therefore uninhabitable wilderness and oppressively coded cities – as spaces of class fluidity, eccentricity, and creativity.”9 Indeed, suburbia is the condition for the development of an imaginative vision not unlike Atwood’s own, a

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vision that is “interested in edges, undertows, permutations, in taking things that might be viewed as eccentric or marginal and pulling them into the center.”10 Atwood’s biographer, Rosemary Sullivan, has attributed this vision to the fact that, like her characters, “she would become someone who was always looking for a space to stand – on the borderline between city and bush, between reason and feeling, between fear and empathy. She was someone who learned from that wild world what she would call ‘the gaping moment’ – ‘a sense of the hole in the sky.’ ”11 Suburbia is the quintessential borderline between city and bush. Atwood articulated its potential in an early poem called “The City Planners.” Critical as this poem is of “the panic of suburb / order in a bland madness of snows,” Atwood allows for the possibility of a “gaping moment” to emerge that might “give momentary access to / the landscape behind or under / the future cracks in the plaster.”12 In Atwood’s Toronto, the ravines within suburbia are where the city and bush collide; they are also “the city’s only vertical dimension,” and so they disrupt the horizontality of suburban sprawl.13 The ravines and the bridges that traverse them function in Atwood’s Künstleromane as creative, anarchic, and ambiguous spaces between dichotomous terms, resonating with the function Elizabeth Grosz ascribes to Plato’s chora as a “third or intermediary category whose function is to explain the passage from one oppositional category to another.”14 Like the chora, Atwood’s ravine “dazzles the logic of non-contradiction. It insinuates itself between the oppositional terms, in the impossible no-man’s land of the excluded middle.”15 In many respects, it functions in a manner similar to Stacey MacAindra’s suburban home as a space that is disruptive, dangerous, yet potentially creative as well. Joan’s and Elaine’s narratives of their childhoods in suburban Toronto seem to operate on two levels, exhibiting a logic similar to that described by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, in which the dream is conceived as “something built up, as a conglomerate of psychic formations.”16 The manifest content tells the story of their everyday lives growing up in a suburban community of Toronto, the story of “the conscious electrified life of the houses.” The latent content, however, occurs in the ravines of this community, a space that is “darker,” and whose geographical reality requires her protagonists to “go down” as if into sleep. Such descriptions invite us to read the ravine as a trope for the artists’ unconscious, as receptacles of the childhood experiences that they have repressed, but also as creative, liminal spaces in which the ambiguities of life experiences can be allowed to play.

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Lady Oracle is one of Atwood’s first attempts to explore the meaning of urban, wilderness, and suburban spaces for the developing Canadian female artist coming of age in the 1940s and ’50s, a period in Canadian history when, as Rosemary Sullivan points out, “the dream of suburbia had taken over” and in which the “propaganda of marriage” that surrounded young women prohibited many of them from imagining their roles as anything but wives and mothers.17 While Lady Oracle begins to work out many of the ideas about the relationship between the ideological power of human spaces and the imaginative vision of the artist, Atwood’s 1988 novel, Cat’s Eye, is a more complicated reworking of the Künstlerroman that returns to many of the questions posed by Lady Oracle. Both novels play with the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman to create a “gaping moment,” a rupture or “hole in the sky” that opens up our understanding of what spaces and art mean, and of how they influence each other. As some critics have noted, however, Cat’s Eye goes beyond the concerns of the earlier text by subverting not only the conventional, masculinist paradigms associated with novels of formation, but notions of time and space as well.18 If the English Bildungsroman is a story in which the typical male protagonist “grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination,” Joan’s and Elaine’s narratives of their early “conscious” life growing up in post-war Toronto substitutes suburb for “country” or “provincial town.”19 The manifest level of each story explores the “social and intellectual” constraints that sought to limit the imagination of young women at that time; for Elaine, this begins when her family settles in their suburban “lagoon of postwar mud” following the nomadic years of her early childhood (35); for Joan, when she turns eight and her family moves to “a bungaloid box near a Loblaws supermarket” (48). It is at this time that Joan begins attending Brownies, an organization that typifies the type of gender ideology to which girls were subjected. From chants such as “A Brownie gives in to the older folk; / A Brownie does NoT give in to herself!” Joan learns the proper codes of behaviour for suburbia’s future wives and mothers (51). Joan’s mother provides for her daughter a grotesque reminder of the consequences of suburban gender education. Her mother internalizes the image of the perfect wife and mother to a pathological degree, a fact that reveals itself to the young Joan when she is permitted to watch her mother “put on her face” (63). During this ritual, Joan observes, her mother “often frowned at herself, shaking her head as if she was dissatisfied; and occasionally she’d talk to herself as if she’d forgotten I was

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there. Instead of making her happier, these sessions appeared to make her sadder, as if she saw behind or within the mirror some fleeting image she was unable to capture or duplicate” (63). Joan also recognizes that as an overweight child, she is to her mother “the embodiment of her own failure and depression, a huge edgeless cloud of inchoate matter which refused to be shaped into anything for which she could get a prize” (65). She imagines her mother as a “three-headed mother,” as reflected by her vanity’s triple mirror, aligning her with the excessiveness of the grotesque (215). When her mother’s “astral body” appears to Joan, it is always hyper-feminine, dressed in suit and gloves, “clutching her purse” and with “a bigger mouth” drawn “around her mouth with lipstick” (173). The exaggeration of her mother’s body is a flamboyant reminder of the effects of postwar suburban ideology on women’s bodies and – most importantly – on their imaginations. Joan’s flight from suburbia when she is old enough to leave home is, then, a flight from her mother’s pathological compliance with repressive gender norms.  Like Joan’s, the structure of Elaine’s narrative of artistic and emotional development in Cat’s Eye is deceptively simple, mimicking that of the English Bildungsroman but adding a third space to the typical movement of the heroine. It begins with Elaine’s early childhood, or period of innocence, in the bush of northern Ontario, moving her to suburban Toronto during her adolescence. Suburbia is represented as akin to the “provincial town” that Buckley identifies as the conventional setting for the childhood experiences of the hero of the English Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman, for whom “the journey from home is … in some degree the flight from provinciality.”20 For Elaine, as for Joan, the journey from home is a “flight” from suburbanity and from the constraints that its associated values of materialism and consumerism place upon women. Elaine attempts to escape these constraints by moving to the city as a young adult to study art and engage in formative love relationships like the typical hero of the Künstlerroman. She often employs spatial metaphors to evoke her sense that her movements are a form of exile, however, rather than development. She feels an affinity with “D.P.s” or “displaced persons,” refugees from Europe, like her art instructor Josef Hrbik, who populate the city following World War II (299). Her movements from bush to suburbia to city are little more than displacements, then, ironic parodies of the characteristic structural movements of the genre that chart the Bildungshelden’s personal and artistic development from innocence to experience. Once she and her family move into the house that looks nothing like the one in her “school reader, white, with a picket fence and a

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lawn, and window curtains,” Elaine’s education in the cultural logic of suburbia begins (33). Having spent her early childhood in the wilderness of northern Ontario with her unconventional family, Elaine knows nothing of the codes of behaviour that govern suburban subjects, particularly young girls and women. As her family gradually finishes their incomplete bungalow, Elaine observes their evolving compliance with these rigid codes. Even her unconventional mother stops wearing pants, causing Elaine to notice that her “legs have appeared, sheathed in nylons with seams up the backs. She draws a lipstick mouth when she goes out” (36). Many of the rules that govern suburbia are nonsensical to Elaine, such as the prohibition against touching the Smeath family’s rubber plant (60), or the separate door for girls and boys in her school. “I am very curious about the BoyS door,” Elaine recalls. “How is going in through a door different if you’re a boy? What’s in there that merits the strap, just for seeing it?” (49) Elaine’s education in the norms of her culture occurs at school and when she plays with other girls. They colour images of hyper-femininity in their “movie star coloring books,” play school, and create scrapbooks made from old Eaton’s Catalogues” (55, 56). These activities are governed by rules that are consistent with the codes of behaviour and the consumer skills necessary for girls who were being groomed for suburban housewifery. The scrapbooks function as a kind of parodic trousseau: “We cut the small colored figures out of them [the catalogues] and paste them into scrapbooks. Then we cut out other things – cookware, furniture – and paste them around the figures. The figures themselves are always women. We call them ‘my lady.’ ‘My lady is going to have this refrigerator,’ we say. ‘My lady is getting this rug.’ ‘This is my lady’s umbrella’” (56–7). This imitation of a woman’s future social role as consumer is “tiring” to Elaine, given her family’s prior nomadic existence. As an outsider to the conventions of suburbia, Elaine is able to perceive the ridiculousness of what the other girls take for granted as natural. “I know a lot about moving house. But Carol and Grace have never moved anywhere. Their ladies live in a single house each and have always lived there. They can add more and more, stuff the pages of their scrapbooks with dining room suites, beds, stacks of towels, one set of dishes after another, and think nothing of  it”  (57). Having spent her early childhood in the wilderness of northern Ontario with only her brother for a playmate, Elaine is “self-conscious” when she participates in the activities of other girls, aware that she is “only doing an imitation of a girl” (55). Of course, this is exactly what the other

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girls are doing as well; the difference is that Elaine is always conscious of the fact that she is imitating. While there is no question that suburbia is a problematic environment for the developing female artist (one need only think of the plastic covers on the Fosters’ chairs to imagine the sterility), Atwood’s Künstlerromane suggest that it can play a meaningful role in the apprenticeship of young female artists. It is in suburbia, after all, that Joan learns about the audience for whom she will write romantic novels as an adult: “About the only advantage to this life of strain was that I gained a thorough knowledge of a portion of my future audience: those who got married too young, who had babies too early, who wanted princes and castles and ended up with cramped apartments and grudging husbands” (93). Just as Joan’s suburban apprenticeship is vital to her artistic development, Elaine’s suburban education is more than an exercise in conformity. Translating painful emotions or experiences into art is a technique Elaine first learns in her suburban elementary school. In spite of suburbia’s renown for a single-minded pursuit of symmetry and conformity (Elaine relates Miss Lumley’s “recipe for symmetry” in the making of bells and snowmen by folding construction paper so that “everything has two halves, a left and a right, identical” [136]), it is here that Elaine experiences a significant “gaping moment” when another teacher responds with empathy to one of her drawings. Miss Stuart’s ability to recognize the emotional pain that Elaine communicates in a picture of herself in bed surrounded by darkness causes her to experience a minor epiphany “like a blown-out match” (174). Not only does Elaine find a means to express the unspeakable, but she also finds an audience who can read the signs of her emotional distress. While the scrapbook game in Cat’s Eye encourages the girls to mimic good suburban consumerism, it also functions as an early exercise in imaginative expression, making it an integral part of Elaine’s artistic education. Elaine learns that material reserved for “use as toilet paper” in some environments can be treated “with reverence” in other situations, or even used as art (56). The collage technique of juxtaposing different images as a way of making meaning will resurface later when she paints domestic items such as a “silver toaster,” a “glass coffee percolator,” and a “wringer washing machine” that “seem to arrive detached from any context” (357). And in Elaine’s description of the neighbourhood surrounding her home are hints of the creative potential inherent in the paradoxical nature of this space: “The house is hardly on a street at all, more like a field. It’s square-shaped, a bungalow, built of yellow

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brick and surrounded by raw mud. On one side of it is an enormous hole in the ground, with large mud piles heaped around it. The road in front is muddy too, unpaved, potholed. There are some concrete blocks sunk in the mud for stepping-stones so we can get to the door” (33). In this new development, the tidy, uninspired architecture of the houses contrasts with the rawness and chaos of the mud surrounding them. In the spring, Elaine observes, “Our house looks like something left over from the war: all around it spreads rubble, devastation. My parents look over the expanse of raw mud, planning the garden” (63). Mud is a paradox here, functioning as a metaphor for inertia but also of creativity. While most suburbanites turn their “expanse” of mud into something static, namely a lawn or “expanse” of grass, Elaine’s parents plan something more practical and creative  – a garden. Mud in this context is a metaphor for a state of liminality and evanescence, then, of transition and becoming so essential to an artist. “The Atwood suburb is a transitional space, through which wilderness is transformed into artifice,” Frank Davey observes.21 As Josef Hrbik will tell his students in the life-drawing class Elaine attends, an artist needs both “dirt and soul” (291). Learning to exist in the space between dichotomies, to find there material to translate into art, is also a part of Joan’s education as a writer, and her childhood experiences in the ravine provide her with a vital apprenticeship in ambiguity. In her description of the ravine near her home, Joan’s language reveals a common fear of spaces within which nature has not been subjected to the orderliness that governs in  the suburbs. Joan recalls that the ravine near her home “crawled with vines and weedy undergrowth, it was dense with willow trees and bushes” (49). For Joan’s mother, it is this chaos that makes the ravine attractive to “the lurking pervert,” “old derelict,” and “child molester” whom she imagines inhabits it (49). The ravine also frightens Joan, who must cross it weekly to attend Brownies. Ironically, however, it is not the so-called evil men children need to fear in the ravines but the other children who inhabit this “republic of childhood.” In the ravines, away from the eyes of adults, Joan’s peers inflict emotional suffering upon her as punishment for her nonconformity: “Sometimes they would claim that their running off was a punishment, deserved by me, for something I had done or hadn’t done that day: I had skipped too heavily in the fairy ring, I hadn’t stood straight enough, my tie was rumpled, I had dirty fingernails, I was fat” (55). Abandoned frequently by the other members of her Brownie troop, Joan learns to use her imagination to help her endure the frightening experience of being left

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alone “in the darkness and cold” (56). In the dark spaces of the ravine, Joan’s imagination turns the figure of adult panic into an embodiment of justice and retribution. She imagines that “the bad man would really come up out of the ravine and do whatever he was fated to do. That way, after I’d been stolen or killed, they would be punished, and they would be forced to repent at last for what they’d done” (56). The contrast between Joan’s tidy suburban street and the unruliness of the ravine resonates with Freud’s characterization of the contrast between the conscious and unconscious systems of the mind, a comparison Atwood invokes when she compares going down into the ravines to going “down into sleep, away from the conscious electrified life of the houses.” When the so-called bad man actually appears, there is something absurdly dream-like about him. Far from looking like the “tall” man “in a black suit” with red eyes, a hairy head and “long sharp teeth” of Joan’s imagination (56), the real “bad” man looks quite harmless, and Joan’s memory of the experience reads almost like the narrative of a dream, with its attention to oddly incongruous details and the reversal of our expectations. She describes him as “a nice-looking man, neither old nor young, wearing a good tweed coat, not at all shabby or disreputable” (57). It is a shock, then, when the man lifts the daffodils he holds “to reveal his open fly and the strange, ordinary piece of flesh that was nudging flaccidly out of it” (57). The following week, Joan’s friends tie her to the bridge, then abandon her. She is rescued by a man who looks, like the flasher, “neither old nor young” and “wearing a tweed coat” (60). According to Freud, characters in dreams often represent several people or even multiple aspects of the dreamer’s self, communicated to the dreamer covertly by the unconscious using such signifying tools as displacement or condensation. In the ravine, Joan is confronted by the same baffling logic and ambiguity as dreamers meet. The daffodil man” is mystifying because Joan can’t pin down his identity: “Was the man who untied me a rescuer or a villain? Or, an even more baffling thought: was it possible for a man to be both at once?” (61). In later years, Joan explains that the mystery of “the daffodil man” haunts her: “he was elusive, he melted and changed his shape like butterscotch or warm gum, dissolving into a tweedy mist, sending out menacing tentacles of flesh and knotted rope, forming again as a joyful sunburst of yellow flowers” (61). The daffodil man and the ravine operate as signs of the ambiguous; while each appears “menacing” at times, they also dissolve into their opposites, functioning as the chora of Joan’s unconscious and of the transformation of her experience into art.

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Likewise, for Elaine, the creative potential of suburban spaces is evoked by her experiences in the ravine near her street, which comes to function as the unconscious of both the text and of Elaine herself in a rather more complex manner than it does in Lady Oracle. As in Atwood’s earlier novel, the ravine is the liminal space where city and bush collide, and it is significant that the ravine is situated within suburban Toronto, for both are epistemologically unstable spaces. The potential dangers of the ravine are implied by the presence of “deadly nightshade” on the path, a plant whose “berries red as valentine candies” might be “a good way” to poison someone (79). The poisonous nightshade berries provide an interesting contrast to the more benign blueberries Elaine and Stephen pick for their mother in the forests up north, and from which she makes puddings and sauces (71). The contrast suggests that the ravine is not considered dangerous simply because it is wilder, but because of its ontological ambiguity as a space that is neither fully wild nor fully cultivated. As it does for Joan in Lady Oracle, the ravine becomes the site of the peer harassment Elaine endures as an adolescent. When she falls into the frozen creek and nearly drowns, she has a near-death experience during which she believes she is rescued by a woman, whom she associates with the Virgin Mary, who moves through the air and through the bridge, then “holds out her arms” to Elaine, causing her to feel “a surge of happiness” (203). Whether she is an apparition, a projection of wish-fulfillment, or an actual person is never made clear. Like the daffodil man in Lady Oracle, it is possible to see her as a more ambivalent figure, with a menacing side, such as the legendary Belladonna whose name is another designation for the deadly nightshade plant. Her ontological status is, therefore, as ambiguous as the ravine from which she emerges. She functions as a transitional figure, enabling Elaine’s development into a more empowered child, one capable of recognizing her tormentors’ need for a victim and her own resiliency: “They need me for this, and I no longer need them. I am indifferent to them. There’s something hard in me, crystalline, a kernel of glass” (208). The importance of Joan’s experiences become clear when the ravine and the daffodil man both appear later in her collection of poetry, Lady Oracle. Ironically, the text that is regarded as Joan’s more serious work of art comes from her unconscious when she makes an attempt at “automatic writing,” ostensibly for one of her gothic heroines. The symbolism that emerges when she hypnotizes herself communicates her repressed memories, using the systemic language of the unconscious. The ravine is condensed into underground imagery as the place inhabited by the female protagonist of her poems, a woman

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who lives “under the earth somewhere, or inside something, a cave or a huge building,” inviting us to interpret the symbolism as aspects of her personality (224). Although Joan is unable to recognize it, this protagonist is a displaced version of an aspect of her multiple self, that part of her who is “enormously powerful, almost like a goddess,” but who possesses “an unhappy power” (224). Mired as her conscious mind is in keeping dichotomies separate, Joan does not see herself in her character; she thinks she is too “happy and inept” to be like her (224). The daffodil man is also displaced in Joan’s poetry, emerging ambiguously as a man who is “evil” but who also “seemed good” (224). The source of his identity is hinted at when Joan’s publishers ask her “who’s the man with the daffodils and the icicle teeth?” (227). When condensation and displacement begin to operate later in Joan’s gothic romance, Stalked by Love, readers of Atwood’s text begin to realize that they have been brought into a “gaping moment.” Like its protagonist, Felicia, we enter a confusing maze where characters and dichotomies collide and dissolve into one another. There is no ontological certainty: high and low art, city and bush, reality and fantasy, hero and villain – all are as “tenuous” as the bodies of the women Joan/Felicia/Charlotte encounters at the centre of the maze (342). This ambivalence regarding the nature of spaces is connected to Joan’s linguistic training, for, as a poet, recognizing the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified is an experience that frees her both from her own romanticism and from her selfimposed creative limitations. In effect, it is this ability to inhabit the space between dichotomies that Joan has had to learn in order to take herself seriously as an artist, and for which her adolescent apprenticeship in suburbia and its ravines has prepared her. Elaine’s art functions, much like Joan’s writing, as a means for her to translate repressed memories by displacing the painful contents of her unconscious into images. Given her fascination with displacement, it follows that it should be the communicatory method she uses most in her art. A wringer washer, for example, is one of the domestic items Elaine paints when she moves beyond painting only things that are “in front” of her to painting from her unconscious or imagination (357). She seems puzzled by the fact that “the wringer itself is a disturbing fleshtone pink” (357), having repressed her childhood attraction to the idea of going through the wringer and coming out “flat, neat, completed, like a flower pressed in a book” (130), or, like the ladies she and her friends cut out of the Eaton’s catalogue, figures who embody the “flatness” of postwar suburban femininity (130).

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Joan’s and Elaine’s experiences in the ravines encourage them to disassociate themselves from rigid cultural values and ways of being. As Martha Sharpe argues, for Elaine, a significant part of this is her ability to think beyond a limited conception of time and space. Sharpe argues that Elaine’s conception of time as a dimension like space is the root of her dissidence.22 Her ability to “think outside the box,” to see beyond the limiting construction of the universe in dichotomous terms, is, perhaps, a more significant part of her artistic education than it is for Joan in Lady Oracle. For both characters, the fact that this education is set in a subterranean section of suburbia is highly relevant; it is in this liminal space that they find the freedom to learn how to translate the contents of their unconscious – their often traumatic or troubling adolescent experiences – into the covert linguistic or imagistic systems of their creative articulation. The importance of space for Elaine’s artistic vision is made clear when she relates her fascination with glass and with Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage. As she explains, it is not the depiction of marriage (that most suburban of institutions) that captures her imagination, but the reflection of an alternative story in the pier glass behind the figures who are the subject of the painting. In its “convex surface,” Elaine is captivated by the presence of “two other people who aren’t in the main picture at all” (347). The glass represents an alternative vision: “These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees more than anyone else looking” (347). Van Eyck’s mirror functions like Elaine’s cat’s eye as a metaphor of a way of seeing differently and of imagining “a different arrangement of space” and therefore inhabiting that space differently as well. As a child, this ability is a survival strategy Elaine develops to momentarily escape her bullies by fainting, an activity she characterizes as a kind of temporal and spatial rearrangement: “There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time” (183). When she faints, Elaine experiences an “edge of transparency,” during which she is spatially “off to the side” (185). It is a parallel of this alternative experience of time and space that she finds in art, and that will become important in her own imaginative expression. What is most intriguing about the way Elaine’s personal concerns and experiences converge in her art is that they unwittingly take on a wider relevance, something akin to a political vision, however distant

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Elaine herself may feel from political activism. In this respect, I disagree with Frank Davey, who argues in Post-National Arguments that it is “not always easy to find Canada or Canadianness within this text” and that Canada in Cat’s Eye is “an individual space,” constructed by a subject who is threatened by various “fashionable ideologies” such as “multinational consumerism, international feminism,” and “modernist aesthetics,” all of which “come from outside Canada.”23 I argue instead that Elaine’s art  – and by extension, Atwood’s novel  – articulates a vision of “Canadianness” but also of a personal feminism, a vision that grows out of an individual woman’s struggle to understand how the time and space in which she grew up influences her. This convergence of seemingly unrelated concerns is most evident in one of Elaine’s more contemporary paintings, Picoseconds. Highlighting the importance of multiple interpretations to how a text means, Elaine explains that the organizer of her retrospective describes the piece as “A jeu d’esprit … which takes on the Group of Seven and reconstructs their vision of landscape in the light of contemporary experiment and postmodern pastiche” (427). Elaine then shares her own interpretation of the painting, which both supports the organizer’s reading of the painting as a “reconstruction” of the Group of Seven’s “vision of landscape,” but also suggests its relevance to her own “individual,” personal experiences and the influence of time, space, and place: It is in fact a landscape, done in oils, with the blue water, the purple underpainting, the craggy rocks and windswept raggedy trees and heavy impasto of the twenties and thirties. This landscape takes up much of the painting. In the lower right-hand corner, in much the same out-of-the-way position as the disappearing legs of Icarus in the painting by Bruegel, my parents are making lunch. They have their fire going, the billy tin suspended over it. My mother in her plaid jacket bends over, stirring, my father adds a stick of wood to the fire. Our Studebaker is parked in the background. They are painted in another style: smooth, finely modulated, realistic as a snapshot. It’s as if a different light falls on them; as if they are being seen through a window which has opened in the landscape itself, to show what lies behind or within it. Underneath them, like a subterranean platform, holding them up, is a row of iconic-looking symbols painted in the flat style of Egyptian tomb frescoes, each one enclosed in a white sphere: a red rose, an orange maple leaf, a shell. They are in fact

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the logos from old gas pumps of the forties. By their obvious artificiality, they call into question the reality of landscape and figures alike. (427–8) Elaine invites us to interpret her work much as she interpreted Van Eyck’s painting or Bruegel’s landscape: the representation of what appears to be going on “behind or within” the landscape  – the representation of Elaine’s memory of her parents – is arguably more important than the manifest content of the text, in this case, the landscape as a reconstruction of the works of the Group of Seven. The piece accomplishes this by foregrounding the background, by placing a higher value on the painting’s representation of Elaine’s personal history, and by juxtaposing the landscape and the figures with the “artificiality” of the “subterranean platform” composed of gas station logos. Elaine’s description of her work, therefore, allows for a reading of the text in which nationalist or political concerns grow out of the personal. Like the collages she created from Eaton’s catalogues as a child, the disparate layers of Picoseconds complement each other. The representation of her parents domesticates the wilderness, while Atwood’s invocation of the Group of Seven challenges us to reconsider how limited our conception of Canadian spaces can be. The painting suggests that the personal can indeed be political, challenging a limited notion of art that devalues anything autobiographical. Picoseconds makes meaning on multiple levels; most interesting for my purposes is its reconsideration of the meaning of wilderness spaces to a construction of “Canadianness” and its feminist challenge to the representation of the personal in relation to time and space. Highlighting the epistemological insecurity of the wilderness/urban binary through the trope of the ravine, both Cat’s Eye and Lady Oracle perform a concomitant reconsideration of the meaning of time and space for the female Canadian artist coming of age in postwar suburbia. As Künstlerromane, these texts contest the denigration of the autobiographical as they posit a creative potential for a social and cultural space most often associated with sterility. They articulate a political vision in which the female artist, as a subject of suburbia, refuses to be confined to the spaces of domesticity. By her refusal, she is made present in time and space by taking up the “outsider-within stance” that is crucial to Gillian Rose’s feminist politics of paradoxical space. As Rose explains, “The subject of feminism … depends on a paradoxical geography in order both to acknowledge the power of hegemonic discourses and to insist on the possibility of resistance. This geography describes that

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subjectivity as that of both prisoner and exile; it allows the subject of feminism to occupy the centre and the margin, the inside and the outside.”24 We are reminded of the role of the artist as it was formulated within Canadian criticism by Marshall McLuhan; as Richard Cavell makes clear, McLuhan contested the idea of the “artist outside society” and “held that artists could contest environments from within by creating anti-environments” and by making of art a “material practice.”25 In suburban Toronto, Joan’s artistic vision shapes, and is shaped by, both the man-made landscape of the “bungaloid boxes” and the ostensibly “natural” topography of the ravines. As suburban Künstlerromane, then, Atwood’s novels posit a creative potential for a social and cultural space most often associated with sterility. As for so many Canadian protagonists, Joan’s and Elaine’s attempts to escape the landscapes of their adolescence and to emulate the romantic model of the artist in exile inevitably fail; there is no getting outside, for as Joan wryly observes, “my own country was embedded in my brain, like a metal plate left over from an operation; or rather, like one of those pellets you drop into bowls of water, which expand and turn into garish mineral flowers” (311–12). As spaces that are ambiguous and ambivalent, the suburbs and their hidden ravines operate as the materialization and spatialization of the artist’s expanding artistic unconscious system, challenging us to find merit in the process of that transformation, however “garish” the result. For Joan and Elaine, the ravine is the chora of this paradoxical space. Regarded as a “gap” or “crack in the plaster,” it can be argued that the existence of a “natural” ravine space within the “artificial” landscape of suburbia troubles the natural/artificial dichotomy, exposing what Eli Mandel has called the “perceptual flaw” of the “duality” of “self and landscape” within the history of Canadian criticism.26 It may well be that the “garish” suburban landscape will come to have as much influence on the postwar Canadian imagination as the wilderness, the north, and the small town have had in the past.

3

“The Bomb Is Only a Metaphor Now” Nevertheless, do not panic. Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What more do you want? Everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place everywhere. Jean Baudrillard

1

In “Disneyland,” an ironically named chapter of Barbara Gowdy’s novel Falling Angels, teenaged sisters Norma, Lou, and Sandy are promised a trip to Disneyland by their father. Several months later, the girls spend their vacation instead in the bomb shelter their father has constructed in the backyard of their postwar suburban home. For two weeks the entire family are “Pioneers of Self-Defence” whose daily routine is an ironic parody of everyday life in suburbia (55). The chapter’s title becomes an empty signifier: like “the bomb” that precipitated the building of so many fallout shelters during the cold war, Disneyland fails to materialize as a meaningful signifier. Instead, it represents the cul-de-sac readers and characters come up against whenever we try to find the Real in Gowdy’s suburbia. Disneyland, Niagara Falls, a bomb shelter, the Don ravine, and the subdivisions of Toronto’s suburbs are the most significant spatial tropes Gowdy uses in two of her novels, Falling Angels (1989) and The Romantic (2003), to evoke the experience of growing up female in suburbia during the sixties. Both novels are set in unspecified suburbs of Toronto reminiscent of Gowdy’s native Don Mills, the community Richard Harris describes as “the first major example of a new suburban type, the fully planned corporate suburb” in Canada.2 The lack of specificity lends the settings a generic quality, while also signifying the labyrinthine logic of suburban design that thwarts Gowdy’s characters’ quests to find meaningful spaces to call home. Harris contrasts suburban spaces from regional places in Canada when he observes that “a particular suburb is a place, in the same sense that Quebec City, say, is a place. But ‘suburbs’

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Eric Cole, Aerial Photo of Don Mills.

are a different type of place from, for example, ‘provinces’ or ‘regions.’ Regions are – in varying degrees but by their very definition – unique. Suburbs are  – in varying degrees but by definition  – generic.”3 This design quality is revealed in an aerial photograph of Don Mills from 1955, in which the view of serpentine streets and indistinguishable houses reinforces the visual appeal to a bucolic ideal (see figure 3.1). Don Mills appears separate and distinct from the distant urban core. Contained within itself, its streets and culs-de-sac loop back into each other like an elaborate maze. The design is meant to reinforce a sense of domestic security, protection for children from the ills of the city, from density, from traffic. But its maze-like effect is of containment and the impossibility of escape. Gowdy’s suburbia is also haunted by linguistic lack or absence, aggravated by the penchant for naming suburban neighbourhoods and streets according to a logic for which, as Kenneth Jackson has remarked, “accurate description is rather less important than bucolic imagery.”4 Finding something “real” in the quest for a home or sanctuary leads one back within a labyrinth constructed of signs to the discovery that

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the signifiers of suburbia, place-names like “Greenwoods,” “Greenhills,” “Pine Grove Park,” and “Deer Park subdivision,” have no meaningful signifieds. The recognition of this linguistic dead end is significant for almost every character that inhabits Canada’s literary suburbs. In Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream, for example, one narrator notes wryly that “the more decrepit and thoroughly paved the site, the more otherworldly or bucolic the name” (34). Judith in Carol Shield’s Small Ceremonies is similarly cynical about the name of the suburb where her family lives, Greenhills, and her difficulty locating it ontologically: “It is really nothing but the extension of a developer’s pencil,” she reflects, “the place on the map where he planned to plunk down his clutch of houses and make his million” (13). As Louise remarks in The Romantic, places such as Greenwoods take their names “from the oak and maple forests that developers have bulldozed” (24). In contrast to such cynicism, the developer himself gleefully cultivates the deception. In Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing, developer Jerry McGuinty derives a sense of mastery and power naming his subdivision “Pine Grove Park, because I jammed a few pine trees into the ground. It wasn’t a park, because it was covered with houses, but promoting developments is usually a matter of calling them what they aren’t. (I enjoyed that part of the plotting – being free to create my own world.)” (149) If “the bomb is only a metaphor,” if everything is only a signifier that leads back into itself, that leaves relatively few strategies to the suburbanite for symbolic resistance or literal escape. When the design and logic of a place is labyrinthine, it is no surprise that finding a way out is almost an impossibility, as the sisters’ failed attempt to run away from home suggests in Falling Angels. Those who do escape are typically associated with some form of deviant sexuality, like Louise’s mother in The Romantic, who is suspected of running off with a “fancy Dan” (154). Gowdy’s female characters often attempt both literal and symbolic escape from the repressive homogeneity of suburban culture through their sexuality: a fraught strategy, as the proliferation of aborted pregnancies in both texts attests. But sexuality, when it is expressed outside the confines of normative heterosexuality, also offers Gowdy’s characters a chance to think outside the logic of our “two-term universe.”5 Gowdy’s work further suggests that the cultivation of irony may also be the suburbanite’s best strategy for surviving an ironic landscape by adopting and parodying its double-speak. If, as Linda Hutcheon proposes, Canada has a “structural and temperamental affinity” to irony, can a similar argument be made about its suburban imaginary?6 For Hutcheon, the relationship is attached to the “inescapable doubleness

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(or even multiplicity) at the base of irony as a trope and the historical and cultural nature of Canada as a nation.”7 As other cultural critics have remarked, there is also an “inescapable doubleness” to suburbia, situated as it is between the extremes of city and country or wilderness. Peter Childs suggests that this doubleness is compounded by the fact that suburbia is never fixed; its “structural and temperamental” ambiguity mirrors its constantly “shifting” location as new developments and sprawl extend its borders and shift its proximity to the centre.8 If doubleness is “a familiar cliché about Canada,” this can also be argued of suburbia, where doubleness is highlighted by the ironic nature of place-names that have the potential to “disrupt our notions of meaning as something single, decidable, or stable.”9 In Australian literature, Roger Webster theorizes, an ambiguous suburbia has the potential to disrupt the stability of meaning: “Paradoxically, suburbia’s decentredness and depthlessness – its apparent lack of any profound cultural signifying status  – are at one level where the potency of suburbia lies. It has become a sterile zone, devoid of cultural and aesthetic value so that the very absence of signification becomes a haunting presence – a cultural and geographical ‘other.’ ” 10 Gowdy’s suburban oeuvre suggests that a similar argument can be made about Canadian suburbia, where it is the labyrinth of similarity and signification, if not the absence of it, that asserts its “haunting presence.” As Gowdy remarks, “when everything appears very much the same, you become more innately attuned to subtlety, just as a mother who has twins sees great difference in her children that nobody else does.”11 Like the Canadian nation, this space may also induce an “affinity” for irony and ambiguity that becomes the very condition of resistance and opposition. This is particularly crucial for those, like Gowdy’s protagonists, who have difficulty escaping, for as Hutcheon points out, “irony can potentially engage its critique from the inside of that which it contests. Saying one thing and meaning another … is certainly one way of subverting a dominant language from within.”12 As ironic readers of signs, Gowdy’s protagonists share with Atwood’s the “outsider-within” stance of resistance.

Falling Angels – Suburbia as Temporal and Spatial Labyrinth First published in 1989, Falling Angels was one of the first Canadian novels to be set in a community that felt very much like the one in which I grew up during the eighties, and which seemed at that time to

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be so nondescript as to be unrepresentable. Gowdy evokes more than she describes this landscape, as if it could be anywhere. We know the girls live in the suburbs only because they occasionally refer to their neighbourhood as “the subdivision,” for example, when their father refers to a local boy as “the garbage you got in the subdivision when you let apartments go up” (24). The generic, labyrinthine quality reaches a sublimely comedic height in the chapter, “Paradise 1960,” when the sisters try to run away from home; Lou’s sense of direction is confused by “the streets curling back on themselves” and “the houses all looking alike” (38). And when they ask a boy for directions, his response aptly conveys the impossibility of navigating a way out: “Go that way, then that way, then that way, then that way, then that way” (38). The plot of Falling Angels mirrors the suburban landscape in which it is set. Structured as a temporal labyrinth, it begins with a chapter entitled “Resurrection 1969,” in which the girls attend their mother’s funeral, then goes back in time to “Christmas 1959.” In this chapter, the sisters discover that their mother either dropped or threw her first-born child into Niagara Falls, an unthinkable act within the social economy of suburbia and its cult of domesticity. The narrative then moves through various points of the sixties before ending again in 1969 with “Vital Disconnection,” in which readers learn that the mother has either fallen or thrown herself to her death after climbing to the roof of their home. This act returns full circle to the ambiguity of the infant brother’s death, an event that haunts the narrative as a kind of familial myth of origins and accounts for the mother’s alcoholism and agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is a prevalent condition among mothers in Canadian suburban literature. Symbolically, it represents the alienation from place, space, and self that typifies the experience of the suburbanite, whose confinement within the domestic sphere seems to initiate a refusal of freedom much in the way that prisoners fear leaving their jail cells, or Lou neglects to find the key that will release her family from the bomb shelter. As Joyce Davidson argues, the agoraphobic’s experience of panic “destroys one’s sense of relatedness to other people, and locatedness in place, alienating the subject from the practices of everyday life.”13 Agoraphobia exhibits its own labyrinthine logic. The labyrinth is a spatio-temporal trope that recalls the Greek myth of Daedalus and the maze he built on Crete to contain the monstrous minotaur. When Daedalus and his son become imprisoned themselves, the only way out is through artifice and flight; Daedalus constructs wings of wax to facilitate his escape. In “Paradise 1960,” the girls construct their own elaborate escape plan when they run away from home, embarking

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on a journey that reads like an ironic parody of a fairy tale: “Plan A – walk north through the subdivision to the ravine, where they might find an old boxcar to live in. Eat fish from the river and wild berries. Plan B (in case there were no old boxcars) – take the bus into the city, to the orphanage” (36). In contrast to the island landscape of Crete, the suburban labyrinth is positioned between fantasies of self-sufficiency in the wilderness and the city’s imagined offerings of an institutional life. For Gowdy’s protagonists, the ravine is often the closest characters can get to nature and the wild. During their attempted escape, the girls begin walking north, where they first encounter the mendacity of suburban street names “like Deep Pine Woods and Shady Oak Hill, although there were no hills and just a few spindly maple trees held up by sticks, the same as on their street” (37). They become lost, paradoxically winding up, after a half hour of walking, back where they started (38). Unable to find the ravine, the sisters move on to Plan B, and wait in the hot sun for a bus (for if there are no trees in suburbia, there is no shade either) (39). Once they leave the bus, they pass through an unfamiliar, more urban landscape with “rows of buildings” and “poor, sad, foreign people … who couldn’t afford to live in the suburbs” (41). In Gowdy’s world, trees are the signifiers that identify different communities. In contrast to the “spindly” trees “held up by sticks” in their new subdivision, it is the “huge trees” as much as the mansions that tell the sisters they have entered an older, more established part of the city “where rich people live” (41, 42). To them, it is as if they have entered another world. Like hapless protagonists of a fantasy, the sisters end up in “Paradise” by accident, really a community of mansions reminiscent of Toronto’s Rosedale or Forest Hill – inner suburbs with a history that precedes the corporate era of development – where Norma, Lou, and Sandy enter a parody of a parallel world that is as strange to them as Wonderland to Alice. They are amazed by the lawns “bare of children and dandelions,” the coolness provided by trees, and by the fact that “nothing matches here,” for “the houses are all different” (42, 44). In this “fairyland of flowers” they meet an elderly man who offers them lemonade and even agrees to let the girls stay with him in his mansion (44). Despite the minor differences (such as the absence both of a television set and lemonade that comes in a can), however, the man’s home is really a larger, wealthier version of their own, with a kitchen like that in “Leave It to Beaver,” that most suburban of post-war television sitcoms (43). To the girls, it seems as if their escape from suburbia has been a success. There are clues, however, that all is not quite right in this “paradise.” The

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man has a parrot that squawks the word “Naughty,” and his attention toward Sandy, the prettiest of the sisters, is disturbing and inappropriate  (43). Ironically, the place of refuge, the paradise to which the labyrinth of suburbia leads, is neither the city nor the wilderness, but another suburb, albeit a more prosperous imitation of the ideal than their own home and neighbourhood. If the labyrinth offers the illusion of possible escape, the fallout shelter in “Disneyland 1961” is a structure of containment that offers no such promise. During the two weeks the family spends in their bomb shelter, not even biological occurrences like the arrival of Norma’s first period allows for deviance from the routine of “the Regime” (58).14 The bomb shelter is a microcosm of suburbia in which the female body must be contained and disciplined. During their stay, the girls have no choice but to submit to the disciplining of their bodies, following a chart that dictates when they can use the bathroom, exercise, and eat. The only available form of resistance is to steal swigs of whiskey from their mother’s coffee cup. The Regime is so effective that Lou will later wonder why she didn’t search for the key to the hatch during the times when her father passed out, having drunk too much whiskey when they ran out of water. The question haunts her “for the rest of her life. Why didn’t she escape?” (73) The question goes unanswered, suggesting that the quotidian massages bodies into compliance. Most models of both resistance and compliance offer unsatisfactory outcomes for the girls. They recognize that their agoraphobic mother is different from the other mothers in their neighbourhood, for “instead of doing housework all day and going outside now and then to shop or sweep the porch, their mother went outside once a year. The rest of the time, “from six in the morning until eleven at night, she watched TV” (11). She is so addicted to talk shows that she describes the absence of a TV during their stay in the bomb shelter as being “like losing one of your senses” (62). Her passive resistance to the cult of domesticity leads to stagnation and immobility. Their father, on the other hand, is at the other extreme, forcing his children into militant conformity with the suburban ideal, lining the girls up for inspection when he comes home from work, then going outside to look up and down the street, searching for “something to get in an uproar about: the neighbors’ dandelions, their dirty cars, their unshovelled driveways, their noisy kids” (20). In their own ways, Lou, Sandy, and Norma all search for a more meaningful existence beyond the extremes their parents represent. Just as biological necessity is not tolerated in the microcosm of the fallout shelter, deviation from gender and sexual norms in the

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microcosm of suburbia is unthinkable, particularly female sexual desire that is not contained within heterosexual marriage. While escape from the confining and claustrophobic environment of suburbia may be the ultimate goal, the protagonists of Falling Angels do try other strategies of resistance whose ends have more to do with survival than literal or figurative escape. Sexuality in particular offers an ambiguous opportunity for resisting the heterosexual imperative at the foundation of suburban culture. For young women, that ideal often meant fulfilling the roles of wife and mother, confined within the home and isolated from others. As Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique revealed, sexuality was often a diversion or escape for America’s suburban housewives in the fifties and sixties, particularly as an experience that might liberate them, however momentarily, from a life of emptiness: “For the woman who lives according to the feminine mystique, there is no road to achievement, or status, or identity, except the sexual one: the achievement of sexual conquest, status as a desirable sex object, identity as a sexually successful wife and mother.”15 Lou’s first sexual experience can be interpreted ambivalently as both a deliberate attempt to resist this destiny, and an attempt to reconcile with it. The first target of her sexual mission, Lance Nipper, is a local oddity, the “boy with the metal plate in his head” that was “supposed to make him normal” but that left him “crazy for other metal things” (23). Lou imagines that she is “magnetized” by Lance’s “metal plate tugging at the zipper on her jacket and the buckles on her boots” and follows him home (24). Lance’s ambiguous position within the community, the fact that he fails to be made “normal” by the metal plate, makes him an ideal sexual object for Lou. As an outsider herself, it is the connection to another, the need to feel that she isn’t completely alone, that motivates her desire for sexual experience. At Lance’s apartment, Lou is confronted by another model of stagnated feminine resistance when she meets Lance’s mother, who, like her own, can barely turn her attention from the television long enough to register Lou’s presence. Ironically, it is after she hears a beer ad on TV exploiting the rhetoric of gendered suburban norms (“The wife most likely to be kissed always puts beer on her list”) that Lou becomes afraid, suggesting it is not simply the menacing Lance she fears, but “something she couldn’t put her finger on,” an unconscious dread of turning out like Lance’s mother, or her own (25). Sex inevitably leads to an unwanted pregnancy and abortion for Lou. Just as the sisters’ quest for “paradise” ends ironically, Lou represents her return from the abortionist as a cynical parody of Dorothy’s return

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home in The Wizard of Oz. “But here I am. And this is my room. And you’re all here. And there’s no place like home” she tells her sisters. Lou questions Dorothy’s decision to leave Oz and return to Kansas, to “a wrecked house, poverty, no friends for miles. And Elmira Gultch is still going to take Toto to the pound” (171). The allusion is particularly apt, echoing the strong ideology of home and family produced by North American popular culture that legitimized the suburban ideal. Lou’s abortion brings an ironic end to the ambivalent possibility of escape through the promise of domestic fulfillment offered by her pregnancy. Serendipitously, Lou’s pregnancy coincides with Sandy’s, but for the younger sister, pregnancy is the result of her attempts to find legitimacy for her sexuality within the community. After a sexual relationship with twin brothers, Sandy fears she has become a “nymphomaniac” and begins dating a football player, primarily to prove to her friends that she hasn’t become a lesbian (141). Her sexuality, then, becomes an attempt to deny her own deviance from the norm, which she has hitherto expressed in a longing for older men. Metaphorically, pregnancy in Gowdy’s texts places the characters in a state of liminality that mirrors their spatial and temporal states of adolescent becoming. The decision to end or to continue this state is extremely significant, for it presages the nature of their reincorporation into their community and the kind of relationships they will have, as adults, with suburbia and its ideological foundations. Lou’s abortion endorses her resistance to the seductive pull of the feminine mystique while Sandy is left in this liminal state at the end of the text. She appears willing to go through with her pregnancy; her decision suggests that she will be the sister most likely to follow in their mother’s footsteps. Surprisingly, the most well-adjusted character in the novel is Norma. The least physically attractive of the three sisters (she is often referred to as “the fat girl”), Norma also appears to be the most innocent (3). But it would be unfair to dismiss her as lacking in complexity. As a teenager who does not share her sisters’ more active social lives, Norma seeks approval and affection from her father by assisting him with that most suburban of activities: finishing the basement.16 After her drunken father touches her inappropriately while teaching her to drive, Norma loses her innocence, discovering a “toughness” within herself and rediscovering her “old common sense” (139). When she falls in love with “her dream girl,” Stella, Norma is not deluded by vague ideas that her desire will offer escape. Of all the relationships in the text, Norma’s love for Stella is also the only love that is not primarily motivated by a desire to possess. Recognizing that “Stella getting a

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boyfriend is long overdue and inevitable,” Norma decides to enjoy a fleeting romantic but asexual relationship that offers her a momentary respite from banality (165). As in many of Gowdy’s works, a homosocial or homosexual relationship represents hope, even if its end is inevitable, or if it leads nowhere in the labyrinth of desire.17 There is irony here, of course. As sexuality without reproduction, homosexuality is a rejection not only of normative heterosexuality in the suburban social economy; like abortion, it also puts a metaphoric end to the dizzying chain of duplication and simulation, “the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real” that makes the suburban labyrinth resonate so well with Baudrillard’s simulacra.18 Each of these outcomes is an ambivalent way out of the confining norms of suburbia, as symbolized by the metaphors of the labyrinth and the bomb shelter. If the promise of paradise leads to a mansion in a wealthier suburb of Toronto, and Disneyland is a bomb shelter in the backyard, then it makes perfect sense that the text should end with the girls escaping no further than Niagara Falls. As a natural wonder of the world surrounded by a hyper-artificial built environment of wax museums, freak shows, and sex shops, Niagara Falls is something of an ironic parody of suburbia. Like Baudrillard’s “Disneyland Imaginary,” it “is the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation” in a culture Baudrillard characterizes as “hyperreal” because there is no longer an originary “real,” only “models of a real without origin or reality.”19 Disneyland, he remarks, “is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland.”20 Niagara Falls both conceals and reveals the simulated artificiality of North American suburban culture.

The Romantic – Suburbia as Linguistic Labyrinth Like Falling Angels, The Romantic could be set in any Canadian suburb. In this novel, however, Gowdy is far more specific about the landscape, reflecting the greater awareness of narrator and protagonist, Louise. That she shares a name with the most knowing of the sisters in Falling Angels invites comparison; but Louise is the “twin” more “innately attuned to subtlety.” As a motherless only child, she is something of an outsider in Greenwoods, a position that contributes to a heightened sensitivity to her surroundings. At an early age, Louise is far more capable than Lou of recognizing the duplicitous nature of the suburban spaces – and the names of those spaces – around her. But she is also more intrigued by the pull to romanticize them.

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Louise’s first experience with the superficiality of suburbia occurs when she spends two weeks at a children’s day camp called “Camp Wanawingo” held in the nearby ravine. The children are led by a White counsellor named “Big Bear,” who teaches them how “to be an Indian,” which means “gathering twigs for the sputtering campfire and weeding a mostly dead vegetable garden planted by the campers from the first session” (8). They also search for “Indian artifacts” that can only be found by “the eagle-eyed and pure of heart” (8). As in Falling Angels, readers and protagonists are confronted again by a spatial trope that leads nowhere. “Wanawingo” is an empty signifier, a neologism that sounds like an Indigenous loan word. “Big Bear” is likewise a White imposter donning the signs of Indigeneity in this “supposedly Huron” camp (93). The “noon-time shouting of the camp motto” from the campers at Wanawingo suggest that the ravine has come to be little more than a representation to suburbanites of what they think are more authentic Canadian wilderness spaces. Once again, the search for an authentic space within suburbia leads nowhere within a linguistic labyrinth in which the referents of signifiers are merely nostalgic signs of a culture whose historical past and contemporary presence have been erased.21 As Baudrillard writes, “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”22 The violent spatial and symbolic displacement of Indigenous peoples and cultures becomes evident, revealing the place of suburban development in the history of White settler colonialism in Canada. Particularly relevant to my reading of Gowdy’s “Camp Wanawingo” is the recognition, as Roger Kiel argues, that suburban and settler colonialism marginalize “Indigenous people out of consciousness or even material existence,” while “the taking and subdividing of land” is implicated in a naturalization of “white privilege” and “suburban home- and asset-ownership.”23 Although the ravine is the closest the children of Greenwoods can get to the wilderness, they are also aware that it is a natural space that has not been left untouched by the influences of industry and the drive for development. Far from being a space of undeveloped wilderness, the landscape is polluted by the presence of a “sludge factory” that causes the boys who swim in the river to get “rashes” and “smell” (94). Significantly, Louise’s narrative voice never calls attention to the irony of the factory’s name, suggesting that it has no other purpose than to produce “sludge” or waste, making it one of the few places in the community to be named literally. As Amy Lavender Harris remarks, “the Don River … had grown so sluggish with effluent and silt that an environmental organization held a mock funeral for the river in

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1969.”24 Yet the ravine does offer Louise and Abel, the childhood friend who eventually becomes the object of her romantic obsession, a place of refuge. Unlike the characters in Falling Angels who become lost in the labyrinthine subdivisions and never find the ravine, Louise and Abel spend a large part of their childhood exploring its natural spaces and animal life. Although the artificial, adult world of suburbia often intrudes on the isolation they seek (as when Louise finds a drunken vagrant outside her “tee-pee”), the ravine offers the children a space in which to imagine other realities (94). The imaginative possibilities represented by the ravine become Louise’s romantic “texts,” formed and limited by her narrow experiences with Camp Wanawingo. After her mother abandons her family and disappears, Louise becomes fixated on a plan to be adopted by Abel’s mother, Mrs Richter, the exotic German woman who stands out from the crowd of similar suburban mothers in her neighbourhood. At the ravine, she constructs a tee-pee and makes believe that she is “an orphaned Indian princess called Little Feather” adopted by Mrs Richter, who becomes “a captured German settler” in the fantasy, “renamed Nightingale” and married to the chief (92). The fantasy is a romantic parody of North American captivity narratives, demonstrating Louise’s ability to construct alternative realities to those offered by her suburban culture. Yet Louise’s fantasy also demonstrates her tendency to focus on others to provide her with a sense of identity. “It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself” Friedan suggests.25 The recognition is crucial; as the most important character to be identified with “the Romantic” of the title, Louise frequently indulges in romantic illusions that focus on others to give meaning to her life; first on Mrs Richter, and later on, Abel, without whom she feels she has “nobody left being interesting for” and is “nothing” (131). Such moments also imply Louise’s mistrust in the duplicitous use of language to name places and things by that which they are not. As she learns to see through the logic of suburbia and identify the illusions behind “Greenwoods” and “Camp Wanawingo,” Louise also comes to develop a facility for irony. Hers is a “Romantic Irony,” a term Hutcheon associates with “a recognition of a reality different from appearance,” and also with a mode of writing “in which the text creates an artistic illusion only to destroy it by revealing its own process of arbitrary manipulation or construction.”26 This ability to acknowledge that “nothing is what it seems” (18) will enable her to resist the pull of nostalgia by revealing her complicit manipulation of the real in her own romantic texts, and in the settler-colonial fantasies she first learned in

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Wanawingo. As Louise explains, the undoing of her romantic fantasies is closely connected to her recognition that places will fail her with their promise of sanctuary: “As an adult, whenever I move out of a flat or apartment (which will happen regularly enough that I’ll never have to defrost a refrigerator) I’ll feel exactly as I do now: that the place failed me in its promise of peace and impregnability” (103). Louise’s restlessness and frequent moves as an adult are ironic given the fact that homeownership was the ultimate sign of stability for suburban culture in the fifties and sixties. As Kenneth Jackson writes in Crabgrass Frontier, “homeownership was regarded as a counterweight to the rootlessness of an urbanizing population.”27 For Louise, “upheaval is the point: fixable, household upheaval created to distract me from myself” (308). This recognition will be reinforced as she becomes aware of the falseness of the place-names of suburbia, so much so that she is in fact shocked when she is confronted by a city-dweller who refers to his apartment building as “Willow House” without “irony in his tone” for there are, in fact, “willows in the yard” (237). Interestingly, like the sisters in Falling Angels, it is at a mansion  – the most perfect signifier of the suburban ideal – that Louise has an epiphany, revealing the connection between romantic illusion and the duplicity of perception. While attending a party, Louise makes her way to the yard where she sits beside what she takes to be a pond full of ducks: But they’re not ducks, as I realize after a moment. They’re geese. And the pond … the pond is a wide place in a creek. “Nothing is what it seems,” I think. I find this to be a deeply exciting idea. I sense a faint flash of light to my left, and I hold my breath, wondering if it’s angels. For as long as I can remember I’ve been prone to seeing scarves of white light out of the corners of my eyes, especially when I’m keyed up, and I call them angels because the air around me seems to get somehow purer and emptier, a really spooky feeling. I have this feeling now. (18) As a child, Louise refers to this experience of light as the “Angel of Love,” making it a romantic ideal that is evoked first by her love and desire for Mrs Richter, and later for Abel (78). In the passage quoted above, Louise represents her experience with the angel in a way that highlights the process of its construction as an “artistic illusion;” while she knows  the angels are simply “scarves of light” in her vision, she

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chooses to call them “angels,” a romantic illusion that more closely evinces the feeling of purity and emptiness that accompanies their appearance. Ironically, it is a rather banal misrecognition of fowl and creeks that enables Louise to identify the vagaries of perception, leading her to reach the rather profound discovery that “nothing is what it seems” in her world. While Louise is certainly capable of recognizing the “doubleness” inherent in both suburban place-names and within the texts of her own romantic fantasies, the choices she makes throughout the text demonstrate that she is not always capable of resisting the seductive pull of words, particularly when they offer her the illusion in which she desires to believe. She abandons a strong relationship with Troy, a man who loves her “unconditionally,” the moment Abel returns to her life (302). Although she knows Abel is incapable of loving her as Troy does, Louise chooses to believe he loves her “now and forever” when others validate the fantasy (339). At such times, she is like the moths she and Abel watch as children. An allusion to James Thurber’s fable of the “Moth and the Star,” they become a recurring symbol of the self-destructive potential of human nature and the desire to love: navigating by the moon, Louise reflects on the possibility that moths “don’t understand shades of resemblance. To them, if a thing looks enough like another thing, it is that other thing. All lights are the Moon. The moth is all other moths, and all other moths are the moth” (118). Similarly, Louise is vulnerable to occasional moments of “blind faith” in words, in the belief that the relationship between names and their referents is not arbitrary, that the word “love” means the same thing to Abel as it does to her. Such moments draw attention to the constant tension inherent in any form of “doubling” discourse, of the willingness to be seduced by the promise of meaning while at the same time recognizing the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified. This ambiguity is highlighted by a discussion Louise has with Abel when he is very close to dying from complications created by his alcoholism. For Abel, living close to the edge of death results in a different relationship to language and to things. “Everything is exactly what it is” he explains to Louise. “Everything is itself” (250). When Louise misses his point, Abel constructs a rather complicated argument about the nature of language – again in relation to birds – in which the relationship between signifier and signified is both meaningless and pregnant with meaning:

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“The pigeons,” he says. “They’re not trees or cats or measuring cups. They’re pigeons. They moan, they make their flimsy nest, lay their white eggs. They aren’t right or wrong or important or unimportant or anyone’s name for them. Out of oblivion came these nameless things.” “And then came a name for them.” “The snake in paradise. You say to yourself ‘pigeon’ and the pigeon before your eyes is corrupted by everything you know about pigeons. You see your idea of a pigeon.” “Because you can’t help it. Because out of oblivion came a mouth. And vocal cords. And a brain.” “And then one day the names drop away. They don’t matter. They don’t tell you anything.” (250) For Abel then, names no longer matter because he recognizes that “they don’t tell you anything” about the things they name; living in “oblivion” as he does as an alcoholic, Abel somehow manages to experience “things” in a manner that is no longer mediated by language or by an arbitrary code of meaning contained within words. There are moments when the text appears to romanticize Abel’s alcoholism and his ability to remove himself from the ordinary relationship between the physical world and our linguistic system. Yet Abel, Louise, Troy, and Louise’s father are among the many characters that could be signified by the novel’s title. Like Louise, Abel could be one of the moths incapable of recognizing “shades of resemblance” and attracted to his own destruction, particularly when he romanticizes oblivion. Significantly, Abel is perhaps the least ironic character in the text, a fact which also may have something to do with his inability or refusal to continue existing, although he is only twenty-six when he dies. In this text, the human need to cling to romantic illusions, to believe in the relationship between names and the things they name, is what makes us marvellously vulnerable. We seem to be moving far away from suburbia, yet there are curious moments in the text when Gowdy very clearly ties together seemingly unrelated threads. Language and the body are located in space, and the connections between them come together in the local parkette where Louise confesses her pregnancy to a friend during a walk to school that recalls the labyrinthine wanderings of the sisters in Falling Angels: “The walk is a little under a mile, not far compared to the distance some kids have to travel. Our route goes through the subdivision to a small plaza

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(barber shop, smoke shop, bank, milk store, beauty salon), around the plaza into Matas Parkette with its wooden benches and granite statue of Dr. Adolph T. Matas, 1812–1882, Physician, Surgeon and Linguist, Friend to All (which doesn’t stop people from saying Doctor Fat Ass and Fat Ass Park), then along a sidewalk that runs adjacent to a main road” (132). The parkette is ironically named after a medical doctor and surgeon who is also a linguist, bringing the physical and linguistic spheres together in a rather banal suburban place setting. (Parkettes are a favoured setting for moments of critical epiphanies in Gowdy’s fiction. It is in such a “little park” containing only “a green bus stop bench and a drinking fountain hidden among the only big trees in the subdivision” that Norma kisses Stella in Falling Angels (183).) When Louise arrives in Vancouver to tell Abel about her pregnancy, it is in a small “strip of public lawn landscaped with cedar trees and shrubs, a few slabs of granite, a drinking fountain” where she watches for Abel to emerge from his home (156). That such banal suburban spaces should be the setting for moments of crucial importance to the characters is part of Gowdy’s ability to lend significance to the seemingly trivial details of everyday life. Since Matas is an invented and not an historical figure, we can assume that his seemingly unrelated occupations as “physician, surgeon, and linguist” are no coincidence; he is an odd figure to be honoured in a suburban parkette. His granite statue becomes a monument to the interrelatedness of body and language. Unplanned pregnancies are a common motif and metaphor for liminality in Gowdy’s suburban fiction, occurring in Falling Angels, Mr. Sandman, and The Romantic. For some characters, most notably Lou and Louise, the pregnancies end in abortion; failing to bring about any kind of meaningful beginning for the characters, the pregnancies don’t materialize as the usual symbols of rebirth. Yet they do signify a movement toward a new kind of relationship to language, the real, and their communities. While Lou’s abortion is performed by a “quack” appropriately named “Dr. Dickey” (171, 167), Louise causes her own miscarriage by drinking a concoction created for her by Mrs Carver, the mute housekeeper who becomes a pseudo-mother figure for Louise after her mother abandons her. Louise has many “pseudo-mothers,” and it is noteworthy that this text, like Falling Angels, ends with a recuperation of respect for female relationships. Louise learns after Abel’s death to better appreciate her relationships with other women, and it could be argued that her desires return full circle to the feminine, to seeking the love of a maternal figure like Mrs Richter. As in Falling Angels and

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Mr. Sandman, Gowdy returns to the possibility that romantic desire expressed outside the narrow bounds of reproductive sexuality may be the suburban body’s most potent act of resistance. It can be argued that the aborted pregnancies in both Falling Angels and The Romantic represent moments of what Baudrillard refers to as “implosion.” As examples of ironic proliferation without birth, they mirror the sprawling nature of suburbia, which is itself a powerful trope for Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra and the “rampant” growth that brings us to the point of inertia in the postmodern world. “There is something particularly disgusting about this atrocious uselessness,” Baudrillard remarks in “The Anorexic Ruins.” “It is the disgust for a world that is growing, accumulating, sprawling, sliding into hypertrophy, a world that cannot manage to give birth.”28 Perhaps this slide into “hypertrophy” is what the characters of Gowdy’s fiction resist most in their everyday suburban existences; certainly it is not the banal, for as Gowdy’s work shows, even the most insignificant details, such as the ontology of birds, or the most ordinary of settings like Matas parkette and the Don ravine, can represent moments or places where a vital change in consciousness can occur. If non-reproductive sexuality and desire are the suburban body’s best defence against the hypertrophy of suburban proliferation, they also offer the suburban subject an effective escape from the labyrinth of its signifying process, an opportunity to glean what has been “wiped off the map.”

PART TWO Corporate Suburbia after 1970

4

Master Plans

As Jane Jacobs observes in her 1993 foreword to John Sewell’s The Shape of the City, master plans, “both the name and the concept,” are “reeking of hubris.” Jacobs was critiquing the “rules, regulations, standards and subsidies” that make up “Modern City Planning,” in urban and suburban design and development during the postwar period.1 Likewise, suburban studies scholar Roger Keil refers to Canadian suburbia as a “planned tragedy” that was designed according to “three connected aspects of low density urban form, private homeownership and an automobile infrastructure.”2 In the novels of part one, published or set during the heyday of modern suburban development from 1945–1970, the built environments created by such master plans impact the values, behaviours, and experiences of individual characters. Set in the immediate years following WWII, Atwood’s Joan Foster and Elaine Risley come of age concurrently alongside their inner suburban “lagoons of postwar mud,” but their development as artists requires a rejection of its values and culture. In Gowdy’s body of fiction, young women of the sixties navigate the labyrinthine social, cultural, and physical landscapes of a fictional community that resembles Gowdy’s native Don Mills, Canada’s first planned community. Although published earlier than Atwood’s and Gowdy’s novels, The Fire-Dwellers and The Weekend Man mark a transition – temporally and spatially – in the history of Canadian suburbia, when “the corporate plan superseded the planner’s plan.”3 Contemporary suburbs in Canada have become even more difficult to define, as indicated by the multiplicity of designations used by historians, geographers, and scholars of suburban studies to identify and

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distinguish their various manifestations. Some use “corporate suburbs” or “developer suburbs” to refer to planned, large-scale suburbs on the edge of large cities, designed and developed following the precedent of business tycoon E.P. Taylor’s and urban planner Macklin Hancock’s Don Mills.4 Yet, as geographers Evenden and Walker point out, an alternate history of modern suburban design, garden suburbs like that of Toronto’s Flemingdon Park, follows “British and Scandinavian precedents … said to derive from Le Corbusier,” that offer “mixed housing and designed open spaces: an innovative, integrated cluster of apartment blocks, garden apartments, and row houses, along with community facilities.”5 This mixed housing model is the setting for some of the books I analyze in part two; countering suburban stereotypes, they also anticipate the “post-suburbia,” “exurbia,” and “edge city” landscapes of places like Fort McMurray in Alberta or Surrey in British Columbia, or the edge cities surrounding Toronto such as Brampton, Markham, Mississauga, Scarborough, and Vaughan. Described as “cities in waiting,” these “emergent sites of urbanity at the cutting edge of suburban transformation” are compelling for the ways that they “radically reorient … centre-periphery dynamics.”6 Part two of this book explores fiction set and published during this period of transformation of the Canadian landscape to a more corporate model of suburban development from 1970, when, as historian Richard Harris argues, “suburban diversity has become systematized … so that a new local stereotype has emerged: that of the declining inner suburb.”7 John Sewell argues for contrasting values, “social relations and expectations” in his comparison between urban and suburban design on behaviour, focusing primarily on the differences created by modes of transportation. In cities, he argues, “transit promotes a sense of community” and “tolerance,” whereas the suburbanite’s “private car … promotes a sense of individuality.”8 I find his binary too simplistic, given my agreement with Addie et. al that “it is impossible now to imagine the suburbs neatly sequestered spatially and socially from a categorically different ‘inner city.’”9 Yet I share Sewell’s point that “the design of settlement areas  … affects human behaviour” and argue that the stories in this study are all concerned with investigating the relationship between humans and spaces, while also challenging the stereotypes that infuse the Canadian suburban imaginary. Novels and short story collections reflect this historical and cultural shift; set in corporate suburban communities planned and developed for profit, but also in consideration of livability, they also focus less on individual and more on ensemble casts of characters and/or multiple narrative perspectives.

Master Plans

Fig. 4.1

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Lynch, Gerald. Map of Troutstream.

The texts demonstrate a certain self-conscious wrestling with the idea and ambiguity of the suburbs, and with the nature of the impacts on human behaviour of suburban design and development. Crisis seems to typify this relationship, characterized by a tension between sprawl as an ill-conceived yet unstoppable force of movement and the re-territorialization of other spaces, and suburbia’s opposing inclination toward settlement, stasis, and stability. For the masculine narrators of Gerald Lynch’s 1995 short-story cycle, Troutstream, and Colin McAdam’s 2004 novel, Some Great Thing, hubris resonates in their complex relationship to the natural and built environments surrounding Canada’s national capital, Ottawa. Like Wes Wakeham, men in these novels experience the design, development, and culture of Canadian suburbs as interrelated forces that impinge on their individual crises of masculinity. Historically, the fact that the development and design of suburban Ottawa coincided with the second-wave feminist movement almost certainly had an influence on the crises of masculinity these texts depict, as women moved beyond the separate suburban

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sphere and the domestic roles associated with it. In Some Great Thing, for example, the threat to a cohesive masculine subjectivity is articulated in the binary opposition between stasis and mobility; it is the increasing mobility of women who refuse to be confined to the suburban home that is perceived as the catalyst of the narrators’ insecurity. In Troutstream, multiple male narrators grapple with the ways the design of their community contains them and their desires. The common response is an attempt to restore a sense of control by imposing a more extreme form of masculine agency, either through acts of scopophilic voyeurism, or by participating in the planning and development of suburbia. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “scopophilia” to convey a particular “pleasure in looking,” as understood at the intersections of psychoanalysis and media studies “in relation to the dominance of the male gaze in classical Hollywood cinema.” I am interested in the ways that the voyeurism of men in suburban settings is represented as a process akin to that of male spectators of film, who engage in the erotic pleasure of looking at the bodies of others without being seen themselves. It is therefore a process of objectification of women’s bodies, but also of “narcissistic … identification with an ideal ego.”10 In either case, the quest to reassert masculine mastery requires the characters adopt “invisible” and “all-powerful” personas as omniscient, omnipotent narrators of their stories. Inevitably, their attempts fail, exposing the destabilizing potential of such hubristic “master plans,” to the men, to their communities, and also to their stories.

As Seen by Stroboscope: Suburban Ottawa circa 1990 in Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream Set in the outskirts of Ottawa a decade later than The Weekend Man, Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream offers a representation of a fictional suburb similar to Union Place that also appeals primarily to visuality and that emphasizes, through the perspectives of several different male narrators, the predisposition of its design toward containment and entrapment, voyeurism and surveillance. Visual containment is reinforced by a map of Troutstream that precedes the stories, and by a table of contents that organizes the stories by housing type, with each subdivision representing different economic classes within the community (see figure 4.1). Part I is called “Garden Homes,” Part II “The Complex,” and Part III “The Project,” suggesting that the community was planned according to a mixed-housing model offering a variety of private and public housing types, less focused on the ideal of homeownership and the stereotypical

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homogeneity of the middle-class suburb. In the first story of the cycle, “Anglers Court,” the narrator emphasizes the appeal to visuality by describing the landscape using terminology from the visual arts: “circular by design and self-contained by greenbelt, Troutstream will eventually deliver walkers back to where they began, conveying the impression that, in the pictorial sense, the setting has no real background, only a foreground of garden homes and a midground of parks and trees” (18). However bucolic in its conception, Troutstream is decidedly not the privileged community of little boxes so often associated with North American suburbia. Troutstream’s emphasis on visuality is connected to its insistence that we recognize the relationship between reading and voyeurism, a recognition that is imperative if Troutstream is to succeed as a short-story cycle in the tradition Lynch has written about as an academic. In “The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles,” Lynch argues that the short-story cycle provides “opportunities for the exploration of place and character” and “offers formal possibilities that allow its practitioners the freedom to challenge, whether intentionally or not, the totalising impression of the traditional novel of social and psychological realism.”11 Lynch regards the short-story cycle as an appropriate genre for representing “the struggles of small communities for coherence and survival” and “the tension between the one and the many.”12 More importantly, however, Lynch also argues that the form is “unique for the way in which it often reflects the exploration of the failure of place and character to unify a work,” an idea that is particularly compelling when the kind of place being represented is a place like suburbia, where isolation and sprawl notoriously preclude the possibility of a cohesive community.13 In contrast to the visually appealing north end of Troutstream, the more working-class neighbourhood of the Complex is described by another unnamed narrator as “deep in rows of town houses like barracks,” in which the architectural and settlement design work in tandem to keep residents trapped in a cycle of change and desire: In the Complex the one constant is accelerating change, in the personalities of fathers, the fortunes of women and children, in neighbours, even in the silent speed at which TV channels are incessantly switched. While the only things that really change are the objects of constant desire: yesterday for love, today for eternal youth; today for a steady pay-cheque, tomorrow for immortality; or tomorrow for a little relief, and the day after

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for uninterrupted happiness; or yesterday for tomorrow and today for yesterday. Desire goes round and round and round till all’s eaten up, and there remains only the black hole of pitiable engorged desire itself, climaxing with a big bang into infinity again, starting over. (67) By comparing the Complex to military housing and emphasizing its circularity graphically on his map, Lynch creates a space in which the daily lives of indistinguishable residents are caught in a never-ending loop of unfulfilled yearning. It is as if the very design of the community is responsible for containing desire to the point of implosion, a quality that plays a part in the masculine characters’ experiences with the landscape as figuratively emasculating. This idea is reinforced by the narrative of teacher and Elvis impersonator Frank O’Donaghue. In “Shall I Come Back Again?” Frank describes the Complex as a “maze” that has been made even more self-contained by a bypass that cuts the community off from Ottawa: “On a map it already appears bypassed: a green oasis surrounded by protective greenbelt a good fifteen kilometres east of Ottawa” he explains. “It’s laced with crescents and culs-de-sac within crescents within crescents, not a straight sidewalk to be trod, so that a lunch-hour walk leads me back to where I began, enclosed in a secure circuit, within a green enclosure”  (112). Troutstream is a planned community designed by a graduate student in urban planning to mimic “the epitome of the 1950s suburban dream,” with meandering country-like roads and plentiful greenspace (17). Ironically, however, the master plan that was meant to provide suburbanites with an expansive feeling of freedom and fulfillment leads instead to dissatisfaction and entrapment. Its labyrinthine structure inhibits pedestrianism, and renders escape impossible. Lynch takes this experience a step further in the stories set in the Project, subsidized housing that is home to Troutstream’s drifters, single mothers, and an assortment of lost souls like Sam Blank, narrator of the appropriately titled story, “Peeking Man.” Blank sardonically describes the Project as a “pastel-coloured ersatz chateaux so crammed together that simultaneously opened front doors bang into each other. Everywhere you look in this poor Project new things are freshly broken, or new things are already peeling, everything smaller than life” (187). The layout of the Project makes privacy a privilege the poor are not afforded, for as Blank explains, “in the effort to cram in the required number of units, the builder broke faith with the architect and wedged a couple of units right outside my back window” (187). This construction flaw

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has created a situation ideal for Blank’s voyeuristic tendencies. Indeed, the novel suggests that the very design of this built environment fosters a scopophilic gaze with extensive implications for the ways suburbia’s stories are told: omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent styles are invoked by each of the male narrators as they struggle to become “masters” of their tales. Troutstream’s voyeurs are more self-conscious and self-aware than Wes when it comes to their roles as narrators, and the text constantly draws our attention to the acts of looking or watching. The connection between narrative mastery and suburban space is symbolized by a hole in the barrier that separates the Troutstream Bypass from the residential area. Frank O’Donoghue uses the hole to watch as workers construct the Bypass that is meant to ensure Troutstream’s isolation from the highway traffic that transfers commuters from suburb to city (112). For Frank, however, the hole symbolizes the impossibility of that dream. As he explains, “The green barrier protecting me from the sights and sounds of the new Bypass had seemed the green icing on our communal green cake. Until from my bathroom window I spotted the hole” (112). The hole becomes a fixation for Frank as he descends into mental illness, believing it is evidence of the return of Elvis Presley – or the “Vegas Porker” as Frank refers to him – the figure he believes responsible for the murders of two girls in Troutstream (132). This adds another layer of connotation to the symbol; there is a hole in the fabric of suburbia’s safety net, and because of this hole, the hubris of its design – its fabricated security and isolationism – are exposed. For Troutstream’s narrators, voyeurism functions as compensation for a loss of control over their lives and their living spaces, which they experience as a threat to their masculinity. Norman Gray, narrator of the “Movement” story in the “Garden Homes” section, confesses to a kind of “displaced voyeurism” when he watches his landlady’s son play doctor with a local girl (43). Norman is capable of distancing himself sexually from the incident, but he exploits it to resist emasculation by his landlady when she threatens to evict him and his pregnant wife. The theme is more fully developed in Sam Blank’s characterization. Blank’s name suggests that he engages in voyeurism to compensate for emptiness in his subjectivity. He projects his feelings of impotence into the imaginary figure of “Big Jacques,” described in the list of “principal characters” as “the last male dinosaur, a brontosaurus, the fantastic projection of Sam Blank” (x). Blank’s musings on Big Jacques’s last days before extinction invite comparison to suburbia’s impending doom, and to his perception of

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the current state of male-female relations: “Silence, dark, dark silence, dark and bottomless, and a cold black wind a-blowin’ across the world. Is it not what awaits us all? All of us, women who will have become Masters of All Matter, gone with the solar wind. And men so sensitive they refused to mate any more, gone beforehand. And who will rebuild from nothing? Without the jizz? Without the Big Guy? Go ahead and laugh if you want, but you just try it, Missy” (179). Clearly, Sam conflates women’s usurpation of masculine mastery over “all matter” with the emasculation of men and the end of the world. (His address to “Missy” also identifies his reader in a belittling manner as feminine.) Ironically, he indulges in the fantasy as he sits “in the dark waiting for the show to start” (176). The “show” refers to Sam’s private “peep show,” performed by the female neighbours whose bedroom window is directly across from his. His scopophilia is symptomatic of a condition that is exacerbated by suburban design, in which face-to-face interaction is inhibited. Sam attempts to rationalize this activity by comparing it to “an undeclared marriage sanctioned  – nay, sanctified  – at heaven’s convenience counter: voyeur meets and falls madly in love with three exhibitionists” (214). Yet he also admits to a need for a more meaningful relationship with the women, fighting a recent “impulse to bang on the window, or to put my fist or face through it, or to take a running leap, my very body a feminist grapple” (213). As with Wes, Sam’s voyeurism reflects a desire for connection, and he invites us to identify with him in this respect. He teases his readers for our need to analyze his behaviour and distance ourselves from it: “Do you still think there are other than material-biological answers for the likes of me? A faulty sense of proprioception, my proprioceptors skewed chemically, with consequent failure to appropriate my personal property, my proper person, fully. You see, I have lived always at a great remove from my own body, unhoused at home, like an artist disconnected from his sensory material means, with my God’s prank of a cock like a snail’s horn” (214). His use of metaphor is compelling: Sam experiences his own physicality as uncanny; he is as unheimlich in his own body as he is in the suburban space he calls home, a character flaw that contributes to his crisis of masculinity (and one, as we shall see, that he shares with both Jerry McGuinty and Simon Struthers of Some Great Thing). Sam is frank about the erotic appeal and pleasures of his scopophilic gaze, which he justifies as compensation for bodily alienation. Moreover, he compares his voyeurism to “watching tv in the dark,” which his friend Nigel euphemistically refers to as “scoping Tombstone” (214, 189).

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At the end of his narrative, Blank addresses readers directly with a challenge to compare our own readerly pleasure to his scopophilic urge, likening the window from which he looks to the book upon which we gaze: “And come to think of it, just what the fuck are you doing here? Who asked you to sneak in here, with your greasy chops and buttery fingers peeking into my life, eh? Like, get your own fucking window! Look up, look out: there’s a whole real world out there, mein literary voyageur, mon semblable voyeur. Close the fucking book already!” (215) Implicit in Sam’s challenge is an appeal to empathy and mutuality. To explain what drives him to sit “here in the dark, waiting for the show to start,” Sam confesses “I do it because it has nothing to do with me” (215). Voyeurism, then, can provide the same sort of escape from the banality of living that reading and watching television offer, answering the desire to possess knowledge and mastery over the stories of others. This representation of voyeurism recurs in Some Great Thing with Simon, who watches people in order to know them and to compensate for his own sense that he lacks meaningful stories of his own, a common ailment for suburbanites that may also be found in Carol Shield’s Small Ceremonies. Sam Blank’s challenge that we become more aware of our own readerly scopophilia opens us up to read using a different kind of gaze  – the “stroboscope”  – that Lynch argues is a more appropriate model for understanding the alternate kind of focus we should give the story cycle. Rather than reading for the penetrating “steady beam” of light that characterizes the conventionally linear novel, Lynch suggests that the story cycle gives us “the world as seen by stroboscope, held still momentarily, strangely fragmented at other times, moving unfamiliarly in the minds of readers accustomed to novels. The steady beam, itself an illusion, is here broken up, perhaps intentionally disrupted.”14 Sam Blank’s metafictional intrusion calls upon us to attend to the ways in which our gaze mimics the illusion of “the steady beam” as it seeks to master the stories of certain places and characters. The fragmented nature of Lynch’s short-story cycle demands that we read differently, searching for the echoes and parallels that open us to a reading of the “detached” suburban community of Troutstream as seen by stroboscope. Like The Weekend Man, Troutstream is seeking a more appropriate form for the stories of the suburbs and the crises of subjectivity – particularly of masculinity  – the built environment provokes as it frustrates and contains the desires of its inhabitants.

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“From the 1:25,000 Topographical Map”: Suburban Ottawa circa 1970 in Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing Like The Weekend Man, Colin McAdam’s 2004 novel Some Great Thing is set in the historically important period of the 1970s, when corporate planning replaced civic suburban design. Suburban Ottawa is a contested terrain in the novel, a screen upon which protagonists like developer Jerry McGuinty and bureaucrat Simon Struthers seek to impose competing reflections of their own masculine subjectivities. McAdam’s novel differs from Wright’s in that it is less concerned about the historical significance of McLuhan’s conceptions of space and the relationship he sees between technology and subjectivity, although automobiles and tools of construction function as powerful metaphors in the text. In one very important respect, McAdam’s protagonists are very different from the masculine protagonists of American suburban novels, for whom, as Beuka argues, the “crisis of masculinity” is precipitated by an inability to participate “in the shaping of their own space and identities” (100). Jerry McGuinty and Simon Struthers are the very men responsible for shaping the design and identity of Ottawa’s suburbs during this period. With allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Bible, and classical texts such as the Odyssey, McAdam invites us to read the parallel stories of Jerry’s and Simon’s development and design of suburban Ottawa as a mock-epic. The novel’s title is an allusion to 2 Kings 5:13 “His servants came near, and spoke to him, and said, “My father, if the prophet had asked you do some great thing, wouldn’t you have done it? How much rather then, when he says to you ‘wash, and be clean?’” The novel is as much about the historically masculine and hubristic project of city and nation-building as it is about finding the most appropriate means of telling the stories of suburban Canada post-1970. The nature of this place-making project necessitates that McAdam’s novel be remarkably reticent about describing the place in which it is set. Functioning as a microcosm of the nation, the environs of Ottawa are a “blank” canvas for the dreams of developers and bureaucratic planners, but also of storytellers. As quintessential bureaucrats for whom “the noblest aspect” of their jobs is “the distance” between them and their subjects, Simon and his peers only know the land they control from afar. As the narrator explains, “they knew the land from the 1:25,000 topographical map, which, as far as any of them knew, told them all but the smell of the flowers” (124). The bureaucrats of the National Capital Division where Simon is “Director of Design and Land Use,” are

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characterized as excessively arrogant about their own subject positions; “a glorious race of demi-giants in need of an appropriate landscape,” they are the self-appointed guardians of Ottawa and of “Canadian values” (32, 100). In their arrogance, the civil servants of the Division feel it is their duty to project upon the “Greenbelt” south of the city their own visions of what the nation should be. Once the Division figured out what “it needed for itself, more or less,” we are told, “it now felt responsible for setting in the landscape an idea of what it was to be Canadian” (101). Their motivations, however idealistic they may appear in the Division’s “Dreambook,” are fuelled by the self-important conviction, as articulated by one of Simon co-workers, that they “are the guardians of this land on behalf of the citizens of this capital city” (135). While Simon views his world as “a vessel of possible fictions” upon which he can project stories of himself, for developers such as Jerry the land is impossible to describe, because it has no intrinsic value beyond the reflection of mastery it provides (33). As Jerry explains, “much of this earth, in those days, was meant to be built upon. I didn’t see much land that was pure and beautiful. A lot of it was sacred because the sacred part of land is the use you make of it, and most of this land was saying ‘use me.’ There was so much developing and prospecting around that the world looked like it was going to roll up and leave, and if you didn’t hold on to it, if you didn’t put your boot down on the dirt and say, ‘That’s mine,’ it would move under the boot of the next man who would change it” (62). Jerry’s hubris lies in the fact he has come to think of himself like Agamemnon, as king of the “plaster city” he has built (314). “I have covered five thousand acres with my own creations. That’s right. I have choked, raped, and tortured the earth, my friend, and in the end it is mightier than it was. Teach me about nature and I will show you a pair of hands” (21–2). He resists calling his developments “suburbs,” because the word is an insufficient signifier of the mastery he wants us to see reflected in his accomplishments: “Call it a suburb, if you want, but it was still part of the city itself, the spreading roots of the buildings downtown, and I figure you can say a man built a city who laid roads, built houses, and had a hand in the magic that brought up the rest” (165). Jerry’s unwillingness to recognize the arrogance of his activities reaches its height when he blindly and obsessively fights the  bureaucracy of the National Capital Division (NCd) in Ottawa for the right to turn a piece of his land slotted as a Greenbelt into a golf course, in spite of the fact that he personally dislikes the sport (244). For Simon and Jerry, then, the geographical environment is a “blankness” that is only meaningful as “potential” and as a reflection

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of themselves that confirms their positions of power. In the arrogance of these bureaucrats and developers  – those agents most active in the shaping of Canadian suburban space and identity – we can perceive the catalysts of the crises of agency and ambition that the male narrators of the previous novels experience. It is their “master plans” that are accountable for creating environments that cultivate detachment, alienation, and the containment of human desire. In Some Great Thing, the contest for power is fought over the development of land and expressed in metaphors that associate power with masculinity and stasis, and resistance with femininity and mobility. The conflict can be read metaphorically in the story of Simon Struthers and his obsessive pursuit of Kwyet Schutz, the daughter of a colleague. When Simon mishears her name as “Quiet,” she becomes a suitably blank screen for Simon’s romantic projections. McAdam gives their story extra depth by alluding to Ovid’s tale of Atalanta, “the girl who ran more quickly than any man alive” and Hippomenes, the suitor who manages to win her hand when he beats her in a race by distracting her with golden apples (198). Kwyet represents the freedom and mobility of imagination (Simon refers to her as the “daughter of Imagination”), which is in constant conflict with Simon’s need, coded as masculine in the text, to have power over people, places, and things through knowledge acquired voyeuristically. The stereotypical association between men and automobiles is disrupted by Jerry’s wife, Kathleen, whose lunch truck becomes a metaphor of mobility that is in constant tension with the houses built by her husband. An Irish immigrant who came to Canada on her own by boat, Kathleen is the quintessential embodiment of movement. Anti-suburban and anti-domestic, she lives in her vehicle, functioning as a powerful female figure of resistance to her husband’s version of masculine absolutism in the home. Kathleen can be conceived of as the literary descendent of Arachne Manteia, the picaresque protagonist of Aritha Van Herk’s No Fixed Address. As a travelling salesperson, Arachne is an anti-domestic heroine who resists the limitations the suburban ideal imposes on women. Like Jerry, Arachne’s husband is associated with stability, as it he who waits patiently at home. In contrast to Jerry, however, Thomas is not a figure of absolutism or control. As a cartographer, his art helps brings the world into being for Arachne, for whom “the elegant lines convert those curves into longing” (89). “Her dreams are the maps of convoluted journeys” (228).“Freedom” is likewise how Kathleen describes her lunch truck, “having an apartment that moves around with your life makes so much more sense than moving your

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life into some sort of space you wouldn’t go to otherwise, right?” (82). Kathleen’s habit of frequently disappearing in her van for weeks at a time is disconcerting to Jerry, a character whose need for stability finds expression in his vocation as a builder and “master” of plaster. Jerry prides himself on building homes that last, unlike the “paper houses” being built in the seventies that were “dreams” to “everyone but their builders” (25). The solidity of the houses Jerry builds parallels his own need to sustain a sense of himself as “master” of his domain. He confesses to an unconscious desire to “settle” and domesticate Kathleen. “It was my duty,” he confesses, “to put us both in our own house” (83). When his household begins to fall apart  – Kathleen’s drinking turns into fullfledged alcoholism when she is unwillingly “settled” into motherhood and housewifery  – Jerry’s crisis of masculinity, his loss of mastery, is signified by the unravelling carpet he literally believes he can feel moving beneath him. “I could hear it moving” he confides. “I wasn’t scared of it, don’t be a fool, I was just angry with it for changing, for growing out of the house I built for it” (116). The movement of the carpet provides a stark antithesis to Kathleen, who suffers a loss of independence after an accident destroys her lunch truck; eventually incapacitated by her alcoholism and by cirrhosis of the liver, she spends more than a year in bed. Jerry later learns that she did not even rise to use the toilet (310). Ultimately the golf course comes to represent Jerry’s last desperate attempt to limit Kathleen’s mobility: “I caught myself imagining I would one day see Kathleen driving around the kingdom outside my window, my kingdom, in her own little golf cart. I imagined I could own the limits of her world; everywhere she drove was Jerry” (277). And as he later admits to his son, “I think I was building my neighbourhoods just to get a hold on Kathleen, keep her from driving away” (401). As a narrating presence, Jerry is bombastic and occasionally controlling as he directs our attention to his point of view, never doubting we will sympathize with him. At the beginning of his story, he tells us where to look on a map, pointing out the developments he built like a child staking a claim over his toys. “Now look here at this map” he commands. “The Oaks: mine. The Hunt: mine. Pine Grove: mine. Much Of It: mine. I will show you more later. I will drive you around them”  (22). Jerry is unapologetic about his mendacious naming practices, suggesting that the fictitiousness of their names is simply another means of maintaining a reflection of himself as absolute ruler of his neighbourhoods. “I enjoyed that part of the plotting” he confesses.

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“Being free to create my own world” (149). His narrative intrusions are self-assured and domineering: “You there listening to me, know this” he demands. He even refuses to reveal certain aspects of his story until their “proper place” and interrupts his narrative flow while he gets himself a beer (160, 366). The narrator of Simon’s story is more difficult to identify; “he” appears to be a third-person narrator who is omniscient, possessing knowledge of Simon’s point of view. According to this narrator, Simon’s need to exert absolute power over his environment has more to do with the repressive spatial relationship he has with his own body than with his experience with an alienating landscape, although the latter is what Simon himself holds responsible. Indeed, the very first sentence of “The Story of Simon Struthers” informs us of this: “Contained in space, yearning to get out, that is how I think of Simon when I look back over his life. That body of his that has spread sympathetically with every yearning, his body was the trap he always ignored. It was the space around him he blamed” (29). Simon’s body, then, functions as a microcosm of the city of Ottawa, where the battle between sprawl and containment can be avoided by bureaucratic indecisiveness. The absurdity of bureaucracy reaches its comedic height when Simon suggests to a colleague that they should “Decide, mark on this map, that this land needs to be decided upon.” Her response is to agree, “And since we can’t distinguish between bad and good, yet, let’s decide to be indecisive” (127). Simon seeks to overcome the physical and psychological effects of this irresolvable tension by becoming a voyeur, because “people and places belonged to him once he knew their secrets” (74). Simon directs his voyeuristic gaze through official bureaucracy when he devises a survey of the “new residents in the south of the city, near the land that was under review” (137). We are told that Simon goes against “protocol” by going door-to-door himself, and asking questions that have little to do with the issue of land use: “The questions on the survey gave him great pleasure: Are you married? For how long? Why? One in every twenty questions was bewildering and intrusive – often simply ‘Why?’ – and its effect was honesty, people answering presumably out of confusion or fear” (138). In spite of such honesty, however, Simon’s scopophilic desires are frustrated by the fact that “learning secrets on paper wasn’t the same. Ultimately, he was never, truly, invited in” (138). Like Wes and Sam Blank, Simon’s quest for community and connection is thwarted by suburban detachment and the culture’s penchant for separateness. Simon’s need to know the intimate details of other people’s lives springs from his fear that he lacks a strong, masterful

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subjectivity; he regards his home and that of his neighbours in the Glebe, an upper-middle class neighbourhood in central Ottawa, as “manifestations of mediocrity.” To stave off the emptiness he feels, Simon keeps “an unchanged persona and a hope or a hunger for other people’s lives” (139). Ottawa offers him the perfect state of “blankness” upon which to project a vision of the city and of himself as “some great thing.” At the end of the day, it is this potentiality – located in the liminal space between knowledge and imagination – that Simon craves. “He was always wise enough to know that if things can be imagined, they can be created” (207). His justification for stalling Jerry McGuinty’s development plans has little to do with the NCd’s mandate of “preserving” the land, although his goals are slightly more idealistic than Jerry’s. Simon simply wishes development to be open to “human possibilities” because he feels that “anything on the landscape takes away choice; he knew that. Houses, neighbourhoods were the worst offenders  – the same shapes framing everyone’s potential. Put walls around a child and the child can’t be free; take away paradise and Paradise will have to be imagined” (208). Eventually, Simon becomes fixated on the idea of putting a wind tunnel on the greenbelt (a facility that was actually built in Ottawa in 1970), because it conforms to his idea that “Something could be built that would create rather than take away choice. Human possibilities could be examined rather than stifled” (208). Ironically, the product of Simon’s crisis of masculinity is this strange caterpillar-like building on the Ottawa landscape, a structure he does not even create, but makes “possible” through his bureaucratic stalling. When Simon’s narrator eventually breaks through to a more fully fleshed-out characterization, his persona blends with that of his subject, merging the scopophilic gaze of the narrator with that of the reader: “Even bachelors  – the ones he knows who never talk about sex, the ones who do great things – even they are more precious than the philosopher’s stone. That land they occupy by the shores of celibacy in the tropic of self-love, what do you know of that, my wise men of science? Perhaps some of you occupy it yourselves, or look through one of their windows. Publish what you see. He wants to know. I watch them often. Not as much fun as others, but fascinating. I am one myself, but I am not the sort I mean” (221). Simon’s voice is barely distinguishable from that of his third-person narrator, suggesting that they may be one in the same, that the narrative voice is a projection of the “unchanged persona” that Simon has adopted to ward off his crisis of masculinity. The rest of “Simon’s Story” vacillates between the “I” of the narrator and that of Simon, with an entire chapter narrated as stream of

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consciousness, until the final chapter, when he finally speaks in the first person. While the details of his current life continue to be banal – he has become something of a suburban flâneur wandering aimlessly through shopping malls  – Simon’s reflections on the relationship between narrative, subjectivity, and geographic space are worth repeating: “This silly little city. If only I wasn’t … I can try telling you everything again – everything I really thought, everything I really said – but it would all seem even emptier. I would like to tell you a story about a man named Simon Struthers: servant of the public; giant; fiction; me. I would like to tell you where I am, but I have never really known. I believe it is somewhere between me and you. I know for certain that I was rarely in this body unless it was against someone else” (391–2). Like Jerry, Simon’s narrative ultimately brings him to a recognition of himself as a man displaced both from his own body and from the “silly little city” upon which he has spent a lifetime trying to impose an image of masculine greatness and absolute authority; an image that he has only been able to maintain by exerting mastery over the bodies of women. Although he is still a long way from respecting the sovereignty of other bodies – Simon continues to search for Kwyet, believing he is motivated by a desire to make amends for his obsessive intrusion into her life – his recognition represents a moment of hopeful surrender. When he finally speaks in his own voice, Simon exposes a certain vulnerability that undermines his previous hunger for power. Jerry also demonstrates a moment of “hopeful surrender” and a willingness to share his vulnerability when he recognises the equalizing power of oral storytelling. In a compelling moment of metatextuality, he describes the powerful function of stories on the construction site: At lunch we all sit near but apart, and a round of stories begins. Stories on sites have always been the same collection of words – hard, woman, father, beer – used in combinations that continue to grow. They are perfectly timed to add up to forty-five minutes, and they are nicely designed – though nobody mentions it – to take our misery away. You can get a sad story sometimes that makes your heart feel tired from all the uphill crawling in the world, but you’ll somehow feel better about going back to work once you hear it. Or you get the stories that start nowhere, finish in the same place, and offer no real fun or interest along the way; but they still feel necessary and go very finely with a roast-beef sandwich and a Coke. (95)

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With this anecdote, Jerry provides insight into one of the primary functions of storytelling. More than narrative coherence or escapism, sharing stories provides the opportunity for “communitas,” an experience of communal cohesion so desperately needed in a socially and spatially detached and fragmented landscape. Additionally, it contextualizes the orality of Jerry’s narrative, opening it to the possibility of subverting the absolutism of written text. Reviewers have been critical of McAdam’s first twenty pages, calling them “a false start” and “dispensible.”15 Yet the very first voice we hear in these pages is not Jerry’s, nor is it Simon’s so-called “third-person” narrator. It is the ribald, broken, drunken voice of Kathleen as she negotiates her way through the banal present in an alcoholic haze. In her voice, we hear the echoes of someone once robust and resistant; of all the characters, she has suffered most for the hubris of others, and it is her tragic end that most tellingly reveals the folly of master plans. The masculine quest for a stable reflection of mastery in the development and design of suburbia negates female mobility and agency. While her fate recalls the devastating effects of a dysfunctional landscape on the women who grew up in the suburbs of the postwar generation, it also predicts the detrimental symptoms of distress the adolescent bodies exhibit in the next chapter, in which crises of masculinity predominantly manifest as violence against the self. Lynch’s and McAdam’s narrators ultimately raise more questions than they answer as they explore methods and techniques for narrating Canada’s suburban stories of masculine crises of subjectivity. Gerald Lynch uses a genre with a long tradition in Canadian literature – the short-story cycle  – to explore the successes and failures of place and character in our nation’s youngest type of community. In the process, he dislocates an absolutist paradigm, calling upon us to read the stories that come out of Troutstream with a stroboscopic rather than a scopophilic focus. Thirty-four years after The Weekend Man, Colin McAdam’s novel looks at the same time period as history, experimenting with several different narrative voices and techniques to tell the stories of corporate suburbia’s prefabricated conceptions, and of the very real costs of their master plans.

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Subdivisions Sprawling on the fringes of the city In geometric order An insulated border In between the bright lights And the far unlit unknown Growing up it all seems so one-sided Opinions all provided The future pre-decided Detached and subdivided In the mass production zone Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone Rush, “Subdivisions,” 1982.

For the most part, contemporary representations of the suburban Canadian landscape in fiction concerned with adolescence conform to the stereotype captured so poignantly by the lyrics to Rush’s 1982 anthem of disaffected suburban youth, “Subdivisions.” Adjectives such as “sprawling,” “labyrinthine,” “insulated,” and “mass-produced” frequently recur in descriptions of the planned, corporate communities that typify development since the 1970s. As Richard Harris argues, “the conformity of the corporate suburb has steadily become more profound.”1 Strangely enough, such conformity fails to provide the feeling of belonging it promises; a sense of detachment and division seems to prevail now more than ever. As I argue in the previous chapter, novels written and set during this second wave of suburban development continue to question what it means to our sense of who we are, personally, regionally, and nationally, and what it means to grow up in and inhabit the corporate landscapes that sprawl on the furthermost rings of our urban centres. As it was for Atwood’s and Gowdy’s earlier generation of adolescent misfits, the most recent incarnation of these landscapes are fraught with danger, particularly for young women. These novels seem to offer a vision of the Canadian suburban experience that is categorically

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bleaker than that provided by their predecessors. Kelli Deeth, Lesley Ann Cowan, Elyse Friedman, and Judy MacDonald create a compelling psychogeography of Canadian suburbia in which the subdivision functions metaphorically to convey the manner by which the bodies of young women mirror the communal social body, manifesting the signs of their struggle to define themselves both in resistance to, and in compliance with, the mass-produced conformity of this geography.

“Detached and Subdivided” Guy Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”2 The level to which the different novels themselves comply with stereotypical representations of the suburbs has much to do with how they depict the changes suburban landscapes have undergone since the 1970s, and with the influence these settings have on the characters’ psychology. The suburbs in these novels tend to fall into one of two types. The first is the fictional suburb, like Judy MacDonald’s Deer Park subdivision, that is a thinly disguised representation of similar communities. The second type, employed by Cowan, Deeth, and Friedman, achieves verisimilitude by setting the stories in actual places such as Don Mills, Mississauga, West Hill, and Willowdale, in Ontario. Generally speaking, all these novels characterize late twentieth-century suburbia as increasingly corporatized parcels of land, carved into subdivisions, that fail to function holistically as neighbourhoods. Natural spaces have become domesticated “greenbelts” and parks, replacing Gowdy’s and Atwood’s wilder ravines that once provided characters with a “republic of childhood” to escape to, and to explore. For this crop of suburban characters, the homogenous landscape is most problematic because of its inability to provide aesthetic, intellectual, psychic, cultural, or physical stimulation. Early in Judy MacDonald’s Jane, familiar locations are brought to mind by the clapping song “M-I-S-S-I-S-S-A-U-G-A” that the female narrator describes as a background for her story (9). “The funny thing is,” the narrator reflects as she watches a group of girls in the schoolyard, “they probably don’t really know what they’re spelling. Don’t know it’s a place, a city, a shopping mall … Chances are at least one of the girls in this playground will grow up, find herself living in a certain subdivision” (10). Suburban place-names since the early period of Gowdy’s and Atwood’s suburbs have not become any more reflective

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of the realities of geography or history, it would seem: “Mississauga” is a signifier that bears little relationship to the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, an Algonquian (southern Ojibwa) people from whom the suburb takes its name, who were its original inhabitants and who continue to hold claim to the territory. Instead, “Mississauga” now refers to a conglomerate of shopping malls and subdivisions, and the clapping song prepares the girls, perhaps even encourages them, to aspire to the limited future such a space can offer. For the narrator of Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2016), Mississauga is known as “Misery Saga,” where “there is nothing to do with sunny afternoons but all the things we have already done a thousand times” (1). Despite the thirty-odd years between the suburbia of Lady Oracle and that of Jane, the prevailing gender ideology of the space continues to prepare young women to seek value in their roles as wives and mothers by becoming good consumers. As the narrator observes, “I’m a girl and a girl never really decides anything, other than with make-up and fridges and shit. Anything else just happens” (140). The setting of the story and the narrator’s identity in Jane are intentionally vague; common place-names such as “Deer Park subdivision” and “Powerline Road” encourage readers to consider the possibility that the horrors the narrator relates could happen in any suburb, to any teenage girl who engages in obsessive romantic love to fill the void of meaningful cultural or intellectual stimulation in her suburban landscape. To her, life in Deer Park is like “living in a world of zombies” or among “the walking dead” (106). For this reason, the text emphasizes the nightmarish quality of conformity in a community where people all seem to “live in boring houses, think identical thoughts, buy the same boring things, go to the same places” (37). The title persuades us to consider the narrator as one of the nameless, inconsequential “Janes,” girls “nobody knows or really cares about” that she and her boyfriend use for their sexual and romantic gratification (89). Representations by recent writers of actual suburban neighbourhoods challenge us to reconsider the assumption that they are White middle-class enclaves of exclusivity, but affirm that they nevertheless negate difference as the suburban ideal reasserts its psychogeographical dominance. Lesley Ann Cowan’s novel As She Grows depicts the struggles of a young woman being raised by her alcoholic grandmother in one of the many apartment buildings that are an ignored part of Don Mills. For Snow, Don Mills is a fractured community whose subdivisions connote economic class, one that functions as the

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antithesis of a nurturing environment, particularly for teenagers. Snow describes her street, The Donway, as “a big paved moat surrounding all life’s necessities” (13) and for her, “it’s like living in the stomach of someone’s decaying suburban dream” (14). She and her friends hang out at the local mall simply because “there’s nowhere else to go” in an area where there are only apartments, houses, and more malls (17). She is sceptical of her grandmother’s assertion that they live in “a good neighbourhood” for “they tore down all the good stuff, like the movie theatre and bowling alley, years ago” (13). Snow’s observation highlights the lack of any kind of stimulating or welcoming space for adolescents in her neighbourhood, particularly those whose families are working class and without disposable income for recreational activities. Without money to access the artifacts of consumerism, Snow and her friends can only hang out at the mall, doing “dumb things” such as throwing “jelly beans down on unsuspecting heads from the staircase” or heating up quarters and dropping them on the ground while they “wait for the squawks of old ladies who scorch their frugal fingers” (17). Bored, “with nothing to do and nowhere to go,” they indulge in substance abuse for diversion (17). Similarly, the protagonist of Kelli Deeth’s short-story cycle, The Girl Without Anyone, comes of age in a semi-detached home east of Toronto  in suburban West Hill, a slightly more middle-class neighbourhood in Scarborough, but one in which many families are as fractured as the landscape. The child of divorced parents, Leah’s life bears little resemblance to the North American fantasy of the perfect nuclear family depicted in sitcoms on television. She experiences the landscape as alien and threatening, observing that “when you did not feel at home, everywhere else was the landscape of a nightmare, empty, labyrinthine, full of unexpected, bloody battles” (103). Like Stacey in The Fire-Dwellers, Leah confesses to a feeling of insecurity within her own home, to an “impression that the house leaked. There was something weak about our house; the outside always made its way in” (48). Leah is as ambivalent as Stacey about this permeability. While the latter tries to protect her household from the outside, it is this very quality that helps her remain open to the world and to its potential. For Leah, however, permeability seems to extend to her sense of self; chameleon-like, she is a difficult character to get to know. Many of her experiences growing up derive from her quest to sort out how much her identity reflects West Hill. Her fear is that she mirrors the emptiness and vapidity of her geographical environment, so she seeks experiences

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in the city, in Toronto’s downtown, as a means of feeling unique (22). Her ambivalence toward her surroundings is signified, ironically, by the sense of empowerment she feels when she steps “on the grass of familiar lawns” (129). For Michelle in Elyse Friedman’s Then Again, suburban North York in the seventies and the nineties is like “beige paper wrapping on a lurid novel” (38). Beneath the drive to fit into suburbia’s homogeneity, however, is a much more interesting layer of complex dysfunctionality. Michelle recognizes the vapidity of the pursuit of the suburban ideal in her neighbourhood at Yonge and Steeles. “The neighbours are out in full force today” she notes. “They are ferreting the yellow dots out of their square green lawns. They are levelling off the hedges. They are polishing up the hubcaps” (16). Michelle is critical of the hypocrisy of their manicured exteriors because she recalls the interior chaos and eccentricities of the people living around her, people such as the Bregmans, who conduct experiments on their dog’s excrement (36). “When I think back on it” she wryly observes, “it was quite an achievement for us Schafers to be regarded as the freaks of Pinecrest Avenue” (38). Michelle’s memory of developments such as the “Ontario Housing” project for the “poor and white” defies notions of economic homogeneity, while her notice of changes to the racial makeup of her neighbourhood since 1970 suggests that, while it may have become more diverse, the mindset of its population has nevertheless remained unaltered: “The neighbourhood has changed. The Jews and Italians have moved on, replaced by Chinese and East Indians. I watch the kids tricycling up and down the sidewalks, the parents washing cars, mowing lawns, sneaking surreptitious peeks at the redhead chain-smoking on the porch at number 5. The neighbourhood hasn’t changed that much” (34). All that has really changed is the encroachment of the ’burbs and their palaces of consumerism into what was once considered rural. As Michelle notes when she ponders the name change of the local mall, “I suppose north of Steeles at Yonge no longer qualifies as ‘country.’ The Towne and Endless Expanse of Hideous Subdivision Mall would have been apt. Probably have to go north of Major Mackenzie to find a decent patch of country these days” (65). As this text suggests, social, racial, economic, ethnic, and even geographic diversity is defenceless against the territorializing power of suburban values and consumerism. Perhaps the most interesting change to occur in the last decade of suburban development is the domestication of the ravines. Formerly spaces where, free from the watchful eyes of grown-ups, children could explore imaginative possibilities not offered by their neighbourhoods,

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the natural spaces of post-1970 suburban fiction fail to provide respite for their characters. When Michelle returns to the ravine she used to explore as a child, she is dismayed by the discovery that even wild spaces have been taken over by a more artificial suburban aesthetic: It’s a beautiful park, but not as beautiful as it once was. The Don River used to run through here, a thin stream gurgling along at the bottom of the hill, trickling towards the trees and into the ravine. You could hear the frogs at night. A rich and calming sound. But the river is gone, filled in with soil and covered up with sod. I follow the groove in the grass at the bottom of the hill over to the mouth of the ravine – the ravine I used to walk through to get to the oh Complex, the ravine I used to flee to just to smoke or walk or think. There have been alterations here too. The small dirt path has been widened and covered with wood chips. Hideous and phony-looking. And there’s a big sign: welCoMe To The weSTVIew FITNeSS TrAIl. (163) Michelle is fortunate enough to remember the presence of a mildly chaotic wildness within the orderly suburb; in the stories of Leah, Snow, and the narrator of Jane, there are no revivifying landscapes. When Leah travels north into what was once country, for example, she searches “for a glimpse of a horse,” but only finds “new subdivisions” (163). Closer to what Leah thinks of as the country, people are only distinguishable by the different vehicles they own. Leah notes that they are “a different kind of people” who owned “Ski-Doos and motorbikes” (103–4). Similarly, for Snow, the “country” is connected to death, as the place she travelled with her grandmother in order to spread the ashes of a mother she never knew (3). In Jane, the suburban landscape feigns wildness with its “fake pioneer sign” at the entrance to “Otter Lake Park” (32). When teenagers seek separation from the adult world, they go to “Powerline Road” an uninspiring landscape with “hydro pylons marching” and “ugly, endless wires” (91). Ominously, the local creek becomes the repository for the corpses of the “Janes” the protagonist and her boyfriend kill when they have finished using them to indulge their sexual fantasies.

“Dreamers and Misfits” Without question, suburban landscapes in late twentieth-century Canadian fiction have become lamentably standardized, provoking remarkably similar emotional and behavioural effects on the protagonists.

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The more colonized by franchises this geography becomes, it seems, the more it lacks stimulation, the more desperate the desires and means of resistance. This is especially true for the young people whose emotional and social development is tied to that of the suburbs. If we recall Rush again, the stereotypical suburbs of Canada are spaces in which there is little encouragement of critical or subversive thought. Those who do not conform feel alienated from their community. “Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone.” “Detached and subdivided” subjects are the quintessential products of an equally detached and subdivided “mass production zone.” Neuroses such as romantic obsession, self-destructive behaviour, agoraphobia, and self-mutilation are rampant in these novels. Yet for all their loneliness, the dreamers and the misfits manage to survive, and theirs are the most compelling stories to emerge from the contemporary “decaying suburban dream.” As for Gowdy’s characters in the previous generation, dreaming is a potentially dangerous strategy of resistance for the contemporary protagonists of suburban literature. With nothing for entertainment beyond the mall, the teenaged residents of Don Mills and West Hill indulge in romantic obsessions. In The Girl Without Anyone, for example, Leah confesses to seeking out love as a means of filling the deficiency she fears defines her sense of self: “That was what I thought love was, a joining. And once I was joined, the person I knew as myself would neatly and finally vanish – I would no longer feel longing” (45). Snow in As She Grows shares Leah’s experience of identity as something she gleans only as negativity: “I only know who I am in terms of who I’m not” she confesses (75). While she keeps people at a distance to protect herself, Snow continues to seek the illusion of safety and completeness her apathetic boyfriend provides her, despite her recognition that this relationship is both “freeing and trapping me all at the same time” (85). Perhaps the most disturbing portrait of romantic obsession as an antidote against the boredom inspired by suburbia is Judy MacDonald’s Jane. The novel’s unnamed protagonist composes tales of sexual conquest for the benefit of her psychopathic boyfriend, whose increasing sexual perversity eventually leads the couple to murder a young woman. Jane’s protagonist acknowledges early in her narrative that her ambitions are focused solely on pleasing her boyfriend, implicating suburban gender ideology in her complicity in his crimes: “The job I want is to make you happy. The career I want is to create a perfect home, be perfect for you. Maybe to work with people, but does it really matter how?” (13). In a climax that is eerily reminiscent of the modus operandi of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, Paul and Karla Bernardo, the couple kidnap and

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murder two young women, a crime for which the narrator’s need for romantic stimulation is as culpable as her partner’s predatory sexuality. The suburban landscape is implicated as both a cause and as a means for indulging in psychopathic fantasy: the first time the couple kidnaps a young woman, they take her by car to the deserted “Powerline Road” where “the snap and buzz” of electricity takes over the sounds of “the crickets” (91). The narrator imagines the power lines negating their moral depravity and the pathological nature of their relationship: “I can feel all this old stuff pulling away from my brain. I can see it, brown and sludgy, coming out of my nose and floating out the window. The power lines burn it. A smell like a million flowers fills the air” (92). Interestingly, in each of these novels, the female protagonists choose men from “downtown” or “the city” as their romantic objects. The further her suburb is from the city, it seems, the greater its romantic pull. For the speaker of Rush’s “Subdivisions,” the city holds a similar appeal, offering the possibility of excitement, variety, and stimulation: “Drawn like moths we drift into the city / The timeless old attraction / Cruising for the action / Lit up like a firefly / Just to feel the living night.” When Michelle in Then Again first moves out with her boyfriend, she characterizes their three-hour walk down Yonge Street as a pilgrimage to the “New World” (17). While Snow and the unnamed narrator of Jane are romantically involved with young men who come from the city, in The Girl Without Anyone, Leah settles for a sexual relationship with an older man she is not really attracted to because he offers her the opportunity to spend “part of the evening in Toronto, with its lights and cars, people that pushed” (116). He immediately identifies Leah as somebody who “comes from the outskirts” when he first meets her working as a waitress in a Toronto restaurant, suggesting that West Hill’s imprint is too ingrained for her to escape (113). Frequently, this turning away from suburban dullness to the bright lights of the city reflects the characters’ attempts to compensate for dysfunctional families and friendships. Suburban novels set after 1971 are full of such failed relationships, challenging the belief that suburban bungalows and “good neighbourhoods” encourage the development of healthy families and relationships. Connections between mothers and daughters seem particularly problematic, especially in single-parent homes. Snow, the product of a teenaged pregnancy, escapes a damaging life with her alcoholic grandmother, yet the psychological damage this relationship inflicts prevents her from forming strong female relationships. Leah’s relationship with her mother has its share of complexities as well; she feels the need to protect her mother from

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the vulnerability caused by her broken marriage. Kissing her mother’s cheek, Leah observes, “It was like kissing something weaker than myself, something I couldn’t protect from harm” (45). Her desperate need to find acceptance in her peer group causes her to betray those who love her, despite recognizing that the people she aspires to impress “were not friends, that I had tricked myself into another kind of loneliness” (76). Filial ambivalence is not unfamiliar in postwar suburban novels; the mothers in Jane and The Girl Without Anyone resemble the alcoholic, agoraphobic mother in Gowdy’s Falling Angels, while the grief that haunts Michelle in Then Again after the death of her mother is similar to Louise’s experience of maternal loss in The Romantic. What all of the daughters share is a need to understand the ways their mothers have been influenced by middle-class suburban ideologies that impose ideals of feminine perfection they cannot possibly achieve, given their own class positions. Conventional families fare little better than the single-parent ones: the mother in Jane is a spectral presence suffering from depression, spending most of her time in bed (69). Her daughter can only watch her “decomposing right in front of us” (69). Her father looks at her inappropriately when he thinks she isn’t looking and suggests that she is “a slut” (70). Most alarmingly, neither of her parents recognize the signs of pathology in her relationship with her boyfriend. The same is true of Michelle’s parents in Then Again. Perhaps the most arrestingly dysfunctional family, in Michelle’s memories of her childhood they are the most seemingly “normal.” Indeed, they appear so normal that Michelle’s brother Joel hires convincing replicas of his deceased parents when he attempts to reproduce his home and family circa 1970 for himself and his siblings. Michelle recognizes by the end of her narrative, however, that their home was a “haunted house. Holocaust haunted. Dark and damaged” by their Hungarian-Jewish father’s experiences during World War Two (185). So consumed are her parents by their pursuit of the suburban ideal, or blinded by their own states of denial, they fail to see signs of their children’s distress. Suburban masculinity is as complex as Friedan’s feminine “problem with no name.” While the protagonists of suburbia’s coming of age stories tend to be young women who initiate self-healing by telling their stories, there is little salvation for the male characters surrounding them. Snow’s boyfriend Mark, the product of a dysfunctional upbringing himself, is self-centred and irresponsible, abandoning her when he learns of her pregnancy. The dysfunctionality of suburban society, Jane suggests, breeds the extreme psychopathy of the unnamed narrator’s

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boyfriend, who compares himself to Russia’s infamous serial killer, Chikatilo (124). The men who survive and become fathers themselves are frequently characterized as selfish, like Leah’s father in The Girl Without Anyone, or sexually suspect, such as the leering father in Jane. Friedman’s Joel, the most memorable example of masculine dysfunctionality, is superficially successful, a Hollywood screenwriter who is financially capable of indulging his hedonistic nostalgia for the suburban ideal of his childhood. Purchasing his Willowdale home on Pinecrest Avenue, Joel restores it exactly to its 1970 state and hires actors to play his parents for a weekend reunion with his sisters. Joel’s actions reveal a deeper longing for home and connection, however, when he chooses to end the weekend blockbuster style by blowing up their home after his sisters refuse to stay there indefinitely. In Joel’s quest to restore a nostalgic fantasy, Friedman explores the applicability of Baudrillard’s notions of “simulation” to representations of the suburban imaginary. Joel’s entanglement in the labyrinthine orders of the “simulacrum” – his inability to distinguish between the real and his desire for an idealized past that never existed – quite literally leads to implosion. Metaphorically, the “hole in the ground” that replaces the Schafer’s two-storey home reflects the profundity of their failure to maintain the pretence of conformity. Among both male and female characters, substance abuse is another method of choice for numbing, ironically, the pain of the numbness that life in the suburbs produces. Adolescent characters like the narrator of Jane acknowledge the inherent danger of their behaviour, yet they continue because “It’s scary, but kind of exciting too. All this stuff bubbling up, about to swallow me, but then I get back in control by going completely out of control” (57). Snow continues to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, and engage in self-destructive sexual behaviour during her pregnancy. She recognizes her dependency on alcohol – “the way my throat craves the burn of vodka”  – as her inheritance from her grandmother and her deceased, drug-addicted mother (159). This recognition helps her to spatialize her legacy. Eventually she realizes that her behaviour is a manifestation of her desire to escape the life she had with Elsie in Don Mills, just as her mother’s pregnancy was “a way out” of the west-end Toronto “stockyard neighbourhood that smells of meat and blood” where she grew up (192–3). Bushmills Whiskey is Michelle’s numbing agent of choice in Then Again, as is sex. As a teenaged outsider growing up in Willowdale, Michelle drinks alcohol, smokes pot, and has sex with other outsiders she finds in the Ontario Housing complex in her neighbourhood (50).

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She characterizes her behaviour as “a wonderful distraction. A temporary clouding of the thoughts that are consuming me” (53). For Michelle, suburban existence is like “a black comedy with an incomprehensible plot and a cast of weak, stupid and evil characters. Ordinary men are executioners lying in wait. Everything is behaviour except, perhaps, brutality” (53). The emptiness and vapidity of daily life in suburban North York are among the things Michelle wishes to escape with her destructive behaviour. Among her peers in fiction, she is not alone in her desire to escape the superficiality of a lifestyle that she perceives as “an elaborate collusion” that masks a common fear no one dares speak (53). As these novels suggest, however, no matter how elaborate the collusion, it fails to hide the signs of communal disease that mark the bodies of adolescent suburban subjects.

“Ticking Traps” Some will sell their dreams for small desires Or lose the race to rats Get caught in ticking traps And start to dream of somewhere To relax their restless flight Somewhere out of a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights Rush, “Subdivisions” 1982.

As Rush’s lyrics suggest, the most frightening outcome for the dreamers and misfits of suburbia may be submission, for ultimately those who “sell their dreams” are the ones who will get caught in “ticking traps.” Suburban subjectivity suffers from its share of neurotic behaviour that manifests both physically and psychically as a response to the infirmity of suburban life. Agoraphobia in particular occurs frequently as a symptom of the distressed body and community. Literally translated as fear of “the marketplace,” agoraphobia is typically associated with fear of open spaces, a perfect ailment for the sprawling suburban landscape, explaining the agoraphobic’s refusal to leave the safety of her home. In his cultural history of agoraphobia, Paul Carter defines the syndrome by its symptom of “movement inhibition,” which has compelling implications as a trope for suburban malaise.3 Joyce Davidson characterizes the condition as one that is explicitly spatial, with interesting implications for its recurrence in suburban literature as an affliction specific to female protagonists. Davidson suggests that agoraphobia may be interpreted as a defensive stance against “a social

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space corrosive to the subject’s boundaries.”4 The agoraphobic need to become housebound is therefore compensation for the subject’s experience of spatiality as a form of dissolution of self: “Given this crisis state of spatial affairs – of boundaries, distance and location – it is perhaps unsurprising that the subject should eventually become more or less temporarily housebound. Her boundless vulnerability means she may have no choice but to remain exclusively within the home, assuming its protective boundaries as reinforcement and extension of the psychocorporeal boundaries of the self.”5 The agoraphobic suburban housewife and mother is a particularly interesting figure in this respect. Michelle Berry’s What We All Want is a sympathetic depiction of a housebound mother and her daughter, Hilary, who has come to think of their home as a fairytale tower or castle. “They were living that fairy tale where the castle gets covered over with vines. But there was never a prince to come home and chop at those vines and rescue her mother, rescue her” (53). Like the mother in Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels, maternal figures in Jane and The Girl Without Anyone represent the immobility, sterility, and stasis that the “feminine mystique” engenders, as if women are psychically incapable of leaving the homes that imprison them. In Jane, the mother suffers from debilitating depression, barely able to leave her bedroom long enough to eat dinner before “her brain implodes”; her daughter perceives this agoraphobia as a form of decomposition that is potentially lethal to others, for it leaves her breath “like poison” (69). Inert suburban femininity finds its ultimate expression in Deeth’s character “Aunt Phyllis,” who suffers from an unnamed disease that leaves her literally “unable to move” (30). The children of these maternal figures are not immune from such “mobility inhibition,” it seems. Leah becomes obsessed with her friend Loretta’s Aunt Phyllis, to the point of physically humiliating her; she insists on satisfying her curiosity about Aunt Phyllis’ immobile body, giving her a bath despite recognizing the inert woman’s signs of distress (35). Like Elaine in Cat’s Eye, who is fascinated by the iron lung that confined postwar survivors of polio, Leah is attracted to the idea of immobility and of being free from having to act: “Anyone can do whatever they like to me, I thought, push and pull me. I can’t move” (42). If we think of agoraphobia as an infirmity in which the subject fears the dissolution of subjectivity and agency within a social space that is corrosive  – dividing and subdividing the subject into fragments  – it seems the perfect suburban ailment. The suburbs are the quintessential affront to geographical borders, often regarded as spaces that are rapidly

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metastasizing, taking over the city and the country. Not surprisingly, the suburbs are perceived likewise as a threat to personal boundaries, so that agoraphobia afflicts children who have spent their formative years there. As an adult, Michelle Schafer is a self-described agoraphobic whose only contact with the outside world is the newspapers that allow her “to go out into the world without having to leave my room” (5). Her life in Winnipeg before she returns to Pinecrest Avenue for Joel’s “Blast from the Past” is as free from the challenges of social interaction as she can arrange it. She lives in the bookstore she owns, and she endures the company of a man she doesn’t particularly like in exchange for weekly sex that doesn’t require her to risk vulnerability (2). The stories Michelle collects from newspapers all have to do with the perils of mobility, relating stories of freak car and boat accidents (5–8). Ultimately and ironically, however, Michelle’s mobility inhibition and vigilant self-protection fail to save her from harm. When Joel detonates the bomb that explodes their childhood home, Michelle almost dies and loses her hearing and her last remaining family members. Then Again suggests that it is frequently the suburban home itself – the refuge of the agoraphobic – that is corrosive to the fragmented suburban subject. But the disaster she has always feared projects Michelle into a “Permanent Threshold Shift” (183), a transitional and liminal stage of healing, during which she recognizes the time before, living in fear and withdrawal, as the time “when I was dead” (186). Living through the disaster she has always feared frees Michelle from her self-imposed exile. Agoraphobia is a response to an experience of space as a threat not just to the subject’s sense of personal boundaries, but to her physical limits as well. As Davidson points out, “the subjectivity or sense of self of each and every individual is thoroughly, absolutely, embodied.”6 Not surprisingly, skin functions in culture and in the arts as a powerful sign of the subject’s corporeal and psychic boundaries. As Davidson wryly observes, “The question that is constantly asked of each of us is, how ‘thick-skinned’ can/should we be in the presence of others? This question seems to be absolutely central to an understanding of the nature of agoraphobia and also, to the gender specific incidence of agoraphobia in society.”7 Like agoraphobia, acts of self-mutilation or “cutting” the skin seems to be a gender-specific behavioural response to an experience of space as a threat to the subject’s boundaries. Snow, Michelle, and the unnamed narrator of Jane share self-harm as a psychological response to their experiences growing up in caustic suburban geographies. The frequency with which self-harming behaviour occurs as a metaphor in suburban literature suggests a correspondence between the

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diseased, fragmented, and subdivided environment of the suburbs and the suburban body’s attempt at self-healing. As psychiatrist Armando R. Favazza emphasizes in his work on self-mutilation: “The individual human body mirrors the collective social body, and each continually creates and sustains the other. Misperceptions of reality, feelings of guilt, negative self-images, anti-social acts, and all the other symptoms we associate with personal mental illness defy understanding without reference to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical integrity of the communal ‘body.’”8 The protagonists of contemporary suburban novels describe cutting their own skin in ways that invite us to compare their fragmented emotional landscapes to the fractured integrity of the suburban body. Their behaviour is frequently represented as a ritualistic attempt to move toward a healing of the fissure between suburban bodies and spaces that brings us back to the significance of Turner and “the ritual process.” Self-mutilating characters frequently describe the sensation that results from the act as a physical release from the anxiety of living, or as a means of coping with the sensation that their bodies are exploding, which is a literal transgression of corporeal limits. As Michelle explains, cutting provides her with “a glorious release. A wonderful gush. All along the top of the forearms, a fabulous easing. The lines, like tiny valves, releasing steam, pressure and blood” (50). The narrator of Jane cuts her arms and pulls out her hair as a response to the guilt and anxiety her crimes, her “anti-social acts,” have caused, as if harming herself might help her atone and thus restore her to the society against which she has transgressed so grievously (118). For Snow, it is “the unexpected cracks” in her broken skin that enable her to feel like she can breathe (51). As Favazza points out, “the implied metaphor is clear: in cutting their skin they provide an opening through which the tension and badness in their bodies can rapidly escape. What does leave the body as a result of skin cutting is blood, a precious substance that throughout human history has been associated with the cure of illness, preservation of health, salvation and resolution of social conflict.”9 Given the absence of formal, meaningful rituals in their culture, the protagonists must enact their own. The young women all attempt to heal the fractured relationship between their communal and individual suburban bodies through self-mutilation. In effect, they are initiating their own ritual processes, instigating themselves into a liminal phase whose objective purpose is aggregation with their communities and the restoration of a meaningful relationship with their cultural spaces. As adolescents, however, they are regarded as marginal to their societies. As Turner

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explains, such subjects “have no cultural assurances of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity.”10 Theirs is a desperately dangerous and tentative sojourn in the liminal phase of the ritual process. For the female protagonist of contemporary suburban fiction, cutting the skin can be a frantic attempt to communicate distress to the culture from which she is alienated. Snow carves the words “mother,” “slut,” and “ugly” into her arms. Hiding her scars is like “a constant battle to bury truths that keep surfacing from under my skin, rising from some unknown depth in me” (81). Snow experiences her body as a mirror of her environment, comparing the surfacing of her body’s scars to a story she heard about the surfacing of “an entire prehistoric village in a farmer’s field” in England (81). Acknowledging that which surfaces is therefore an acceptance of the diseased social and communal body that enables a movement toward healing. When Snow’s cutting is discovered, she explains to her social worker that the “the words are meant for me to read.” She interprets her self-mutilation as an act of uncovering rather than of writing, “The way a sculptor claims his hands only release the shape from stone” (282). Snow’s letters create her “own language of blood and skin” (283). When Michelle’s self-harm is discovered, her family is so alarmed that they place her in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. It is here that she meets Frank McCollum, the only “real person” she can “stomach or love” (53–4). A broken soul himself, McCollum is the only person who understands Michelle’s need to communicate. Seeing in the slashes on her arms “a painting or a story or a song,” McCollum tells Michelle that “the message is oK, but the medium is all wrong” (58). Exchanging her razor for an IBM Selectric, Michelle learns to channel the energy she releases by cutting her arms into writing missives to McCollum, and eventually, into writing fiction. Like the characters of Atwood’s suburban Künstlerromane, Michelle learns to sublimate her trauma into art. A study of adolescent girls living in a Canadian correctional institution revealed that the girls carved their skin as “a way of expressing independence, autonomy, and personal freedom” and as a “very adequate way of controlling their social environment.”11 The literary subdivisions of post-1970 suburbia share with correctional institutions a lack of meaningful stimulation and a suppression of personal autonomy. In addition, the agoraphobic home can function quite literally as a prison for adolescent protagonists. They experience their geography as institutional and sterile, a limiting environment that does not nurture personal growth. Moreover, in a world where acquiring goods such as

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cell phones and automobiles serves as a sorry imitation of initiatory rituals, it is not surprising that suburban adolescents turn to selfmutilation as a more meaningful way of marking their movement from adolescence into adulthood. Favazza reminds us that cutting has “a symbolic association with the mutilative rites of adolescent initiation” and that self-mutilative acts are “pacts, unconscious and sealed with blood, indicating the adolescent’s desire to be reconciled with society.”12 These contemporary suburban protagonists are desperately trying to move beyond the liminal phase and toward reintegration. But their efforts are complicated by the extremely unhealthy state that continues to plague their social and built environments. The standardized suburban landscapes developed after 1970 provide contemporary fiction writers with individual and communal bodies fraught with the signs of postmodern dis-ease: agoraphobia, selfdestructive behaviour, and psychopathy point to the desperate state of both these bodies. Agoraphobia in particular is the ultimate sign of misplaced anxiety. In Then Again, the explosion of the family home insinuates that the threat once externalized “out there” beyond the sanctity of the single-family dwelling is really inside. Bricks and mortar are as fragile as skin; gestures toward healing, as I shall discuss in the next chapter, must be of apocalyptic proportions if the suburban subject is to achieve the reaggregation she seeks. If the bomb is only a metaphor, the metaphor is ticking.

6

Transformative Catastrophes The suburbs are a bell jar whose interior is impervious to the goriness and exalted passions of historical outburst. Douglas Coupland

1

It is unsurprising that the author responsible for articulating the zeitgeist of Generation X, a generation largely raised in the suburbs of North America, should publish not one but two coffee-table books on Canadian popular culture: Souvenir of Canada in 2002 and Souvenir of Canada 2 in 2004. Neither is it surprising that Souvenir of Canada should contain an entry called “Suburbia.” What is surprising, however, is Coupland’s rather paradoxical characterization of that space as Canadian. Coupland expresses the equivalent of an apologia for the blandness of Canadian suburbs, which he describes as the embodiment of “the way the United States was supposed to have turned out.”2 This characterization of the suburbs as a Terra Nullius landscape free of “historical outburst” is a common refrain in the Canadian cultural imaginary; Noah Richler begins his “Literary Atlas of Canada,” arguing that “the Canadian conviction that the country is Nowhere has been a trait of its psycho-geography since the earliest days of its settlement.”3 The myth is difficult to reconcile with Canada’s history of colonization. As Roger Keil states emphatically: “Canada is a settler society: this means that suburbanization is also a taking of indigenous land.”4 Some suburban communities are attempting to reconcile with this dual history of colonization and suburbanization. For example, a map of walking trails in Meadowvale – a planned community in Mississauga, Ontario – acknowledges the violent “historical outbursts” that enabled the settler suburban community’s development with signage relating the histories of Anishinaabe chiefs Wabukayne and Wabakinine. The former signed the Toronto and Mississauga Purchases in 1787 and 1805 respectively,

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while the latter and his wife were violently shot in 1796 by a British soldier who was later acquitted for the murder, an event that nearly resulted in an “uprising,” according to the signage. Despite his earlier characterization of Canadian suburbs as bland and without history, Coupland ends the entry with a vision of a suburban future that is nothing short of apocalyptic “goriness”: “But then, history is going to go on long after you and I are dead. Some day in some way, dams will burst. Battles will occur. There will be blood shed on these cold breezy subdivision cul de sacs amid the ghosts of a billion road hockey games and the ghosts of a thousand minivans washed with dish detergent and sponge mitts. In the darker corners of our souls, we know this to be true – maybe in the year 3066 – not for a long time yet, but some day. And until then, much of the Canadian soul will quietly remain both gentle and suburban, waiting for a greater call – like children in a 1970s sci-fi film, waiting to be sucked up into the sky by bright alien lights, the source of which we can never know” (110). While he laments the fact that the lives of suburbanites are “more or less stripped from the history books,” Coupland’s characterization of the Canadian soul as “gentle and suburban” seems jarringly inconsistent with the catastrophic potential the suburban landscape holds in the passage above, and in much of the fiction written by him and his contemporaries. Even as early as 1962, Humphrey Carver would proclaim, “the surface of the suburbs is scattered with the fall-out of an explosion.”5 Coupland’s reference to “1970s sci-fi films” reminds us that contemporary writers’ visions of Canadian suburbia came of age at a time that coincided with the heyday of Hollywood horror and disaster films, many of which were set in recognizably suburban, albeit American, landscapes. Think of films such as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead of 1978, in which zombies besiege a suburban shopping mall, the influence of which haunts Hamilton author Pasha Malla’s absurdist work of horror, Kill the Mall (2021). Influenced by the genres of horror, disaster, and science fiction in film and literature, Coupland’s Life after God (1995), Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), and Hey Nostradamus! (2004), as well as Calgary author Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum (2004), portray the suburban landscapes of Western Canada as spaces where horrific or disastrous changes occur in the future, functioning as reflections of our millennial, nationalist, and conservative anxieties. These novels employ motifs from apocalyptic and prophetic literature as they represent suburban space and its subjects at the zenith of the liminal phase. We move to the west, now, with novels that move away from realism, employing the techniques of popular genres to represent suburbia more

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paradoxically than earlier novels set during the first period of suburban development prior to 1970. As carnivalesque as they are frightening, the spaces represented by Coupland and Mayr are those wherein the rituals, objects, and identifications most sacred to the suburban way of life become profane; as the novels subject the landscapes to apocalyptic catastrophes, they allow for the possibility of change, or what Frank Kermode calls the “hope of renovation.”6

“Unremitting Banality and Inconceivable Terror” “Who are we, if we have no landscape to call our own?” Coupland wonders in Polaroids from the Dead (102). “Part of growing up in West Vancouver was to feel as if you were growing up in the middle of nowhere: a zero-history, zero-ideology bond-issuing construct teetering on the edge of the continent” (102). Coupland’s question calls attention to the profound connection between landscape and identity. His identity crisis is precipitated by the curious experience of growing up in a place that feels like the “middle of nowhere,” despite its rather specific location “on the edge of the continent.” For Stephen O’Leary, apocalyptic literature provides one response to Coupland’s experience of lack in relation to a meaningful individual or communal identity: “The story of the apocalyptic tradition is one of community building, in which human individuals and collectivities constitute their identities through shared mythic narratives that confront the problem of evil in time and history.”7 As Coupland’s writing implies, there is a sense that the newness and homogeneity of suburban landscapes have prevented them from being spaces infused with shared “mythic” or historical narratives, hence they have failed to provide contemporary writers with a consequential sense of community or a communal identity. This provides a compelling contrast between texts set in corporate suburbia and those set in the inner suburbs of the postwar period. While the protagonists of texts set during the first period of suburban development either escape to the city or find something redeeming in the postwar suburbs, for the latter, the suburban equivalent of the “problem of evil” is the possibility that their experience of lack  – of  culture, of variety, and of community  – may be interminable. As a social, cultural, psychic, and imaginative space that epitomizes Baudrillard’s “simulacrum,” contemporary suburbia holds no promise of an end; with its penchant for relentlessly sprawling, proliferating an identical landscape of big-box retail outlets, franchises, and single-family homes, the landscape evokes postmodern hyper-reality in that it “rules

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out the very occurrence of the Last Judgement or the Apocalypse or the Revolution.”8 Before analyzing Coupland’s particular representations of suburbia in relation to the prophetic or apocalyptic traditions, it seems prudent to explain how I am defining the different terms, and why I feel these two writers are situating their respective texts within these traditions by employing conventions associated with them. As Robert R. Wilson explains, the Western world looks to the Bible as “the paradigm for the identification and analysis of contemporary apocalyptic movements.”9 Wilson distinguishes between three referents of the term “apocalyptic”: religion, literature, and eschatology. Apocalyptic eschatology refers to “the themes and motifs associated with Jewish and Christian beliefs about the end of the temporal world and the beginning of a new world to come.”10 Marlene Goldman also describes apocalyptic narratives as concerned with “a transformative catastrophe and a subsequent revelation of ultimate truth.”11 She points out that eschatology is not only a temporal but also a spatial reference to the end, since “the original meaning of eschaton is actually ‘the furthermost boundary,’ ‘the ultimate edge’ in time and space.”12 The spatial implications are intriguing in light of Canadian suburbia’s function as a trope on the boundary between the civilized city and the unruly wilderness. Edward J. Ahearn prefers the term “visionary” to apocalyptic, arguing that the former is a more inclusive term for fictions that “involve a radical transformation of how we perceive the world, with inevitable implications for our judgment on the state of society.”13 Goldman distinguishes between prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology, defining the former as “a religious perspective” that envisions “God accomplishing divine plans for within the here and now.”14 Apocalyptic, on the other hand, “maintains that the prophet no longer retains the faith that redemption can occur in this world. In apocalyptic literature, hope does not lie in the anticipation of the restoration of an earthly community, but in the belief that God will bring an end to the profane world and create an entirely new one.”15 Likewise, Susan Sontag argues that the appeal of disaster films is that they allow viewers to “participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”16 For Sontag, disaster films reflect powerful “anxieties about the condition of the individual psyche,” anxieties which she connects to “the depersonalizing conditions of modern urban life.”17 Robert Beuka argues that the suburban landscape in the United States functions as a mirror of “both the fantasies and the phobias of the culture at large.”18 This is equally true in the Canadian

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context, in which it is the “depersonalizing conditions” of postmodern suburban life that mirror the same phobia Sontag perceived in urban life in the late sixties: “unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.”19 Coupland and Mayr borrow imagery, motifs, and generic conventions associated with prophetic and apocalyptic literature, as well as narratives of crisis or disaster. A broader definition seems fitting, then, given that both are additionally concerned with the “restoration of an earthly community.” For Coupland, the end of the world is a thematic concern, an anxiety that informs the sensibilities of many of his “Generation X” characters, who frequently give voice to a malaise that stems from the inadequacies of their suburban lifestyles. While nuclear apocalypse is a concern in the short story “The Wrong Sun” in Life after God, visionary experiences of apocalyptic eschatology also inform Girlfriend in a Coma and the suggestively titled Hey Nostradamus! Mayr’s novel is less overtly “apocalyptic,” but she too employs apocalyptic motifs in Venous Hum. Set in a suburban community that Mayr has described as a “Calgary/ Edmonton hybrid,” the chaotic climax of the novel takes place at a high school reunion that is crashed by various monsters.20 It ends with a cannibalistic feast that rewrites the one at the end of the Biblical book of Revelations, in which the consumption of the Whore of Babylon symbolically releases the colonized people.21 The transformative catastrophe at the centre of her text is spatially imagined, connecting the end of the world to the implosion of urban architectural forms that are being replaced by prefabricated suburban architecture.

“The Land that God Forgot”: Douglas Coupland’s Suburban Vancouver Coupland has frequently indicated the influence on his work of disaster movies from the 1970s. As the narrator of Life after God’s “The Wrong Sun” explains, Generation X in particular has been shaped by cinematic fantasies of eschatology: “The 1970s and disaster movies: seeing The Poseidon Adventure for the first time – the first movie I venture downtown, to see on my own at the Orpheum Theater to watch a world tip upside down. Earthquake; The Omega Man; The Andromeda Strain; Soylent Green; Towering Inferno; Silent Running, films nobody makes anymore because they are all projecting so vividly inside our heads – to be among the last people inhabiting worlds that have vanished, ignited, collapsed and been depopulated” (103). For Coupland’s narrator, the genre allows him to confront fears and anxieties, but also resonates with a familiar

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fantasy of watching the “world tip upside down” and of being “among the last people” to inhabit the world after the end. The experience of “inconceivable terror,” to echo Sontag, has much to do with anxieties about identity, and with feeling disconnected from family, friends, or God, which the narrator distinctly connects to the lack of a meaningful relationship with an authentic landscape. His question in Polaroids from the Dead, “Who are we if have no landscape to call our own?” is temporally and spatially specific to his generation: “Imagine the year is 1970 and you are eight years old. Imagine that you have no religion. Imagine that the houses lived in by you and your friends are all built by contractors and furnished with dreams provided by Life magazine. Imagine that you inhabit a world with no history and no ideology” (122). Coupland laments his generation’s lack of a meaningful landscape to inhabit, infused with an identifiable history and ideology. This lament is echoed by many of his characters. In the story “In the Desert” from Life after God, for example, the narrator confesses, “I have never felt like I was ‘from’ anywhere; home to me, as I have said, is a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies” (173). The connection between his identity crisis and the homogeneity and newness of the suburban landscape where he grew up is reiterated when he tells us, “I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere – the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind” (174). In Coupland’s texts, these anxieties are given expression through the mimicry – both in earnest and parodically – of conventions associated with disaster films. Like Wes Wakeham a generation before, the threat of a nuclear holocaust is very real for Coupland’s characters, and it is associated with the marriage of consumerism and technology that typifies their experiences as children of Vancouver’s edge cities in the 1970s. According to Stephen Keane, “disaster movies of the time were fundamentally concerned with more pervasive workaday concerns surrounding ‘the spectre of corporatism.’”22 The narrator of Life after God’s “The Wrong Sun,” makes a similar connection when he visits a McDonald’s restaurant “on a rainy Saturday afternoon, November 6, 1971” during a nuclear test that produces in him the fear of a catastrophic result (95). The threat fails to materialize, of course. “But connections had been made in my mind” the narrator confesses, “connections which are hard for me to sever even now, twenty years later: one, that McDonald’s equals evil; two, that technology does not always equal progress” (97).

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Coupland is interested in what happens after an imagined apocalypse does occur, a markedly different focus than writers of the earlier generation of suburban fiction  – particularly Wright, Laurence, and Gowdy – whose work is set around the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Laurence, Gowdy, and Wright are concerned with their characters’ inability to deal with a nuclear catastrophe that fails to materialize, and that only momentarily disrupts the banality of their existences. In Falling Angels, the state of unresolved panic such crises induce is symbolized by the bomb shelter and is invoked by subtle details such as the test pattern on the screen of a television that is never shut off (70). In The Fire-Dwellers, panic is signified by the revolver Stacey inherits from her father, and the perverse comfort she finds in the thought that she can use it on her family “if anything happened” and they were “damaged” in a nuclear catastrophe (174, italics in original). For Wes Wakeham of The Weekend Man, the end of the crisis is a disappointment he can only respond to by masturbating (121). The narrator of “The Wrong Sun” notes this generational difference himself when he relates “a cherished family story” about his parents’ experiences of the Cuban missile crisis at an Air Force base in Germany. When the crisis is resolved, the narrator states simply, “Life resumes; time resumes” (100). It is a dissatisfying, anticlimactic experience. As G.P. Lainsbury observes in an article on Generation X, “Crisis is everywhere, omnipresent and perpetual, but it all seems to fail to add up to anything more significant than the psychic state of panic itself.”23 In the second part of “The Wrong Sun,” sub-titled “The Dead Speak,” Coupland sublimates this state of panic when he provides several anonymous characters the opportunity to relate anecdotes about where they were when a nuclear holocaust hit Vancouver. Most of the characters in the story are engaged in the most banal activities: reaching into the fridge, sitting in traffic, shopping at the Park Royal mall, having their hair done. Although they relate their experiences dispassionately, the narrative ends with a message from the dead that anticipates the earnest ending of Girlfriend in a Coma: “we are changed souls; we don’t look at things the same way anymore. For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised again” (127). Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma imagines what living is like for a group of friends for whom life does resume after an apocalypse that is almost an anti-apocalypse, in that humanity simply falls asleep. In some respects, the novel is also situating itself in opposition to 1970s disaster films, since the actual disaster that ends humanity is fairly peripheral.

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Like a typical disaster film however, Coupland’s novel does work on the “perennial theme,” as identified by Keane, “of ‘hubris’” and the idea that “all the marks of ‘civilization’ – from moral codes to technological systems – duly fail in the disaster.”24 Coupland’s characters frequently reflect about the influence Hollywood has had on their generation; as Karen wryly observes in Girlfriend in a Coma, “The world was never meant to end like in a Hollywood motion picture – you know: a chain of explosions and stars having sex amid the fire and teeth and blood and rubies. That’s all fake shit” (208). As one character named Richard observes, the street where he and his friends grew up in North Vancouver, within a “sober, sterile mountain suburb” is “middle-class dull to the point of scientific measurability”  (15,  41). He recalls his mother’s “prophetic” assessment of their neighbourhood as “the land that God forgot” (41). Jared, the ghost of one of the protagonists, who describes the state of the world after the apocalypse, narrates the first chapter of the novel. His description focuses on the collapse of all that we associate with civilization: “To visit Earth now you would see thousands of years of grandeur and machinery all falling asleep” (5). In particular, it is the suburban landscape he pays attention to, describing its reclamation by the wilderness: “Suburban streets such as those where I grew up are dissolving inside rangy and shaggy overgrown plants; vines unfurl across roads now undriven by Camaros. Tennis rackets silently unstring inside dark dry closets. Ten million pictures fall from ten million walls; road signs blister and rust. Hungry dogs roam in packs” (5). The uselessness of suburban artifacts after the apocalypse is a satirical reflection of the protagonists’ anxieties about their investment in such things. Richard invites us to compare the psychically scarred suburbanite to the disfigured Vancouver landscape, which “was still – even now, ninety years later – beginning to heal, unaware of the sterile, suburban tracts above, the driveways and flowers and dishwashers and bird feeders” (107). He also compares himself to a whale “born and bred in captivity, then released in the wild  – into its ancestral sea  – its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths” (108). Richard’s metaphor affirms the dichotomy between the tidiness of the suburbs and the disorderliness of the wilderness. In Coupland’s texts, the suburbs of Vancouver are always on the border of the wild; in Girlfriend in a Coma, for example, Rabbit Lane borders the entrance to a forest (208). In Hey Nostradamus! Heather describes the “ludicrous existence” of a typical “1963 house” located “at the top of the mountain where nobody should live, a yodel away from pristine wilderness, an

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existence made possible only through petroleum and some sort of human need for remaining remote while being relatively close to many others” (209). “Whether set in the past or extending to the future,” Stephen Keane explains, “disaster films carry the ideological signs of the times in which they are made.”25 Like the characters of such films who, Keane argues, face “the ultimate test” when “‘society’ breaks down,” Girlfriend’s characters are tested by the apocalypse they survive.26 This apocalypse initiates in its characters a heartfelt response to lack akin to that which Coupland found in the landscape of his youth and that Karen – the comatose girlfriend of the novel’s title – perceives in her friends when she wakes from her twenty-year coma: “A lack of convictions  – of beliefs, of wisdom, or even of good old badness. No sorrow, no nothing. People – the people I knew – when I came back they only, well existed” (215). Karen refers to the catastrophe that ends existence as she and her friends know it as “some sort of mass transformation” (170). In contrast to typical disaster heroes, however, Coupland’s disaffected suburbanites fail to achieve redemption, primarily because they refuse to give up their shallow suburban lifestyles. As one character observes, “Our lives have remained static – even after we’ve lost everything in the world – shit: the world itself. Isn’t that sick? All that we’ve seen and been through and we watch videos, eat junk food, pop pills, and blow things up” (258). On condition that they submit to a renovation of their inner selves, the group is given a second chance and the apocalypse is reversed. Their mission, then, will be to become the new pioneers and physically transform the banal, consumerist, suburban landscape, to “go clear the land for a new culture” (274). Change and “hopeful renovation” are equally important to Coupland’s representation of suburbia as a “geography of apocalypse” in Hey Nostradamus! Opening with verses 51–52 from 1 Corinthians 15, the novel’s narrative of a Columbine-style high school shooting in North Vancouver is self-consciously informed by right-wing Christian notions of eschatology, now referred to as the “Rapture.” While it satirizes Christian intolerance and ignorance, the novel is also sympathetic to the characters’ attempts to fill the lack engendered by their suburban lifestyles and landscape with religion, and it is as earnest as Girlfriend in a Coma that after the “apocalypse,” here represented as an experience with “inconceivable terror,” “we shall be changed” as promised by the New Testament. While Girlfriend imagines life after the apocalypse, Hey Nostradamus! presents its readers with a vision of time and space in the afterlife and after a transformative catastrophe of a smaller scale,

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one that correlates with his vision of suburbia as a failed utopia in “the middle of nowhere.” Hey Nostradamus! begins with the story of the massacre as narrated by Cheryl, a teenaged born-again Christian who dies as a result of the injuries she sustains, and who is speaking from a limbo-like place where, she explains, “I’m no longer a part of the world and I’m still not yet a part of what follows” (9). Coupland invites us to connect this liminal space with the suburban neighbourhood where the massacre takes place when one of the shooters refers to their high school as “purgatory, School District 44” (30), and when Cheryl cryptically writes “God IS Nowhere / God IS Now here / God IS Nowhere / God IS Now here” on her binder just before the shooting (9). Allusions to North Vancouver as a kind of Promised Land reinforce the relationship between suburbia as a failed utopia and apocalyptic Christian literature such as the Book of Revelations and the prophetic narratives of Nostradamus. Jason, narrator of part two, remembers his “Mom going on a Nostradamus kick. She was trying to find the massacre foretold in his prophecies somewhere. As if” (91). This prompts Jason’s ironic address to the seer, which inspires the novel’s title: “Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we’d all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there’d never be another one again? (92). In their “remote suburb of a remote city,” Coupland’s narrators are acutely aware of their community’s failure as a Promised Land, a characteristic that places them within a distinctly Canadian tradition of apocalyptic rewriting (175). As Goldman asserts, early Canadian texts, such as exploration narratives, have “more often invoked apocalyptic visions of hell than of paradise.”27 Nostradamus’s characters question what sets them apart when “there are thousands of suburbs as average as us” (31). As Cheryl observes, her classmates seem the quintessence of a settled ordinariness, which is reflected by the “niceness” of their homes: “Most of them grew up in rectangular postwar homes that by 1988 were called tear-downs by the local real estate agents. Nice lots. Nice trees and vines. Nice views” (7). What is interesting is that it is not their encounter with the “inconceivable terror” of the massacre that is responsible for many of the characters’ conversions to Christianity, but an ill-defined threat to the “settled ordinariness” of their existence. The off-hand reference to “tear-downs” hints at the insidious changes to which “nice” neighbourhoods like Cheryl’s are being subjected as houses built during the first phase of suburban development are demolished

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to be replaced by the suggestively named “monster homes.” Cheryl encourages us to compare her character to the fortitude of the “two huckleberry shrubs” beside which she is “born again,” suggesting that she feels as if she too has managed to survive the devouring threat of “the mountain-side’s suburban development” (32). She is also sensitive to the hypocrisy of many of her fellow youth-group members, who lead lives of conspicuous consumption. As she observes, “Leading a holy life inside a burgundy-colored Vw Cabrio seems like a spiritual contradiction” (33). Like Girlfriend in a Coma, this novel is critical of the consumerism of the suburban lifestyle, linking it directly to the characters’ spiritual lack. Based as it is on the Columbine massacre of 1999, Hey Nostradamus! is less influenced than Girlfriend in a Coma or Life after God by disaster films. This may have something to do with the fact that tragedies such as Columbine have demonstrated the inconceivable terrors lurking in suburbia itself. The novel also seems less optimistic than its predecessors; their experiences with evil have left the characters with an ironic detachment from their lives and their feelings, as is evident in observations such as Jason’s that the gunmen responsible for the massacre suffered from “the generic sort of alienation we’ve all become too familiar with in the 1990s” (102). Perhaps the naïveté of the seventies’ disaster film, the genre’s tendency to end happily with order restored, is inappropriate for the kinds of anxieties and spiritual crises precipitated by the likes of Columbine. The only appropriate response, as Jason’s zealously religious father Reg explains in the novel’s final part, is “communion with others;” whether by means of god or humanity, whether real or illusory, this is what the novel’s characters have sought in their different ways (243). The same might be true of all of Coupland’s characters, who seek in their post-apocalyptic lives an experience of “communitas.” Structure, it seems, is the first construct to go in eschatalogical fantasies, and it is the eradication of structure that makes room for meaningful communion with others. Victor Turner associates communitas with the unstructured period of the liminal phase of ritual processes, when it “breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality, and from beneath structure, in inferiority. As Turner argues, “people can go crazy because of communitas repression”28 for we “have a real need  … to doff the masks, cloaks, apparel, and insignia of status from time to time even if only to don the liberating masks of liminal masquerade.”29 In Coupland’s novels, the “insignia” of cultural and economic status in suburban society lose their value during death and apocalypse, initiating his characters into the ambiguous potentialities of the liminal masquerade, if not yet communitas.

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“The Way of the Suburbs”: Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum Like Coupland’s novels, Suzette Mayr’s satire of suburban life, Venous Hum, invokes popular genres in film and literature such as horror and science fiction, particularly those influential during the seventies. Populated by cannibals, zombies, vampires, griffins, gargoyles, a “Dr. Stoker,” and a mildly monstrous foetus, Mayr’s novel is full of intertextual allusions to mythological monsters and to literature such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Horror films like Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, The Amityville Horror, and The Night of the Living Dead are also referred to when, for example, the pregnant vegetarian protagonist is exhorted  to eat meat, prompting her response that “this baby is not going to be some kind of meat-eating Rosemary’s Baby with horns and talons” (18). When the dead arrive at the novel’s climatic high-school reunion, realism is completely abandoned; the debt to teenage slasher films is signalled by Lai Fun’s observation that “school was a horror movie” of the “car-crash serial killer high school” variety (206). Mayr has explained that she wanted to “explore the horror genre” as a form that would allow her to imagine “the monster” not as “a rich white guy” like Dracula, but as a “an immigrant woman who can’t find a job,” as a projection, then, of conservative fears about immigrants, homosexuality, and racism.30 For Mayr, “horror provides insight into what a culture is afraid of.”31 Robin Wood suggests that the horror genre functions effectively as an expression of that which contemporary Western culture represses: “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror.”32 If we accept Wood’s argument that the “definition of normality” that is threatened by the monsters of horror films is “the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them,” then it is not surprising that many of them have been set in the suburbs, that bastion of conservative family values.33 Homo- or bi-sexuality has also been represented as “monstrous” or vampiric in horror genres, a trope that makes sense in a suburban context with its ideological and material dependence on the heteronormative family. As Wood asserts, “Bisexuality represents the most obvious and direct affront to the principle of monogamy and its supportive romantic myth of ‘the one right person’; the homosexual impulse in both men and women represents the most obvious threat to the norms of sexuality as reproductive and restricted by the ideal of the family.”34

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As a satire of suburban life that is both comedic and horrific, Venous Hum provides a different response to the question of what kind of “inconceivable terror” lurks in the gentle Canadian suburban soul than do Coupland’s texts. As Mayr explains, “the suburbs have incredible fictional potential … because they’re a homogenous environment built for people who don’t necessarily conform.”35 Venous Hum confronts readers with the repressed contents of the suburban dream, and with conservative anxieties about race, homosexuality, and immigration within a western Canadian landscape. In the process, she turns this landscape into a carnivalesque space that challenges our stereotypical assumptions about suburbanites. The novel plays with our expectations, often by reversing the conventions we associate with popular genres or by strategies of defamiliarization. Protagonist Lai Fun Kugelheim, for example, is a biracial woman whose ethnicity is left ambiguous; her name is inspired by her German father’s favourite noodle dish and not his familial origins. Despite setting the novel in a hybrid of two conservative Alberta cities, Calgary and Edmonton, Lai Fun is able to marry her lesbian partner, an event that only became legal in contemporary Alberta in 2005 but is made possible in the novel by Mayr’s generic, temporal, and geographic liberties. She imagines an alternative, heterotopic universe for her characters with an epigraph that creates a social and political space in which “in December 1967, Pierre Trudeau as Justice Minister of Canada presented the House of Commons with a divorce reform bill and amendments to the Criminal Code liberalizing restrictions on abortion and homosexuality” [12]. Mayr also subverts our expectations with her representation of the cannibal; usually a figure associated with negative stereotypes and taboos, Mayr’s vegan immigrants (who are, ironically, from Ottawa, but are constantly misread as immigrants by some Albertans, who fail to recognize differences between race and origin) are non-practising cannibals with whom we are clearly meant to identify and sympathize. Kirsten Guest suggests that postcolonial theorists and writers have helped transform the symbolic function of the cannibal from a negative to a more positive role: “the cannibal, long a figure associated with absolute alterity and used to enforce boundaries between a civilized ‘us’ and a savage ‘them,’ may in fact be more productively read as a symbol of the permeability, or instability, of such boundaries.”36 This transformation is due, in part, to recognition of the basis of the function of the taboo, whose efficacy, Guest asserts, “relies not on its participation in differential systems of meaning but rather on its recognition of corporeal similarity.”37

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Lai Fun’s parents are former cannibals who “turned over new leaves and became vegetarians so they could set an example for Lai Fun” (178). Readers are encouraged to identify with their dream, which is to “put down roots deep into the earth and live normal, boring suburban lives forever” (179). Their victims, on the other hand  – most notably the racist vampiric teacher Mrs Blake and the entitled White male writer Thor – invite our derision. When confronted by Lai Fun’s mother Louve for “feeding on children,” Mrs Blake’s response echoes the characteristic rant associated with right-wing critics of immigration: “I’m just doing my job, says Mrs Blake. Assimilating them. You parading around like this is your home, like you were born here, like you own the rules. Who gets to feed on whom! Taking jobs away from people who deserve them and were here first. You are an invader. You’re not only a creep and a bum, you’re a monster and a freak” (219). Mayr calls attention to the demonization of racialized minorities and immigrants as parasitic invaders by inviting us to reconsider who is the bigger monster. Mrs Blake, an English teacher whose relentless bullying of racialized children is metaphorically conveyed as vampiric, eventually turns into a gargoyle – a monstrous figure whose mouth acts as the spout on gothic architecture, and whose name comes from the French gargouille, associating it with the throat. Likewise, Thor is a talentless author who “feeds off” others by plagiarizing their work. Fittingly, the stories of immigrants and exoticized others are the narratives he most desires (176). Living in the “biggest and most orderly” house on the street, Lai Fun and her partner mimic misconceptions about the conformity of suburban life and “the way of the suburbs,” a phrase that operates as the ironic refrain of the latter half of the text (135). What troubles the characters most with ontological uncertainty is not the monstrous, which seems surprisingly lucid and ordinary, but their dreams of the everyday. It is Lai Fun’s dreams that “wake her with their banality,” while her uncharacteristic life as a lesbian wife and mother in her suburban neighbourhood is anything but banal (14). As Louve tells Lai Fun, “Months and months of dreams about lawn-mowing and grocery lists, and now you want me to interpret monsters? A monster is a monster is a monster” (15). Her words echo those of Abel in The Romantic when he tells Louise “Everything is what it is. Everything is itself” (250). Like Gowdy, Mayr uses suburban space and culture to explore the oftenarbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, between language and the real. Her stance toward the banal is ambivalent, especially as it comes to function as the “revelation” that occurs at the end of the text and is associated with apocalyptic narratives.

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“The way of the suburbs” becomes conflated with the monstrously scarred and haunted landscape of Louve’s and Lai Fun’s pasts, and with the community’s older urban buildings, quickly being demolished to be replaced by strip malls and franchises. The first to go are the griffins that decorate the bridge between city and suburb. “The assholes in this city don’t care about anything old,” Louve laments (15). But the demolition of the bridge and its griffins, as well as the general hospital and the high school Lai Fun attended as a teenager, also signals the disappearing border between urban and suburban spaces. On the bridge during a bus ride, Louve observes “the grown-over scars of the missing griffins,” and she hopes their poor, cracked, mixed-up bodies ended up in a nice cemetery, not just in Hotel Macdonald’s dusty basement, or dumped in a ravine” (45). As mythological monsters, hybrids of lions and eagles, the griffins call attention to suburbia’s desire to rid the landscape of anything ontologically uncertain. They also make appearances throughout the narrative, at Lai Fun’s and Jennifer’s wedding for example, as metonyms of a strident resistance against suburban sprawl’s drive for dominance (23). The griffins’ metonymic relationship to the protagonists’ psyches are indicated when the narrator describes Lai Fun as “a haunted house. She has a broken heart and all people with broken hearts are haunted. She has a condemned building for a heart and so her heart does what all distressed buildings do: it implodes like a worn-out hospital, like a used-up, sandstone school” (131). Like the protagonists of Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus!, the inner selves of Venous Hum’s characters reflect the haunted, scarred landscapes they inhabit. The novel ends with a gesture toward hopeful renovation, however; at the dinner party in Lai Fun’s and Jennifer’s suburban house, we find the griffins in their new home, “in the back garden, propped on either side of Freddy’s swing-set” (227). They thus signal the return of the repressed. Venous Hum effects its “hopeful renovation” through two unconventional “apocalyptic” scenes in Part IV, “The Reunion: October 2005,” during two climatic moments – the high school reunion Lai Fun and her friend Stefanja have been organizing, and the dinner party in which the characters eat Thor, Stefanja’s husband and Lai Fun’s partner in adultery. Just as Girlfriend in a Coma moves suddenly into apocalyptic mode, Venous Hum abruptly moves away from all pretence of realism, as if in violent realization of the limitations of that genre for representing suburban space. Scarred psyches and scarred landscapes converge at the reunion, which takes place in the community hall because the school has been demolished. At first, the reunion seems typical: “Lai Fun

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looks around at all her old school-mates and sees nothing she didn’t already expect” (211). Assurances are quickly revoked, however, when the sentence ends: “except that so many of them are dead” (211). It is at this point that the novel moves confidently into an alternative construction of suburbia as horror film set, replete with the return of high-school misfits zombie-like and irreverent, and the hospital’s undead. It ends with a carnivalesque dance in which “Nuns hug doctors, priests hug priests, patients do the IV jive. Football players hug computer nerds, drama guys hug Trojans and do pop-a-wheelies in wheelchairs, phlebotomists dip orderlies, interns twirl with housekeepers and janitors on their shoulders” (224). Time itself does not escape the topsy-turvy effects of this carnival, as is indicated by the setting in October 2005, a date that will arrive long after the novel’s publication. This carnival is the “transformative catastrophe” that turns the social order of suburban Alberta upside down, making that which is normally taboo permissible, even “civilized.” After killing the thieving Thor, Louve plans to get rid of the body by preparing an elaborate dinner party. The novel normalizes the feast by reproducing her recipes for “Deep-Fried Fingers in Black Bean Sauce” and “Brain Fritters” (187–8). The feast itself seems positively civilized in its description, rendered rhythmically through Mayr’s alliterative prose: “Slice with serrated steak knives through rare meat marinated in olives, capers, red wine, roasted in the oven until fragrant and perfect. Crunch through crackling, hint of rosemary, garlic, chew, eagerly around the bone, suck out the fatty marrow. Smell the salt of the meat, the salt of the garlicky sauces in the little bowls over the tea lights, the slurp of skewers dipped into Thai peanut sauce, black bean sauce, black pepper gravy, the sound of meat being chewed, the squeak and slice of incisors into the meat. Louve dips her fingers into a bowl of water and lemon slices, then wipes her hands on a napkin. Monsters are delicate eaters. Everyone knows this” (227). It is impossible to read this passage without experiencing the pleasure of the cannibals; nor can we overlook the similarities between eating human and animal flesh – a strategy that ensures our sympathies lie with the feasters rather than the feast. It also challenges us to question our moral certainties and the assumptions upon which they are founded. This strategy of defamiliarization results in intriguing implications for the text’s representation of suburbia and its relationship to neoliberal capitalist culture. It draws attention to the fact that this system succeeds by scapegoating and negating racialized, gendered, or ethnicized others. Anthropologists such as Eli Sagan and cultural theorists like Jacques Derrida, Maggie Kilgour, and Marlene Goldman have noted that

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capitalism is the Western world’s most cannibalistic cultural form. As Derrida cryptically states, “the so-called nonanthropophagic cultures practice symbolic anthropophagy and even construct their most elevated socius, indeed the sublimity of their morality, their politics, and their right, on this anthropophagy. Vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different mode of denegation.”38 Goldman is emphatic that “the unchecked will to consume” is “at the heart of the western and European model of society.”39 Many of the participants at Louve’s feast are former oil tycoons and executives whose fortunes changed when the economic boom of the eighties ended abruptly. Their consumption of Thor in the company of the disenfranchised is a dramatic reversal of capitalism’s habit of feeding off the poor. It also substitutes a male philanderer for the Whore of Babylon, whose consumption in the Biblical book of Revelations symbolizes the “release of a colonized people” and initiates a new social order.40 Just as it is for the cultures that practice it, this feast is a ritual, a moment of mythic re-enactment whose purpose is to reintegrate a broken community and sublimate human aggression through communitas. According to René Girard, “ritual cannibalism was designed to reproduce a primordial event.”41 Mircea Eliade refers to this process as the reactualization of myth, making cannibalism a “cultural behaviour, based on a religious vision of life.”42 Many anthropophagic cultures, such as the Tupinamba of Northwest Brazil, practiced cannibalism as a means of bringing about “communal cohesion.”43 As Girard further explains, “The prisoner drew to his person all the community’s inner tensions, all its accumulated bitterness and hatred. Through his death he was expected to transform maleficent violence into sacred beneficence, to reinvigorate a depleted cultural order.”44 The apparent paradox of a transformation of violence into beneficence through an aggressive act is resolved by Sagan, who insists cannibalism must be regarded as “an expression and satisfaction of aggression within a social context.”45 As Sagan explains, “the ritual mystery of this religion is expressed through an act of symbolic cannibalism; the flesh of the god is eaten and the blood is drunk, not actually but symbolically. And these symbolic cannibal acts are performed out of the need to express and enjoy feelings of affection and communion. Communion as established with one’s fellow worshipers, with the god who has been killed, with one’s own past, and with the ambivalent and contradictory forces within oneself that can be reconciled within a religious form.”46 Lacking such “religious forms” and rituals, North American suburbia must find other cultural forms to express and sublimate the drives that

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are regarded as dangerous to society. Sagan argues that art is a particularly important mechanism of sublimation: “Without sublimation, it is all impossible  – without cultural form that incorporates these sublimations, we would all be eating our enemies.”47 “Monsters are delicate eaters. Everyone knows this” (227). The cannibal feast that brings Venous Hum to its conclusion enacts a ritualistic sublimation of violence as the usually gentle vegans consume and incorporate the bigoted aggressor and adulterer. Northrop Frye identifies the cannibal feast as a feature of apocalyptic narratives: “At the bottom of the night world we find the cannibal feast, the serving up of the child or lover as food.”48 The dinner party ends with a spatial shift in its refrain, now: “This is the way of the city” (229). Communal and familial harmony is restored. Yet the novel concludes with Louve’s letter to Ann Landers  – that icon of postwar suburban mores  – in which she complains about her inability to rid herself of old friends she recently had over for a dinner party. With this return to the trivial and banal, Mayr goes against the usual literary function of “revelation,” frustrating our expectation that the novel’s conclusion will provide us with the kind of “ultimate truth” Marlene Goldman identifies in the apocalyptic narrative.49 Apocalyptic or visionary literature seems a suitable response for suburban literature published at the boundary of the millennium. For Edward J. Ahearn, works that are visionary or apocalyptic like Coupland’s and Mayr’s have the benefit of being subversive of the “increasingly dominant form of the realistic novel,” a form that has been particularly central to the Canadian canon.50 Sagan suggests that “the psychic energy released when aggressive, sexual, and magical instincts are sublimated can be used to construct new [cultural] forms.”51 These texts also provide what Baudrillard refers to as the “global fantasy of catastrophe,” in the very space that seems to rule it out, answering the “demand for a violent resolution of reality, when this latter eludes our grasp in an endless hyper-reality.”52 Serendipitously, a series of articles on suburbia in the Globe and Mail ended with John Barber’s commentary (inspired by the 2005 documentary The End of Suburbia) in which he expresses a common fear that it will never undergo a transformative apocalypse: “It may well be that suburbia ‘ends’ in a great postoil apocalypse. Or it may be brought to crisis by some other aspect of its manifold overconsumption – of land, for instance. It may be, however, that the suburbia we all love to hate is simply no longer historical, something that will change and perhaps improve in time, but anthropological: a big mistake made permanent.”53

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The apocalyptic responds to this kind of anxiety, providing us with what Frank Kermode calls a “myth of transition,” that allows us to think of suburbia as a space in a terminable temporal, spatial, and ritual phase.54 As David Seed elaborates, “The notion of an ending, as Kermode shows, does have the appeal of rescuing us from the ultimate nightmare of endless, undifferentiated duration.”55 As such, it might offer the potentialities of communitas and the opportunity for a more meaningful reconciliation of subject and landscape.

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Scarborough, Scarberia, Scarlem, Scarbistan, Scar-bro

As René Girard reminds us, literary critics since Aristotle have argued in favour of literature performing an essential ritual: “In describing the tragic effect in terms of katharsis he asserts that tragedy can and should assume at least some of the functions assigned to ritual in a world where ritual has almost disappeared.”1 Suburban protagonists perform ritualistic activities as a means of healing their bodies and their relationships to their communities. These rituals can be hidden and personal; often, they are expressed as signs of characters’ distress. I think of Karen’s play with the grey cube that represents thoughts of suicide in The Torontonians, or the many adolescent girls who communicate trauma and the need for its release through self-harm. Ritualistic gestures can also be grand and catastrophic – as in Elyse Friedman’s Then Again and Coupland’s novels – satisfying a desire to blow up the material and cultural artifacts that represent “the good life” in suburbia. The banal symbols of suburban culture that clutter the homes of White writers culminate in Suzette Mayr’s novel at Louve’s cannibalistic feast, a ritualistic coming-together of the dominant and marginalized cultures. Cannibalism functions in Venous Hum as a ritual – in a world where ritual has almost disappeared  – that dramatically brings the Canadian suburban imaginary into communitas. Although the feast takes place in Lai Fun’s and Jennifer Singh’s suburban home, the chapter ends, “this is the way of the city,” suggesting a merging – not simply of urban and suburban spaces – but of the values and social behaviours associated with them as well (229). When the psychogeographical boundaries that once distinguished the division between suburb and

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city are extinguished, other markers of division are revealed as illusory. This ambiguity, however discomfiting, brings the spatialized, racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized diversity of Canadian suburbia into high relief. Certainly, it is far too soon to proclaim the actual suburbs of Canada as spaces approaching that state of “communal cohesion” Girard perceived as the outcome of ritualistic cannibalism. At a reading of her novel What We All Long For, Dionne Brand remarked that fleeing to suburbia is one way immigrant or racialized subjects attempt to escape from the damaging ways the city constructs their bodies.2 In the novel, downtown Toronto and its suburbs are liminal places from which various characters of diverse backgrounds negotiate their fraught relationships with the homes they have left behind. The Vu family stuff their home with objects, an activity the narrator describes as “a businesslike readiness to have all the world had to offer by way of things” and as “a voracious getting” (62). Their compliance with consumerism is more than an attempt to fit in with the dominant culture, however. It reveals their need to fill a void and escape the past that haunts the family, who were forced to leave behind their first son when he was separated from them during the voyage from Vietnam: “They had everything and nothing. They didn’t even like or savour having everything, they simply had it as a matter of course. Cars, cellphones, computers, expensive clothes, unused bicycles, unused toys, unused kitchen gadgets, unused birthday gifts, gifts that only had a momentary charge of excitement that was not excitement but agitation. The rooms in their big house in Richmond Hill were stuffed with clumsy furniture. There was a television in each room, turned on endlessly and loudly … So there were generations of furniture and generations of pots and pans and generations of all the things a house can use” (62). The catalogue of goods that pack the Vu home is a compelling reversal of the post-apocalyptic disregard for the artifacts of suburbia that Coupland’s characters demonstrate in Girlfriend in a Coma. These goods are the only signifiers many migrants to suburbia can find to represent the culture to which they are trying to belong. “Consumption becomes culture” as John Barber observes.3 In spite of their increasingly visible presence, Brand’s literary migrants have not achieved the level of privilege that permits them to doff “the insignia of status” that is a part of the communitas ritual.4 For Victor Turner, communitas refers theoretically “to liminal conditions in which human beings not only shed their categorical distinctions and differences but then also relate to one another through the equality and fullness of being, whose mundane actualization is routinely

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prevented by social structure.”5 Edith Turner describes communitas as “the sense felt by a group of people when their life together takes on full meaning.”6 Disaster scholars characterize it as “the improvisational acts of mutual help, collective feeling and utopian desires that emerge in the wake of disasters.”7 This inchoate feeling is recognizable to those of us experiencing a global pandemic in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Like the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, communitas can disrupt social and cultural hierarchies, producing a temporary suspension of time. I think of communitas as a radical temporal and spatial period of flux and transformation experienced within communities – human, but occasionally encompassing the animal, too – inevitably changing relations, institutions, social structures, and both natural and built environments. Communitas is disruptive of the status quo and rarely comfortable. This is the way of the suburbs, then: as more Indigenous, immigrant, and racialized bodies proclaim their presence in that conventionally White space, theirs are the next narratives to emerge, radically transforming the Canadian suburban imaginary through communitas. Consider the names of specific suburban communities surrounding Toronto as they function as metonyms for Canada in our suburban imaginary: The apartment towers of the fictional Rosecliffe Park in the Don Mills of M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land may “exist in a state just this side of dissolution,” but their “renown, because of their inhabitants’ connections, reaches well beyond this suburban community, fuelling dreams of emigration in friends and relatives abroad” (2). In Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement, it is not Canada that signifies the Promised Land for Somali refugees, but the Dixon area surrounding the Toronto airport: “Throughout the refugee camps of East Africa, people knew where Dixon was, like a country, a hoped-for haven.”8 Dixon is also the destination for the narrator of the titular story in David Bezmozgis’s Immigrant City (2019), who travels by TTC with his four-year-old daughter to purchase a car door from a Somali immigrant; when he arrives at the apartment buildings “thrumming with life and larceny,” the narrator is emotionally moved by the reminder of his own “immigrant childhood.” Mohamed Abdi Mohamed’s apartment  on Dixon Road is a surprising setting for a moment of communitas, of “fraternal understanding” and “spiritual communion” between the Jewish Latvian narrator and the Muslim Somali (8, 9). Yet the moment is also fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and mistrust as the narrator questions whether it is safe to leave his young daughter with Mohamed’s family, fearing he will be “dismembered upstairs” in another apartment where the commercial transaction will occur (9).

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Instead, he is surprised by the humility and urgency of Mohamed’s request that he take the memoirs of Mohamed’s uncle, a former Somali minister of justice, and turn them into a story. In the climax to What We All Long For, the collision between cultures and generations occurs, appropriately, “near a stop sign” outside the Vus’ Richmond Hill home (317). While the Vus’ long-lost son Quy waits outside in his brother’s “Beamer” as the latter prepares his parents for their reunion, he is beaten by Jamal, a young biracial man who is the brother of Tuyen Vu’s friend. Jamal and his friends head to Richmond Hill to steal cars because “there are rich motherfuckers there and they got great cars to boost, in garages off roadways called crescents and drives. They got monster houses and monster rides” (317). From Jamal’s perspective, suburban signs of success and upward mobility are associated with the monstrous, a quality that threatens his survival, but that he equates with all that is beyond his reach as a young Black man in the city. Only those immigrant and racialized subjects who have the economic capital to access the suburban dream can do so; yet as the example of the Vus makes clear, they often do so joylessly, “as a matter of course.” It is cruelly ironic then, that the man upon whom Jamal unleashes his anger is not one of the White “rich motherfuckers,” but Quy, whose life and probable death at the end of the novel is tragic on many fronts. Brand describes Quy as a character our “national narrative” can only see in certain ways.9 Like Jamal, his ethnic and racial subject positions keep him outside both the national and the suburban narratives. Rather than violence, the meeting of Jamal and Quy could be an opportunity for communitas, for mutuality and an empathetic recognition of shared struggle. What We All Long For reminds us of the very real costs to racialized bodies when they are inserted into alien narratives and hostile spaces. They continue to be seen and constructed in limited and limiting ways, however “multi” the suburbs might now be. As the speaker of her poetic narrative Thirsty observes, “they had set notions of who they were, buried in apartments / and houses in North York and Scarborough and Pickering.”10 The greatest tragedy occurs when racialized peoples begin to see themselves in the restrictive reflections offered them by their cultures and societies. Brand’s words remind me that the map that engenders the territory also engenders subjects and their stories. As the publishing industry in Canada catches up to the nation’s racial and cultural diversity, fiction of the twentieth-first century offers new narratives set in spaces surrounding Toronto that suggest a renaissance

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for the suburban imaginary. For some, the suburbs are almost an incidental setting; Mississauga is “MiserySaga” to the adolescent characters in Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (2016), while a basement apartment in the “polyglot suburb” of Brampton is the intimate setting in Ian Williams’s experimental novel of unconventional familial kinship, Reproduction (2019).11 There is, in contrast, a kind of urgency to the spatial representation of suburban Scarborough neighbourhoods in a trio of recent novels: Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You (2016), David Chariandy’s Brother (2017), and Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough (2017). Each of these books focus on the specificity of the Scarborough communities in which they are set, offering expansive revisions of the suburban imaginary as the expression of communitas. Even as they provide candid examinations of the challenges experienced by their characters, the novels encourage readers to imagine Scarborough – like other Canadian suburbs – as a microcosm of the nation, permitting a glimpse of what might be possible when people come together in community.

Scarborough, Scarberia, Scarlem, Scarbistan, Scar-bro Once considered “a modern suburban utopia for middle-class and ascendant working-class white families,”12 today Scarborough is recognized – and often maligned – for its racial and ethnic diversity. Census data from 2016 reflects this, as do the community’s various epithets, which in an earlier period conveyed perceptions about the region’s distance from the metropolitan centre but now take on more xenophobic connotations. In a fascinating study of Scarborough as a site for the examination of “Indigenous and settler presence, mobilities and migration,” Villegas, Landolt, Freeman, Herman, Basu, and Videkanic trace the multiple narratives of place-making that attach to this suburban city. As they argue, “Scarborough is often represented in Janus-faced terms: as a vibrant multicultural immigrant gateway and a dangerous and impoverished place – a Scarlem – that houses the city’s racialized working poor.” As the authors elaborate, this oppositional representation means that Scarborough is understood contradictorily in the local – and national – cultural imaginary: the “hypervisibility of negative representations linking place and race and migration processes” coexists with “an invisibility and erasure of the social and economic exclusions faced by area residents.”13 Michael, in Chariandy’s Brother, explains the suburb’s many monikers from his perspective as an insider who came of age during a period

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of transition: “The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scar-bro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life” (13). Here, the suburb is envisioned not simply as a built environment designed by White urban planners and developers, but as a living organism that persists in spite of their master plans; its colours reflect both the community’s racial diversity and the organic growth that flourishes in decay. For Michael’s generation, “Scar-bro” is a powerful act of renaming, of defining their community based on terms that assert communitas: presence, kinship, and mutuality. The urgency of this assertion is a necessary act of agency in response to the violence of racism, misrepresentation, and police brutality. Shifting between the past and the present, Brother narrates Michael’s “complicated grief” ten years after his brother was murdered by police during a summer of violence in the Park (66). More than the “trouble” afflicting the neighbourhood that summer, it is the disempowering response from the wider Toronto community that infuses Michael’s recollections with pain. The demonization of young Black men erases their bodies, lives, and stories from the community “as if through magic a whole neighbourhood had been made to disappear. As if a power existed to do such a thing” (27). Brother is filtered through the limited perspective of a single character, narrator Michael, but he invites readers to see his community, the Park, from the expansive bird’s-eye position of brother Francis’s childhood “place in the sky. The hydro pole in a parking lot all weedbroke and abandoned” (1). The hydro pole is a pervasive symbol of the built environment, placing Brother in conversation with the desolate setting of Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1988) and recalling the menacing buzz of a hydro corridor in Judy MacDonald’s Jane (1999). An image of a hydro pole surrounded by birds is the first paratextual element readers of Brother encounter in the novel; the reward for the brothers’ treacherous climb in childhood is “free air and seeing,” and the sentence that follows invites readers to also see “the streets below suddenly patterns you could read” (1). Michael’s description of his community offers a grammar of the Park that merges verticality and horizontality, the natural and the built environments of Scarborough: it is “a cluster of low-rises and townhomes and leaning concrete towers” that are adjacent to the Lawrence Avenue bridge, “a monster of reinforced concrete over two hundred yards in length. Hundreds of

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feet beneath it runs the Rouge Valley, cutting its own way through the suburb, heedless of man-made grids” (5). Like the ravines of Atwood’s and Gowdy’s fiction, the Valley is a natural, liminal space within the community that hints at danger but also offers the brothers a childhood refuge where they “build forts and hideaways in the brush” (19). Adult Michael describes it as “a wound in the earth. A scar of green running through our neighbourhood, hundreds of feet deep in some places, a glacial valley that existed long before anything called Scarborough” (18–19). A few pages later, Michael concedes that “the Rouge was not ‘nature,’ not that untouched land you could watch on wildlife shows or read about in history books. The Rouge wasn’t the sort of place you could pretend to have discovered, nor imagine empty and now your own” (20). Chariandy’s Scarborough thus reinscribes the Canadian suburban imaginary. It is a crowded, dense assemblage of residential housing that seems more urban than suburban; an “in-between city”14 challenging the stereotypical depiction of North American suburbs as bucolic, labyrinthine, and homogenous streets of identical single-family homes with homogenous White middle-class families inside them. Yet the ravine is a “wound,” and “a scar,” an insistent reminder of the natural environment that refuses to be covered by concrete or imagined as Terra Nullius. It is the republic of childhood, but also of the community of wildlife whose quotidian lives tell stories that are as hidden from the national narrative as are the those of the Park’s human residents: “Always, for our mother, there was the hidden life to point out for us in the Rouge. The monarchs she explained had crossed whole lands to be here. The bird of prey she spotted on the day after she and her co-workers were all suddenly let go, a red-shouldered hawk, pure fierceness and pride. Even once, on our way back home, a raccoon leaving a dumpster, tiptoeing unafraid with a queenly rump-high walk” (148). In this novel, the natural is as much a part of the landscape as is the built environment, and Michael learns from his mother a commonality with the overlooked plant and animal life that is relational, and that disrupts human hierarchies and taxonomies of dominance. Carrianne Leung’s novel That Time I Loved You emphasizes kinship and community with linked stories of multiple narrators who live in a middle-class subdivision of a fictionalized Scarborough neighbourhood between 1979 and 1981. Leung argues that “the suburbs are much more complex than people assume – it’s not that everybody lives in monster homes and it’s all sprawling.”15 The novel counters stereotypes of suburban space and subjects by focusing on the inner lives of the

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residents of three “sister streets” designated by female names – Winifred, Maud, and Clara. Narrator June describes her brand-new subdivision as architecturally homogenous in a way that is recognizable to anyone who grew up in a similar community during the height of 1970s corporate development: “The three sister streets were almost carbon copies of each other, with the same houses—three two-storeys and a bungalow repeated as a pattern” (3). Yet for June’s parents, Scarborough is a welcome change from the crowded conditions of their former lives in their native Hong Kong and later, a rented apartment in downtown Toronto. June explains the attraction for them: “My parents loved the neat grid of black road, the bright white stripes to differentiate the lanes, the chain-linked fences that divided our properties but gave us views into the neighbours’ yards, the young, weeping trees lining our streets” (5). Given the newness of the subdivision, all of its residents are equally new in some way, whether they are immigrants from nations such as Portugal, second-generation Italians, or have migrated from the city, like June’s family, or from northern Ontario communities. The standardized architecture establishes a sense of fraternity – characteristic of communitas – that is amplified by Leung’s technique of linked stories in which multiple narrators share responsibility for moving the plot, while also sharing their own unique experiences. June is the first character to introduce us to Leung’s fictional Scarborough; she is a child of eleven during the period in 1979 when the subdivision is shaken by a string of suicides. As the narrator of three stories in the collection, June’s consciousness is the filter through which readers perceive the culture of her neighbourhood; she comes of age against the backdrop of Winnifred, Maud, and Clara streets, the geographical limits of the world for her and for the other children in the community. In contrast to previous examples of Canadian suburban literature, however, June’s coming of age is a part of the larger story of the community, not its sole focus. Upending conventional media panic about youth vulnerability, the suicides around which the novel’s stories revolve are committed by the adults in the community. As June’s first sentence in the first story, “Grass,” explains, 1979 “was the year the parents in my neighbourhood began killing themselves” (1). Many of the stories that follow represent attempts by residents to make sense of the string of deaths, particularly the children from whom information is often kept in order to protect their innocence. Occasional stories are narrated by adults, some of whom are among the victims of the suicide epidemic. “Flowers,” the second story in the collection, narrates the last day of Mrs Da Silva, who makes the decision to take her own life after learning

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of the death of her mother in their native village of Sāo Miguel, in Portugal. While the third-person narrator offers several hints to explain what leads Mrs Da Silva to drink a bottle of bleach in her garage, her story is a complicated tale of grief, isolation, and the challenges of adapting to a new environment. Leung is careful to avoid locating Mrs Da Silva’s distress in a simplified account of suburban malaise. Like Francesca, Mrs Da Silva’s neighbour, Leung resists totalizing narratives that “gather and explain all these lives in a few sentences, flatten her whole neighbourhood with a simple gesture” (51). Likewise, Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough begins with paratextual elements that establish the author’s sense of kinship with and belonging to her own community in Rouge Park. The first page addresses a specific reader, a child Hernandez encountered when she was a teenager teaching drama at a local community centre: “Wherever you are, I hope you are safe / and know I loved you enough to write you this book” ([5]). This is followed by a poem dedicated to “all the Scarborough girls,” ending with a gesture of empathy and recognition: “I see you” ([7] italics in original). The novel’s narrative develops in interconnected stories told from the perspectives of multiple residents who make up the community of this under-resourced neighbourhood, each taking a turn advancing the plot and sharing their own unique stories. Many of these narrators are children who struggle, together with their parents, against social structures that consistently fail to meet their needs, whether through inefficient bureaucracy, lack of adequate resources, or systemic racism. The cover of the novel immediately establishes its setting as a different understanding of the suburban; above the book’s title is an image of a young Black girl running playfully across a subway platform. The image is featured as if the viewer is seeing the girl from the window of a subway car – a view that invites us to place ourselves inside the scene and outside all we assume we know about suburban communities in Canada – that they are enclaves of White, middle-class car-reliant residents. Like Chariandy’s novel, Scarborough’s expansive definition of kinship is highlighted by the inclusion of the natural world; animal characters such as “Grandfather Heron,” a resident of the Rouge River conservation area, and an orangutan at the Toronto Zoo located in Scarborough, are recognized as vital elements of the novel’s movement toward communitas. One lovely example occurs in a series of chapters narrated by a child named Sylvie, who lives with her Mi'kmaq family in the Galloway shelter. Sylvie is a gifted storyteller who often meets in the common area with another resident, known to the community as “Slutty Christy,” where she tells Christy stories “about the orangutan

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at the zoo that tried to swim away” (76). Sylvie’s story offers an empathetic portrayal of the captive orangutan, who, like many of the human residents in the novel, strives to nourish and protect her family while yearning to be returned to her original home in the rainforest. The tale of the orangutan functions as a meta-narrative reflecting Sylvie’s own need for nourishing origin stories. At one point in her telling, Sylvie projects herself into the story as an infant orangutan “sucking on her long leathery boobs while she told me where I came from. Where we had all come from” (76). Sylvie completes her narration near the end of the novel, when Christy is set to move out of the shelter with a boyfriend. Although the orangutans never return to the rainforest, they set sail across a pool in a raft crafted from found objects, landing eventually in the Rouge Hill Campground. The conclusion of Sylvie’s tale of wish-fulfillment offers hope for all members of the community. Although “they never made it to the rainforest,” she explains, “they have lots of trees to climb. And since Scarborough is a sunrise place, they wake up every morning, enjoy tea, and watch the sky turn red” (207). Storytelling is here a vital gesture of communitas between an Indigenous child and a White woman marginalized as a sex worker and by her struggles with substance abuse. The characters are united by empathy and their desire to make of Scarborough a “sunrise place” that nourishes all residents equally. Chariandy’s revision of Scarborough and the Park is a powerful act of representation that shares Michael’s urgency. As Chariandy explains, “I wanted to offer a story about the resilience of people working in Scarborough, the creativity of people working in Scarborough, the fact that there are parents working so hard to provide better lives for their children in Scarborough. I wanted to acknowledge there are challenges, but tell that bigger story of life and vitality that you don’t always see in headlines.”16 Through Michael’s compassionate observation and telling of the stories that make up the Park, specific places associated with the Scarborough landscape become the setting for community and communitas. At the intersection of Markham Road and Lawrence Avenue, for example, Michael describes in loving detail the small businesses in a “series of strip malls” that cater to the needs of the immigrant population (14–15). He takes equal care imagining the specific origin stories of his neighbours: “they often come under challenging circumstances, from the Caribbean, from South Asia and Africa and the Middle East, from places like Jaffna and Mogadishu” (36). A particularly important space for the neighbourhood’s youth is “a barbershop called Desirea’s” where Francis and his friends hang out,

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listen to music, and practice their art as dJ s (49). As Michael explains, “in Desirea’s, different styles and kinships were possible. You found new language, you caught the gestures, you kept the meanings close as skin” (101). Just as Chariandy tells the untold stories of a different Scarborough, his treatment of the youth’s consumption and production of musical styles associated with Black culture recognizes the complexity of their art, while also offering a clue to his own experimentation with the form of the novel. The youth at Desirea’s recognize their friend Jelly as an accomplished master of dJ ing; his name is a homonym for “Djeli,” meaning “griot” or “a storyteller with memory” (111). Michael describes the ways that his brother and Jelly sample from a diverse range of genres and artists from Black musical cultures: “Francis and Jelly stole it all back for us, the dead and the living, made it ours to listen to” (103). By focusing on the particular, Jelly’s compilations reveal the whole: “he’d discover and isolate the break beat, that precious particle of meaning, that three-second glimpse of the bigger story of a song, extending now forever” (103). The novel seeks to do the same, offering that “three-second glimpse of the bigger story” in small details that disaggregate totalizing narratives of Blackness and race in Canada as they operate both locally and nationally. Michael and his brother Francis are the children of Indo- and Afro-Caribbean parents; Michael describes his friend Aisha as “another black mongrel” (59) raised by a single father who comes from the “the same rural district in Trinidad as our mother” (51) after her “Filipina mother … had to leave the country” (59). Glimpses into the lives of these residents also reveal much about their dreams and their stories. Aisha’s father shares his love of his music with Francis, while Aisha herself is a writer of “coding languages and algorithms and data structures” (62). Misrecognition and misunderstanding are the acknowledged perils of Scarborough’s plurality of origin stories and linguistic diversity. When Michael attempts to address his incommunicative co-worker in a variety of languages he has picked up on the job, the man finally responds “Look, bitch. I’m from Mississauga” (43). But by focusing on the particular stories of Rouge Park’s residents and the specificity of the local landscape, Chariandy’s novel tells a larger story: the kinship expressed through the art and practice of dJ ing becomes an analogy for communitas. Just as with Chariandy, music offers Hernandez inspiration for a novelistic form she feels best represents her diverse community: “The sameness of the suburban landscape serves as the riff to the song that I sing often in my writing. This is how a riff works in music: it is the basic

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repetitive theme that allows a featured melody to shine in counterpoint rhythms and jolts of sound. The drab architecture that city slickers turn up their noses at amplifies the stories of us suburban folks.”17 Hernandez renders her suburban landscape and its “drab architecture” with the precision and acuity of someone who knows it well. Each of the novel’s four parts correspond to a season, merging descriptions of the natural and the built environments. In Part One, “Fall,” black flies and “Grandfather Heron” inhabit the Rouge River, while “At the corner of Lawson and Centennial Roads / With shadows long from an early sunset, the gals at the Pampered Paws nail salon close up shop” and “At Kennedy Station  … the wind flows a fierce warning of a dark season to come” (17;  italics in original). Like Chariandy’s, the particular details that make Hernandez’s Rouge Park uniquely Scarboroughesque amplify the stories of her characters and counter the stereotype of suburban homogeneity. Her child characters attend Rouge Hill Public School; Filipina and Vietnamese mothers work at the Pampered Paws nail salon; and the “best Doubles in Scarborough” can be found at Winsum’s Caribbean restaurant, “Everyting Taste Good” (151). The novel is framed by the narration of one particular child, Laura Mitkowski, whose tragic death in an apartment fire is the “featured melody” toward which the over-arching plot moves. Laura’s opening narrative precedes the novel’s four-part structure and sets the tone for the rest of the novel, communicating a young child’s bewilderment as she and her mother are evicted from their apartment and her mother’s subsequent abandonment of the child to her father, Cory, an unskilled worker and White neo-Nazi who is ill-prepared to provide for his daughter. This vignette establishes with immediacy the novel’s representation of Scarborough in opposition to suburban stereotypes of class homogeneity. Hernandez represents Cory with empathy; like all the residents of Rouge Park, the young father clearly loves his daughter and seeks to take care of her. But the need to fight for scarce resources thwarts him, and his frustration with the system manifests as racist violence and a deep mistrust of those, like Ms Hina, who try to support him and Laura. As in Brother, the racial, ethnic, and class plurality of Scarborough’s neighbourhoods is a source of its beauty, but also a challenge to mutuality. Systemic inadequacy is revealed by the inclusion of bureaucratic documents amongst the personal narratives; email exchanges between Ms Hina, the program facilitator of the elementary school’s provinciallyfunded literacy program, and her supervisor, narrate the challenges and micro-aggressions she experiences while trying to support families.

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Laura’s initial vignette is followed by a letter from the Executive Director of the program to Ms Hina that immediately establishes the short-sightedness of governmental organizations and their ignorance of systemic barriers to literacy and education. Although Ms Hina is initially instructed to “build relationship and familiarize yourself with the community’s members, elders and children” (14), she is later admonished to “try to keep personal lives out of the picture” when she advocates for more resources on behalf of the families in her centre (187). Ms Hina’s character is a benevolent depiction of the individuals who fight tirelessly to bring change to the community. As geographer Ranu Basu argues in her analysis of “Scarborough as Sub/urban/altern Cosmopolitanism,” grass-roots activists and workers are on the frontlines against “neoliberal state-level exclusionary norms” in the community. The stories and vignettes in the novel are fictional testaments of “how migrant spaces have been produced in Scarborough and its everyday life,” and “provide a counter-hegemonic narrative to the logics of a rationally defined settler-neoliberal city.”18 Ms Hina eventually wins her fight against the gatekeepers of neoliberal exclusionism through collaboration with her union. A final official letter from Ms Hina’s new supervisor suggests a hopeful shift in state-level policy and grounds the novel in a balanced representation of the community as it is – and as it could be. This trio of Scarborough novels are each distinct for the ways they experiment with form, then, but also for representations of suburban neighbourhoods and their members that privilege communitas over individualism. Collectively, the characters experience “liminal conditions” during which the “categorical distinctions and differences” among vectors such as age, gender, sexual orientation, class, race, and ethnicity are overcome – even if only temporarily.19 These are unlike the novels of previous decades that tell of the solitary White ex-centric coming of age in suburbia. Instead, they offer ensemble casts of characters and circuitous connections among multiple and competing narratives of the potential for misunderstanding, but also of “fraternal understanding” in the suburban imaginary. One among a variety of examples in That Time I Loved You is the remarkable friendship that develops between June’s elderly grandmother, Poh Poh, and her childhood friend, Naveen. The story “Sweets” is narrated from Poh Poh’s limited perspective: her transition to Canadian suburban life is complicated by her lack of English and her isolation in “this nothing place where you could walk and walk for hours but never arrive anywhere new” (148). Gradually, however,

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the story reveals that Poh Poh has always experienced herself as an outlier, eschewing femininity during her former life in Hong Kong by shaving her hair and running a successful business as a widow. In June’s young gender-nonconforming friend, Nav, Poh Poh recognizes “strains of herself” and “a hidden recognition” passes between them, despite the barriers of age and language (157). By the story’s end, Poh Poh’s quiet acceptance of Naveen’s fluid gender identity is given symbolic expression when she gifts him her most precious wig, named Mae West (165). This gesture of mutuality and recognition cuts across the differences of language, generation, and ethnic origin. A similar relationship of fraternal understanding that cuts across age and other vectors of difference develops between Michael’s mother and the young characters in Brother. Initially isolating himself from his community while caring for his ailing and grieving mother, Michael’s healing is initiated by the return to Scarborough of Aisha. Her presence also prompts the return of Jelly, who had “vanished into the city” after Francis’s death (170). There are clues throughout the narrative that Francis and Jelly’s deep bond of friendship may also have been intimate and romantic, confirmed near the end of the novel when Michael recognizes his brother as a young man who “loved his family, and also his friends. He loved a young man named Jelly” (174). Chariandy’s rendering of a love that subverts stereotypes of toxic Black masculinity contributes to the novel’s investment in communitas. This is deepened further by the rituals of “complicated grief” the characters share after their reunion (175). As Michael’s mother convalesces after a fall and a diagnosis of dementia, Jelly presents her with a bouquet of wildflowers, and the novel ends with the four characters proposing a journey to the creek. The ravine spaces once associated with menace and danger in Toronto’s suburbs are reclaimed by the residents, becoming sites of healing and also of a communitas that includes all life – plant, animal, and insect. As in Leung’s collection of linked stories, Scarborough’s child characters forge relationships of communitas with adult allies that cut across social categories. Like Naveen, Bing is a young child who is bullied in school as he navigates his confusing attraction to another boy; his resilience is nurtured by his loving mother, Edna, and by the caring teacher, Ms Hina, who recognizes and affirms him. Scarborough’s investment in the spirit of communitas culminates in the final story, which is given to the youngest and most tragic of Hernandez’s child characters, Laura. Sharing her story after her death, Laura’s narrative radically establishes the qualities of kinship and mutuality by equalizing that most rigid of social boundaries, the separation of the living and

Scarborough, Scarberia, Scarlem, Scarbistan, Scar-bro

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the dead. Laura’s narrative knits together the disparate threads of the novel’s stories, connecting characters who struggle to understand each other and their experiences. Laura’s reunion with her father, Cory, redeems the least sympathetic of the novel’s many characters. Cory’s racism prevented him from participating in community, from accepting the help of others, and from experiencing the communitas of shared social struggle. After death, Laura’s vision of her father reveals a spirit whose body is shorn of “tattoos and scars,” the signifiers of hatred and trauma that marked him in life. As spirit, Laura also visits Mrs Kamal, the landlady from whose apartment building Laura and her mother were evicted in the first story. Laura comforts Mrs Kamal as she comes to recognize the older woman’s grief for a dead brother, and the living woman and the dead child share a moment of communion while Laura watches Mrs Kamal tend the vegetables in her garden: “She sinks a white cup into a big bucket full of water and feeds every vegetable, like we’re at dinner. Like each vegetable is over for dinner, and she’s giving them each a glass of beer” (252). It is a lovely moment that recalls the ritualistic cannibal feast of Venous Hum, only now, the vegetables are invited as guests. “We were losers and neighbourhood schemers. We were the children of the help, without futures. We were, none of us, what our parents wanted us to be. We were not what any other adults wanted us to be. We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city” (Chariandy 157). Published only a year apart, the Scarborough novels move the narratives of marginalized suburban subjects from the periphery to the centre. The “nobodies” that populate the novels – artists, musicians, storytellers, parents, children – offer a vision of Canadian suburbia that is a radical departure from the stories that came before. As Villegas et.al. argue, it is through such contesting narratives that “we can read Scarborough as a complex space of differential inclusion through which migrants, racialized, and Indigenous peoples experience the erasures of invisibilization and hypervisibilization.”20 Yet they also tell stories of survival, resilience, and communitas. Chariandy, Hernandez, and Leung challenge us to reconsider how we define a community, a suburb, a city, a nation, and what stories define a place like Scarborough. Although the risks of communitas and shared struggle are many, and the novels unflinching in their depictions of the costs  – especially for those whose stories have been violently erased from the suburban imaginary – they offer an outline of a brave new world made possible through art, empathy, and kinship.

Conclusion

Communitas

In the 1950s, my grandparents moved from their Danforth home in an inner suburban neighbourhood of Toronto to a larger house on Tordale Crescent in Scarborough, then a new suburban community at the eastern edges of Toronto. Family photographs from that time suggest they lived a typical suburban existence for a White, middle-class family of modest means: my twelve-year-old father playing in the backyard with his dog, Sandy, his right arm visibly smaller than his left after contracting polio when he was six; my grandparents at the neighbours’ pool party; images of the family home nestled among similar houses on the street, separated by lengthy driveways and expanses of lawn that surely needed frequent maintenance. Yet at different times, our single-family dwelling housed multiple families. In the early days, another family occupied the upper floor and looked after my father while my grandparents worked, and until the family finished building their own home a few streets over. This family is still considered part of my extended family despite the distances of time and space that separate us. In the late sixties, my parents moved into the basement on Tordale Crescent after my birth, until they could afford a home of their own in the suburbs. Even those stories that seem to reflect the most characteristic facets of a nuclear family in mid-century suburbia contain within them nuggets of a more ineffable quality: the unconventional bonds of community and of communitas that operate outside the norm. Canadian suburbia is at a critical point as it emerges from the liminal into the ritual phase of reaggregation, and the nature of its reincorporation within the broader culture remains to be seen. As Jane Jacobs

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observes in Dark Age Ahead, “at a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.”1 “Post-suburbia” is a cultural and spatial reality in Canada; new subdivisions are developing daily, while the franchises and corporate retailers once associated with suburban culture are taking over city spaces and changing their character. As Roger Keil argues, “the suburbs define Canada. They are the country’s most defining form of settlement. They are the core of Empire.”2 Jacobs argues that any society that wishes to avoid falling into a “dark age” must “retain sufficient cultural self-awareness to prevent them from overreaching and overgrasping.”3 Keeping us self-aware is the job of our cultural workers: the poets, novelists, artists, musicians, and filmmakers who are the bards of Canada’s suburbia. They will be the first to show us which forces are ascendant. There is evidence that Canadians are becoming more aware about the dangers of sprawl to our environments and of the need for greater social and cultural diversity in our communities. Activism to protect the Oak Ridges Moraine from development is a familiar example to residents of the Greater Toronto Area. Observing the continuing popularity of suburbs for Canadian homebuyers, a 2018 Globe and Mail article argues that “despite claims that the suburbs are endless, soul destroying rows of homogeneity, the Canadian experience proves them to be lively and welcoming destinations that are especially attractive to minority and immigrant families seeking upward mobility and their share of our collective national dream.”4 Although it is overly simplistic to argue that the suburbs are “welcoming destinations” for minority and immigrant families, the Canadian suburban experience is indeed enriched by diversity, a characteristic that seems less true of the United States. As author Carrianne Leung observes of the Toronto area: “right now, the suburbs are where folks of colour and new immigrants live. It’s the reverse of what the United States has with their white flight to the suburbs. In Canada, the white flight is back downtown.”5 During the present moment, this trend seems once again to be in reverse, however, as more city-dwellers look to the suburbs while the CoVId-19 pandemic changes how and where we work and live. The novels represented in this study are uncompromising in their dedication to making us aware of the imperilled state of suburban bodies and spaces. The diseased condition of the suburban collective manifests

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itself in these novels as alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-harming behaviours in the predominantly adolescent and female bodies of inhabitants. Such afflictions mark adult and male bodies as well. Fathers are often absent or emotionally inept, as in Deeth’s fiction. Some, like Michelle Schafer’s father in Then Again, are haunted by their pasts, while others are militantly conformist, worrying about the state of their lawns as the father in Falling Angels does obsessively. Suburban dysfunctionality manifests frequently in the sexual sphere, with fathers looking at or touching their daughters inappropriately, as in Falling Angels, As She Grows, and Jane. Mothers in Gowdy’s fiction always disappear, some by withdrawing into themselves and into their homes as in Falling Angels, others more literally. In The Romantic, Louise’s mother disappears in both senses of the term. As Louise remarks, “My mother is a woman who goes nowhere, both in the sense of being a homebody and then, when she packs her bags and leaves, of heading off to a place so undiscoverable it may as well not exist” (28). For Kathleen in Some Great Thing, alcohol offers escape from a restrictive existence when the suburban lifestyle robs her of all other means of mobility. Symbols of cultural inertia and death abound – from the mud of Atwood’s Leaside to the agoraphobia that paralyses women in the novels and short stories of Gowdy, Laurence, Friedman, and Deeth. Yet the examples of fiction I examine present diverse depictions of a strikingly similar will to survive the forces of cultural death. The desire for a sustaining relationship between the suburbanite and her surrounding environment is poignantly expressed in the Braille-like communications of the self-mutilator who cuts her need into her flesh. Such desire unexpectedly turns into hope in the works of Douglas Coupland and Suzette Mayr, whose novels subject the suburban landscape to an apocalyptic carnival. The survivors are the harbingers of change, the pioneers in Coupland’s text who are called upon to “go clear the land for a new culture.”6 In spite of all that inertia and death, the postwar suburbs of Canadian literature are also spaces of invention and creative vision. Characters such as Elaine Risley, Joan Foster, and Michelle Schafer escape suburban psychasthenia through their art. Scarborough’s musicians, graffiti artists, and storytellers join forces with grassroots organizers, children, and hard-working parents to make and celebrate community. The authors who grew up in these landscapes themselves remind me of the mushrooms that occasionally explode through the asphalt of suburban driveways. They are living proof that dynamic and powerful entities can manage to find just enough nourishment to break through the most infertile ground.

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Can great narratives emerge from the prefabricated wastelands of Canada’s suburbia? Are forces of cultural life or death in the ascendancy? The texts whose psychogeographies I have explored in this study have all been chosen because they go beyond a simple attempt to represent an ignored landscape. In their quests to find a suitable form for the stories of this landscape, they disturb our “set notions,” challenging us to see what has been “wiped off the map”: the rich complexity of what lies beneath Atwood’s “future cracks in the plaster.” There is room for optimism in Canadian suburban literature, however bleakly or violently the novels may end. As each of the Scarborough novels end with vital images of community, I am reminded of Edith Turner’s understanding of communitas as “collective joy.” While Frank Davey argues in PostNational Arguments that the protagonists of the Anglophone-Canadian novel after 1967 “withdraw from politics” and “retreat into narrow individualism,” I discern a different kind of turn in the suburban novel.7 If the earlier novels suggest the ascendancy of individualism, a separation from culture and society as the nuclear family moves into suburbia’s bastions of privacy, those emerging from the liminal do so seeking a more meaningful experience of community and communitas. They call upon us to let the forces of cultural life be in the ascendancy; to break bread with the cannibals, to help clear the land for a new culture.

Notes

Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Baudrillard, Simulations, 2. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 16. Brand, “XX,” Thirsty, 36. Glover, “The Indonesian Client,” 16 Categories of Desire, 64. Harris, Creeping Conformity, 6, 11. Ibid., 19. Tannahill, “Playwright’s Note,” Concord Floral, xi.

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

Atkinson, “The Real Desperate Housewives,” B1. Mumford, The City in History, 553. Walks, “Places of Residence,” 280. Harris, Creeping Conformity, 10, 11. Ibid., 7. For a discussion of the physical and social characteristics of Canadian suburbs from 1900–1960, see chapter 2, “A Place and a People,” of Harris’s Creeping Conformity. 7 I have yet to find sustained English-language literary treatments of suburban communities emerging from Eastern Canada. Lisa Moore is one author whose corpus is notable for a more urban representation of St John’s, Newfoundland, that challenges the community’s conventional depiction in relation to the dominant tropes of small-town regionalism. English-language

150

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

Notes to pages 6–10

fiction from the province of Québec also tends toward the urban, perhaps because, as Richard Harris observes, in Montreal, “suburban home ownership was challenged for many years by an alternative ideal of urbanity” (Creeping Conformity, 29). Notable exceptions include Pointe- Claire in Linda Leith’s The Tragedy Queen (1995), Joel Yanofsky’s Court Séjour suburb in Jacob’s Ladder (1997), and Dollard-des-Ormeaux in Todd Babiak’s Toby: A Man (2010). Recently translated into English and published by House of Anansi, Québécoise author Marie-Renée Lavoie’s Autopsy of a Boring Wife (2019) is set in the suburb of Limoilou, near Quebec City. Keil, “Canadian Suburbia,” 50. See also Siemiatycki, Peck, and Wyly, “Vancouverism as Suburbanism,” in The Life of North American Suburbs, ed. Nijman, and Harris and Lehrer, “The Suburban Land Question: Introduction,” in The Suburban Land Question, eds. Harris and Lehrer. Shields et. al., “Edmonton, Mill Woods, Amiskwaciy Waskahikan,” 257. In 2006, the land dispute over “a half-built housing development” in Caledonia, Ontario received national media coverage when a group of Haudenosaunee protestors from the local Six Nations Reserve “halted construction” of a planned subdivision, Douglas Creek Estates, which they renamed “Kanonhstaton,” or, “the protected place” (DeVries, Conflict in Caledonia, 4). While the dispute ended with the provincial government’s purchase of the land in question from the developers, the legacy of the dispute continues to reverberate in conversations regarding Canadian nationalism, law, and Indigenous self-determination and land title. For a fuller discussion of the significance of the Caledonia Land Dispute, see DeVries. Ibid., 260. Goldie, Fear and Temptation, 148. Richler, This Is My Country, What’s Yours? 12. Frye, The Bush Garden, 228. Wilson, Swamp Angel, 17–18. Harris and Lehrer, “The Suburban Land Question: Introduction,” The Suburban Land Question, 5. Johnston and Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” 364. Harris and Lehrer, “The Suburban Land Question: Introduction,” The Suburban Land Question, 13. Ferron, The Cart, 8. See, for example, Mumford, The City in History (1961); Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1985); Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias (1989); and Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (1993). See Baxandall and Ewen, Picture Windows (2000); Beuka, SuburbiaNation (2004); Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck, Suburban Nation (2000).

Notes to pages 10–16

22 Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia (1996); Webster, ed., Expanding Suburbia (2001); and Dines and Vermeulen, New Suburban Stories (2013). 23 Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia, 14. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Brand, “XX,” Thirsty, 36. 26 Harris and Larkham, “Introduction,” Changing Suburbs, 6. 27 Harris, Creeping Conformity, 6. 28 Harris and Larkham, “Introduction,” Changing Suburbs, 13. 29 Jacobs, “Foreword” to Sewell, The Shape of the City, xi. 30 See, for example, Bigge’s investigation into the relationship between the literary muse and the suburban landscape in Rohinton Mistry’s novels in “The New Geographers,” 81. 31 Harris, Creeping Conformity, 24, 36. 32 See Sewell, The Shape of the City, 127. 33 McCann, “Suburbs of Desire,” 113. 34 Harris, “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes, and Vice Versa,” 37. 35 Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams,” 489. 36 Ibid., 493. 37 Ibid., 492. 38 Ibid., 494. 39 Ibid., 503. 40 Dowling, “Suburban Stories, Gendered Lives,” 72. 41 Ibid., 175 42 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 4. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 Dowling, “Suburban Stories, Gendered Lives,” 72, 74. 45 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 3. 46 Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, 15. 47 Duany et. al., Suburban Nation, 116. 48 Garecke, “Suburbs: Freedom or Control,” 37. 49 Mumford, The City in History, 564. 50 Duany et. al., Suburban Nation, 121. 51 Ibid., 26. 52 Baudrillard, Simulations, 38. 53 Soja, Thirdspace, 2. 54 Ibid., 46, emphasis in the original. 55 Ibid., 13. 56 Turner, The Ritual Process, 95. 57 Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 255. 58 Turner, The Ritual Process, 96.

151

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Notes to pages 16–27

Ibid., 127. Turner, Communitas, 4. Turner, The Ritual Process, 127. Ibid., 68. Harris, Creeping Conformity, 173. Baudrillard, Simulations, 5. Soja, Thirdspace, 68.

Chapter One 1 Burke, Hinterland Remixed, 3. 2 Cormier, The Canadianization Movement, 44. 3 See Cormier’s The Canadianization Movement for a fuller history of this brand of nationalism, which he describes as “a movement to resist the growing strength of foreign, often American influences on Canadian culture and at the same time a movement to encourage, nurture, support, and foster, an indigenous Canadian culture” (8). 4 Edwardson, Canadian Content, 135. 5 Ibid., 138. 6 Burke, Hinterland Remixed, 10. 7 Laurence, The Case for Canadian Literature, 212. 8 Callaghan, “A Ladybird Lost in Limbo,” 5. 9 Ibid. 10 Saegert, “Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs,” S96–111. 11 Callaghan, “A Ladybird Lost in Limbo,” 5. 12 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 6. 13 It is interesting to note that critical writing on The Fire-Dwellers has had little to say about the importance of suburban space in the novel, largely conflating it with the city. See, for example, Stovel, Stacey’s Choice, 1993, and New, “Margaret Laurence and the City,” 2001. 14 Shields, Small Ceremonies, 47. 15 Campbell, “The Two Wes Wakehams,” 291. 16 Beuka, SuburbiaNation, 114, 146. 17 Whyte, The Organization Man, 267. 18 Mumford, The City in History, 584. 19 Ibid., 583. 20 Ibid. 21 Sewell, The Shape of the City, 86. 22 Carpenter and McLuhan, Explorations 8, 45. 23 McLuhan and Nevitt, Take Today, 258–71. 24 Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 12.

Notes to pages 27–45

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

153

Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 4. Smith, “Looking for Liminality,” [5]. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 3. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, 177, emphasis in original. Ibid., 110. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 6. Ibid., 86. Kay, Asphalt Nation, 33. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 244. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 21. McLuhan, “Environment as Programmed Happening,” 117. McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 151. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 309. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 188. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 11. Laurence, Interview by Robin Ford. CBC. 24 August 1969. Ibid. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 89, emphasis in original. Laurence, “Gadgetry or Growing,” 81. quoted in Cavell, McLuhan in Space,91. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 47. Laurence, “Gadgetry or Growing,” 81.

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fulford, “Toronto’s Novelist,” National Post, 24 August 2000, B1. Atwood, quoted in Sullivan, The Red Shoes, 44. Ibid. Hood, The Governor’s Bridge Is Closed, 12. Fulford, Accidental City, 37. Atwood, “In My Ravines,” The Circle Game, 20. Ibid. In “The Sexualization of Suburbia,” John Hartley makes use of the fitting term, “hedgemony,” to refer to the aestheticism of sameness expressed in the suburban lawn and shrubbery (186). 9 Davey, “Class and Power in Margaret Atwood’s Suburbs and Edge Cities,” 97. 10 Atwood, quoted in Sullivan, The Red Shoes, 54. 11 Ibid.

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Notes to pages 45–66

Atwood, “The City Planners,” Circle Game, 27–8. Atwood, quoted in Richler, This Is My Country, What’s Yours? 15. Grosz, “Women, Chora, Dwelling,” 48. Ibid., 49. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 16. Sullivan, The Red Shoes, 58, 70. See, for example, Sharpe, “Margaret Atwood and Julia Kristeva,” Davidson, Seeing in the Dark, and McWilliams, Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Buckley, Season of Youth, 17. Ibid., 20. Davey, “Class and Power,” 100. Sharpe, “Margaret Atwood and Julia Kristeva,” 174. Davey, Post-National Arguments, 223, 238. Rose, “Feminism and Geography,” 322. Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 209. Mandel, “Introduction,” Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 19.

Chapter Three 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” 34. Harris, Creeping Conformity, 2. Ibid., 16. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 273. Hartley, “The Sexualization of Suburbia,” 186. Hutcheon, Double-Talking, 12. Ibid., 12. Childs, “Suburban Values and Ethni-Cities,” 93. Hutcheon, Double-Talking, 12, 13. Webster, Expanding Suburbia, 2. Quoted in Richler, This Is My Country, 19. Hutcheon, Double-Talking, 13. Davidson, Phobic Geographies, 3. For an analysis of Gowdy’s texts as “suburban grotesque,” see Lousley, “A Feminist Carnivalesque Ecocriticism.” 15 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 266. 16 According to Richard Harris, the marriage between suburban culture and the home improvement industry dates back to the 1950s, when “doit-yourself became a characteristic element in the suburban way of life.” Moreover, Harris argues that it “became the way in which post-war suburbs incorporated individual expression” (Creeping Conformity 164). In The

Notes to pages 67–78

17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Torontonians, the Whitneys express their individuality – and their frugality – by seeding their own buckwheat lawn, while in The Fire-Dwellers, Stacey mocks her own participation in the promise of individual expression when she paints her front door lilac. Gowdy explores the possibilities of homosexual relationships more fully in her novel, Mr. Sandman, in which both parents indulge in secret affairs with members of their own gender. When their homosexuality is revealed to the rest of the family at the end of the novel, we are left with the feeling that the Canaries will finally start to live their lives as honestly and as authentically as they can within a culture where deviance is not officially tolerated. Baudrillard, Simulations, 44. Ibid., 23, 2. Ibid., 25. In contrast, Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin, set during the Oka crisis of 1990, foregrounds the refusal of the Mohawk Nation to be made into a sign of nostalgia for a suburban golf course. McWatt’s text highlights the racism that is a precondition of suburbia’s erasure of First Nations’ cultures and land claims, juxtaposing Kahnawake’s attempt to protect their culture and land from development into a golf course against settler protests to the inconvenient traffic jams caused by the standoff. Baudrillard, Simulations, 12. Keil, “Canadian Suburbia,” 50. Lavender Harris, “Spaces of Difference in Subterranean Toronto,” 261. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 338. Hutcheon, Double-Talking, 34–5. Jackson, 51. Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” 31.

Chapter Four 1 2 3 4

Jacobs, “Foreword” to Sewell, The Shape of the City, ix. Keil, “Canadian Suburbia,” 54, 56. Sewell, “The Suburbs,” 37. See Harris, Creeping Conformity, 137–8, and Evenden and Walker, “From Periphery to Centre,” 240–1. 5 Evenden and Walker, “From Periphery to Centre,” 241. 6 Addie, Fiedler, and Keil, “Cities on the Edge,” 16. Italics in the original. For a fuller discussion of the transformation of contemporary Canada from a suburban to a postsuburban nation, see Harris, “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes” (2014); Addie, Fiedler, and Keil, “Cities on the Edge” (2015); and Keil, “Canadian Suburbia” (2018).

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Notes to pages 78–113

Harris, “Using Toronto to Explore Three Suburban Stereotypes,” 30. Sewell, The Shape of the Suburbs, 179. Addie, Fiedler, and Keil, “Cities on the Edge,” 19. Chandler and Munday, “Scopophilia,” A Dictionary of Media and Communication. See also Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures. Lynch, “The One and the Many,” 93. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 96, emphasis in original. Ibid.,” 95–6. Rigelhof, “Debut Novel Nails It,” d8.

Chapter Five 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Harris, Creeping Conformity, 173. Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” Carter, Repressed Spaces, 16. Davidson, Phobic Geographies, 23. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 322. Ibid., 272. Turner, Dramas, Fields, Metaphors, 233. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 168. Ibid., 281, 282.

Chapter Six 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Coupland, Souvenir of Canada, 110. Ibid. Richler, 6. Keil, “Canadian Suburbia,” 48. Carver, Cities in the Suburbs, 7. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 9. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 6. Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 8 Wilson, “The Biblical Roots of Apocalyptic,” 56. Ibid., 62. Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, 4. Ibid., 14.

Notes to pages 113–27

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ahearn, Visionary Fictions, 2. Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, 15. Ibid., 15. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 215. Ibid., 223, 225. Beuka, SuburbiaNation, 8. Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 227. Andrew, “Fang Fiction.” For her interpretation of the cannibalistic feast, see Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, 25. Keane, Disaster Movies, 17. Lainsbury, “Generation X and the End of History,” 233. Keane, Disaster Movies, 17. Ibid. Ibid., 18. Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, 3. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 266. Ibid., 243. Parke, “One Touch of Venous.” Andrew, “Fang Fiction.” Wood, “The American Nightmare,” 28. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 26. Andrew, “Fang Fiction.” Guest, Eating Their Words, 2. Ibid., 3. Derrida, “Eating Well,” 114–15. Goldman, “Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips,” 172. Pippin, Death and Desire, 28. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 276. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 103. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 275. Ibid., 276. Sagan, Cannibalism, 51. Ibid., 49–50. Ibid., 124. Frye, The Secular Scripture, 118. Goldman, Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, 4. Ahearn, Visionary Fictions, 2. Sagan, Cannibalism, 130.

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52 53 54 55

Notes to pages 127–43

Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, 8. Barber, “There’s No Escaping our Suburban Mistake.” Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 12. Seed, Introduction, Imagining Apocalypse, 3.

Chapter Seven 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 290. Brand, Reading What We All Long For. Barber, “There’s No Escaping our Suburban Mistake.” Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 243. Handelman, “Turner, Victor.” Encyclopedia of Semiotics. Turner, Communitas, 1. Matthewman and Uekusa, “Theorizing Disaster Communitas,” 1. Bush, The Rules of Engagement, 188. Brand, Reading What We All Long For. Brand, “XX,” Thirsty, 36. The phrase “Polyglot suburb” comes from Penguin’s promotional material and is used to describe the novel’s setting in Brampton, Ontario. See https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/564166/reproduction-by-ianwilliams/9780735274068/reading-guide (Accessed 31 March 2021). Villegas, Landolt, Freeman, Hermer, Basu, and Videkanic, “Contesting Settler Colonial Accounts,” 327. Ibid., 322, 327. My use of the term “in-between city” to describe Scarborough is inspired by Patricia Wood’s excellent study, “Citizenship in the In-Between City.” She explains that the term “in-between city” is a rough translation of “German planner Thomas Sieverts’ concept of the Zwischenstadt,” describing “urban development that is neither typically ‘urban’ or ‘suburban,’ but is located between the two, and whose built landscape resembles both and yet neither” (112). Edwards, “Carianne Leung Captures Scarborough’s Early Years.” Patch, “David Chariandy Rewrites Scarborough in His New Book Brother.” Hernandez, “There Are Melodies that Deserve to Be Told above the Riff of the City.” Villegas et. al., 337. Handelman, “Turner, Victor.” Encyclopedia of Semiotics. Villegas et.al., 345.

Notes to pages 145–7

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Conclusion 1 2 3 4

Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, 169–70. Keil, 59. Ibid., 176. Taylor, “Canadians Love Living in the Suburbs, so Why Aren’t We Building More of Them?” 5 Edwards, “Carianne Leung Captures Scarborough’s Early Years.” 6 Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, 274. 7 Davey, Post-National Arguments, 255.

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Index

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Awad), 96, 133 abortion, 65–7, 73–4. See also liminality acoustic space, 27, 28, 32, 36, 39, 40. See also McLuhan, Marshall adolescence, and ambiguity, 108; as liminal, 44; as theme, 14, 94. See also childhood; coming of age agoraphobia, as theme, 62, 100, 104–6, 109, 146 Ahearn, Edward J., 113, 127 alcoholism, as theme, 62, 71–2, 89, 146. See also substance abuse Algonquian Nation, 96 ambiguity, of suburban spaces, 10, 13, 15–17, 23, 34, 45, 50–2, 57, 61, 79, 130 animals, in suburbs, 131, 135, 137, 142 Anishinaabe (Anishinabek) Nation, xi, 11, 111 anthropophagy. See cannibalism apartment, high–rise, xi, 11–12, 22, 24, 27–32, 40, 49, 62, 65, 70,

78, 96–7, 131–2, 136, 140, 143; basement, 133 Apocalypse, suburbs as geography of, 28, 111–14, 116–20, 124, 127–8; as theme, 38–9. See also apocalyptic apocalyptic, eschatology, 113–14, 118; narratives and in literature, 111–14, 119, 123 Arcade Fire (band), xiii architecture, suburban, xii, 26–8, 34, 50, 81, 114, 136, 140. See also apartment; homes, singlefamily; housing; environment, built; malls; townhomes; design, suburban Arnolfini Marriage, The, 54 artifacts, suburban, 3, 117, 129–30 As She Grows (Cowan), 96, 100, 146 Atwood, Margaret, 14–15; Cat’s Eye, 44, 46–50, 52–6, 105; “The City Planners”, 45; “In My Ravines”, 44; Lady Oracle, 44, 46, 52–4, 56–7, 96 automobile, in suburban fiction, xiii, 32–3, 86, 88. See also mobility Awad, Mona: 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 96, 133

172

Index

Babiak, Todd, 150n7 Barber, John, 127, 130 Baudrillard, Jean, xii, 15, 17, 67–8, 74, 103, 112, 127. See also Disneyland Imaginary; hyperreal; simulacra; simulations Bernardo, Paul and Karla, 15, 100 Berry, Michelle: Blind Crescent, xiii; What We All Want, 105 Beuka, Robert: SuburbiaNation, 25, 30, 86, 113 Bezmozgis, David: Immigrant City, 11, 131 Bildungsroman, 44, 46–7. See also coming of age; Künstlerroman Black culture, in the suburbs, 134, 139, 142. See also dJ; djeli Blind Crescent (Berry), xiii bomb shelter, in suburban fiction, 58, 62, 64, 67, 116 Brand, Dionne, xii, 9; Thirsty, xii, 132; What We All Long For, 11, 130, 132 Brother (Chariandy), 11, 133–5, 138–9, 142, 143 Burke, Andrew, 21, 22 Bush, Catherine, 43; Rules of Engagement, 11, 131 Bush Garden, The (Frye), 8 Caledonia Land Dispute, 6, 150n10. See also Indigenous Calgary, Alberta, 5, 114, 122. See also western Canada Callaghan, Barry, 22–3 Canada, contrast with suburbanization of United States, 10, 145; and diversity, 10–11; as heterotopia, 8; as post-suburbia, 145, 155n6; as suburban, xiii, 6, 10, 17, 93, 131; suburban

development of, 5–6, 17. See also narratives, national; nationalism; nation-building Canadianization movement, 22, 152n3. See also nationalism Canadianness, 16, 55, 56; and irony, 60–1. See also Canada Canadian Postmodern, The (Hutcheon), xiii, 27. See also excentric; irony; postmodernism cannibalism, 122, 126–7, 129–30, 143. See also monsters; zombies cannibalistic feast, 114, 129 car. See automobile; mobility carnivalesque, 112, 122, 125, 131 Carpenter, Edmund: Explorations, 26, 36–7 Cart, The (Ferron), 9 Carver, Humphrey, 10, 26, 111 Cat’s Eye (Atwood), 44, 46–50, 52–6, 105 Cavell, Richard, 15–16, 26–7, 30–2, 36, 38, 57 Chariandy, David, 9, 43, 138, 142–3; Brother, 11, 133–5, 138–9, 142, 143 childhood, suburban, 14, 21, 24, 43– 8, 50, 53, 68–9, 95, 103, 106, 115, 134–7, 143. See also adolescence; coming of age chora (Plato), 45, 51, 57 Christianity, and apocalyptic eschatology, 113; and suburban culture, 118–19 cities in waiting, 78. See also edge city; exurbia; in-between city; post-suburbia city, contrast with suburbs, xiii, 6, 8, 12, 17, 27–8, 30, 41, 61, 78, 101, 113, 127, 129–30, 135, 140, 145, 152n13, 158n14; and bush,

Index

45, 47, 52–3; and gender, 23–4, 86; and race, 130, 132–3. See also in-between city; exurbia; suburbs City in History, The (Mumford), 4, 9, 14, 25 “City Planners, The” (Atwood), 45 class, and the suburbs, 4, 9–12, 24, 26, 44, 80–1, 96–7, 102, 130, 133, 135, 137, 140–1 colonialism. See settler colonialism colonization. See settler colonialism Columbine massacre, 118, 120 coming of age, as theme, 44, 46, 56, 97–104, 136, 141 communion, as expression of communitas, 120, 126, 131, 143. See also communitas communitas, 16–17, 93, 120, 126–34, 136–9, 141–4, 147. See also liminality; Turner, Edith; Turner, Victor community, bedroom, 11; -building, 112; and communitas, 126, 133, 134–5, 138, 144, 147; fictional, 22, 25, 30, 77, 80; immigrant, 6, 11; Indigenous, 7; planned, xi, xii, 30, 77, 110; sense of, 78, 80, 90, 112; suburban, 8, 12, 25–6, 39, 45, 58 consumerism, and suburban culture, 12, 47, 49, 55, 97–8, 115, 120, 130 corporate suburb, 5, 41, 58, 63, 77–8, 86, 93–4, 112, 136 counterspaces, 17. See also Soja, Edward; thirdspace Coupland, Douglas, 9, 12, 110–11, 127, 129, 146; Girlfriend in a Coma, 111, 114, 116–20, 124, 130; Hey Nostradamus! 111, 114, 117–20, 124; Life After God, 111, 114–15, 120; Polaroids from the Dead, 112,

173

115; Souvenir of Canada, Souvenir of Canada 2, 110–11 Cowan, Lesley Ann, 9, 12, 95–6, 103, 107; As She Grows, 96, 100, 146 Crabgrass Frontier (Jackson), 59, 70 Creeping Conformity (Harris), 5, 10, 17, 150n7 Crestwood Heights, 4 Cuban missile crisis, 21, 40, 116 cul de sac, 4, 14, 58, 111 culture, Canadian, xii, 6, 17, 21–2, 152n3; Indigenous, 68, 155n21; mass, 3, 36; neoliberal, 125; popular, xiii, 66, 110; print, 31; suburban, 3–6, 9–12, 14, 17, 21, 32, 48, 60, 65, 67, 69–70, 77, 79, 90, 113, 123, 129–30, 136, 145, 154n16; and homosexuality, 155n17; Western, 23, 121, 126 Davey, Frank, 44, 50, 55, 147; PostNational Arguments, 55, 147 Dawn of the Dead, 111 Debord, Guy. See psychogeography Deeth, Kelli, 95, 146; The Girl Without Anyone, 97–103, 105 defamiliarization, 122, 125 Derrida, Jacques 125–6 design, suburban, 4, 12–13, 25–7, 30, 58–60, 77–84, 86–7, 93, 134. See also development developers, suburban, xi, 15, 60, 86–8, 134, 150n10 development, suburban, 5–7, 10, 12, 17, 27, 50, 63, 68, 77–84, 86–8, 91–4, 98, 110, 119–20, 136, 145, 158n14; and Indigenous land rights, 150n10, 155n21. See also design, suburban

174

Index

disaster, genre of fiction and film, 21, 111, 113–18, 120; narratives, 114; scholars, 131 Disneyland, as parody of suburbia, 67; chapter in Falling Angels (Gowdy), 58, 64 Disneyland Imaginary (Baudrillard), 67. See also Baudrillard, Jean; hyperreal; simulacra; simulations diversion, depiction in suburban fiction, 30, 35–6, 40, 65, 97 diversity, of suburbs, xiii, 9–11, 78, 98, 123, 125, 130–4, 139, 143, 145 Dixon, Toronto, 11, 131 dIy (Do-It-Yourself) culture, as theme, 3, 13, 66, 154n16 djeli. See DJing Djing, as art form, 139. See also Black culture dhA (Dominion Housing Act), 5 Don Mills, Ontario, 7–9, 11, 25–6, 58–9, 77–8, 95–6, 100, 103, 131 eastern Canada, 149n7 edge city, 78, 115. See also cities in waiting; exurbia; in-between city; post-suburbia Edmonton, Alberta, 5, 6, 114, 122. See also western Canada Electrical Field, The (Sakamoto), 134 Eliade, Mircea, 126 End of Suburbia, The (film), 127 environment, built, 3, 10, 12–13, 30, 67, 83, 85, 134–5; and children and teenagers, 14, 97, 107–8; and natural, 135 ex-centric, xiii, 17. See also Hutcheon, Linda exploration, narratives of, 119 Explorations (Carpenter and McLuhan), 26, 36–7

exurbia, 78. See also cities in waiting; edge city; in-between city; postsuburbia; suburbs Falling Angels (Gowdy), 9, 58–67, 73–4, 102, 105, 116, 146 families, depiction in suburban fiction, 14, 24, 38, 47–8, 58, 64, 97, 102, 121, 130, 138 fathers, depiction in suburban fiction, 58, 64, 66, 102–3, 140, 146 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 4, 12, 27, 65 femininity, suburban, 13, 23, 48, 53, 88, 105. See also gender, and the suburbs; ideology, gender; masculinity Ferron, Jacques: The Cart, 9 Fire Dwellers, The (Laurence), 7, 9, 22–4, 27–8, 33–4, 36–42, 77, 97, 116, 152n13, 155n16 Freud, Sigmund, 43, 45, 51 Friedan, Betty, 4, 12–13, 69, 102; The Feminine Mystique, 4, 12, 27, 65 Friedman, Elyse, 9, 12, 95; Then Again, 98–9, 101–4, 106–9, 129, 146 From the Ashes (Thistle), 7 Frye, Northrop, 16, 127; The Bush Garden, 8 Fulford, Robert, 3, 40, 43, 44 “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel” (Laurence), 39, 42 garrison mentality, 8 gender, and the suburbs, 12–14, 22– 6, 31, 46–7, 64, 96, 100, 106, 141–2. See also femininity; ideology; masculinity Generation X, 14, 21, 110, 114–15 Girard, René, 126, 129, 130

Index

Girlfriend in a Coma (Coupland), 111, 114, 116–120, 124, 130 Girl Without Anyone, The (Deeth), 97–8, 99–103, 105 Glover, Douglas, xii Goldie, Terry, 7 Goldman, Marlene, 113, 119, 125–6, 127 Gowdy, Barbara, 5, 12–15, 43, 77, 94–5, 100, 135, 154n14, 155n17; Falling Angels, 9, 58–67, 73–4, 102, 105, 116, 146; Mr. Sandman, 73, 74, 155n17; The Romantic, 7, 15, 58, 60, 67–74, 102, 123, 146 Greater Toronto Area (GTA), xii, xiii, 5, 7–12, 17, 21–6, 28, 43–7, 52, 57–8, 67, 78, 97, 101, 103, 110, 129–45 greenbelt, 81, 82, 87, 91, 95. See also nature; park, suburban Grosz, Elizabeth, 45. See also chora grotesque, the, 46–7, 154n14 Hancock, Macklin, 26, 78. See also Don Mills, Ontario Harris, Amy Lavender, 68 Harris, Richard, xiii, 5, 8–12, 58, 78, 94, 154n16; Creeping Conformity, 5, 10, 17, 150n7 Haudenosaunee, 150n10. See also Mohawk Hernandez, Catherine, 9, 137, 139–40, 143; Scarborough, 8, 11, 133, 137–43 heteronormativity, of the suburbs, 60, 65, 67, 121. See also homosexuality heterotopia, 8, 122 Hey Nostradamus! (Coupland), 111, 114, 117–20, 124 Holocaust, “bottle,” 40; and

175

Hungarian-Jewish character, 102; nuclear, 115, 116 homeownership, 5, 11, 68, 70, 77, 80, 88, 150n7 homes, single-family, xiii, 22, 27–8, 58, 63, 97, 103. See also apartment; design; environment; housing; townhomes homogeneity, of the suburbs, xii, xiii, 4, 6, 10, 13, 22, 30, 44, 60, 81, 98, 112, 115, 140, 145 homosexuality, 67, 121, 155n17. See also heteronormativity Hood, Hugh, 43 horror, genre of fiction and film, 111, 121, 125 housing, xi, 11–12, 78, 82, 98, 103, 135; public, 11, 80. See also apartment; design; environment; townhomes hubris, 77, 79–80, 83, 86–87, 93, 117 Hutcheon, Linda, 17, 38, 60–1, 69; The Canadian Postmodern, xiii, 27. See also ex-centric; irony; postmodernism hydro pole, as motif, 99, 134 hyperreal, 67, 112, 127. See Baudrillard, Jean; Disneyland Imaginary. See also simulacra, simulations ideology, gender, 14, 46, 47, 66, 96, 100; suburban, 47, 66, 112, 115 imaginary, Canadian cultural, 110, 133; Disneyland; 67; settler, 6, 9; suburban, xii, xiii, 5–6, 9–11, 16–17, 21, 60, 78, 103, 129, 131, 133, 135, 141, 143 Immigrant City (Bezmozgis), 11, 131 immigrants, and the suburbs, 6, 11, 88, 121–3, 130–3, 136, 138, 145

176

Index

immigration, 122, 123 in-between city, 135, 158n14. See also cities in waiting; edge city; exurbia; post-suburbia; suburbs Indigenous, characters in suburban fiction, 6, 7, 11, 138; displacement of, 68, 110, 143; history, 7; land, 6; loan words, 68; presence in the suburbs, 6, 8–9, 131, 133; title, 6, 150n10 “In My Ravines” (Atwood), 44 inner suburbs, 5, 44, 63, 77–8, 112, 144 irony, 60–1, 67, 68; romantic, 69–70. See also Hutcheon, Linda Jackson, Kenneth: Crabgrass Frontier, 59, 70 Jacobs, Jane, 10, 77, 144–5 Jane (Macdonald), 15, 95–6, 99, 100–3, 105–7, 146 Jane and Finch (Toronto suburban community), 10 katharsis (Aristotle), 129 Keil, Roger, 77, 110, 145 Kermode, Frank, 112, 128 Kill the Mall (Malla), 111 kinship, 133–5, 137, 139, 142, 143 Kunstler, James Howard, 14 Künstlerroman, 44, 46–7, 49, 56, 57, 108. See also Bildungsroman; coming of age labyrinth, suburbs as, 4, 9, 58–74, 77, 82, 94, 97, 103, 135 lack, as suburban experience, or quality, 4, 23, 59, 112, 115, 118, 120 Lady Oracle (Atwood), 44, 46, 52–4, 56–7, 96 Laurence, Margaret, 146; The Fire

Dwellers, 7, 9, 22–4, 27–8, 32–4, 36– 42, 77, 97, 116, 152n13, 155n16; “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel”, 39, 42 Lavoie, Marie-Renée, 150n7 Leaside (Toronto neighbourhood), 43, 146 Le Corbusier, 78 Lefebvre, Henri: The Production of Space, 15 Leith, Linda, 150n7 Leona Drive Project, The, xiii Leung, Carianne, 145; That Time I Loved You, 11, 133, 135–7, 141–3 Life After God (Coupland), 111, 114–15, 120 liminality, and adolescence, 44, 107–8, 109; and communitas, 120, 130, 141; definition of, 16–17; and pregnancy, 44, 73; and ravines, 44–5, 52, 54, 135; and suburban spaces, xii–xiii, 27, 50, 111, 119, 130, 144, 147. See also communitas; Turner, Edith; Turner, Victor. Lynch, Gerald, 93; “The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles”, 81; Troutstream, 12, 14, 60, 79–85 MacDonald, Judy, 134; Jane, 15, 95–6, 99, 100–3, 105–7, 146 Malla, Pasha: Kill the Mall, 111 malls, shopping, xi, xiii, 6, 12, 14, 92, 95–8, 100, 111, 116; strip, xiii, 12, 124, 138. See also architecture; design masculinity, suburban, 14, 23–6, 30, 35, 41, 46, 79–86, 88–9, 91–3, 102–3, 142. See also femininity; gender

Index

Massey, Doreen, 13 Mayr, Suzette, 9, 112, 114, 146; Venous Hum, 9, 111, 114, 121–9, 143 McAdam, Colin: Some Great Thing, 14, 60, 79–80, 84–93, 146 McCann, Larry, 12 McLuhan, Marshall, and acoustic space, 36, 39, 40; and art, 57; “age of,” 40; experimentation with print, 36–8; Explorations, 26, 36–7; and spatial studies, 15–16, 22; and suburban masculinity, 26; and the suburbs as media, 27–8, 30–1; Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 26; and technologies of the self, 31–2, 34, 36, 40, 86; Understanding Media, 34 McWatt, Tessa: Out of My Skin, 155n21 Meadowvale, Ontario, xi–xiii, 110. See also Mississauga Métis First Nation, 6–7 Michaels, Anne, 43 Mi'kmaq First Nation, 8, 11, 137 Mill Woods, Alberta, 6 Mississauga, Ontario, xi, 6, 11, 21, 78, 95–6, 110–11, 133, 139 Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, 95 Mississauga train derailment, 21 Mistry, Rohinton, 11, 151n30 mobility, and agoraphobia, 105–6, 146; and stasis, 80, 88–9, 105; as theme in suburban fiction, 28, 33, 93 Mohawk First Nation, 155n21. See also Haudenosaunee monster homes, 120, 132, 135 monsters, 114, 121–5, 127. See also cannibalism; zombies

177

Moore, Lisa, 149n7 mothers, depiction in suburban fiction, 39, 46–8, 60, 62, 64–5, 69, 73, 89, 96, 123, 135, 142, 146; and daughters, 101–2, 105; and suburban history, 13. See also abortion; fathers; gender Mr. Sandman (Gowdy), 73, 74, 155n17 Mumford, Lewis: The City in History, 4, 9, 14, 25 narratives, national, xiii, 8, 16, 55–6, 61, 64, 132–3, 135, 139, 143, 145, 147. See also Canada; Candianness National Capital Division (NCd), 87, 91 nationalism, 21–2, 56, 111, 150n10, 152n3. See also Canada; Canadianness; Canadianization movement nation-building, 86–7. See also placemaking nature, and suburban spaces, 6, 23, 50, 63, 135 neoliberalism, and suburbia, 17, 125, 141 Nevitt, Barrington: Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, 26 Niagara Falls, Ontario, 58, 62, 67 No Fixed Address (van Herk), 88 No New Land (Vassanji), 11, 131 North York, Ontario, 98, 104, 132 Oka crisis, 155n21 “One and the Many: EnglishCanadian Short Story Cycles, The” (Lynch), 81 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 25 Ottawa, Ontario, xiii, 5, 79–93, 122

178

Index

Papaschase First Nation, 6 park, suburban, 60, 72–4, 81, 95, 99. See also greenbelt; nature pioneers, 58, 118, 146 place and space, xii-xiii, 4–5, 13, 15–16, 55, 58–9, 78 place-making, 86, 133. See also nation-building place-names, suburban, 6, 60–1, 70–1, 95, 96 Polaroids from the Dead (Coupland), 112, 115 postmodern, 17, 27, 74, 109, 112, 114 postmodernism, xiii, 16, 27, 38, 39, 55 Post-National Arguments (Davey), 55, 147 post-suburbia, 78, 145. See also cities in waiting; edge city; exurbia; inbetween city; suburbs Production of Space, The (Lefebvre), 15 prophetic. See apocalyptic psychogeography, 24, 95, 96, 129, 147 psychopathy, 100–1, 102, 109 Québec City, 58, 149–50n7 race, and the suburbs, 122, 133, 139, 141; racism, 8, 10, 24, 121, 123, 134, 137, 143, 155n21 Radiant City, The, xiii ravines, in suburban fiction, 7, 17, 21, 43–5, 50–4, 56–8, 63, 68–9, 74, 95, 98–9, 124, 135, 142 realism, and suburban fiction, 31–2, 38, 41, 81, 111, 121, 124, 127 Reproduction (Williams), 133 “republic of childhood,” ravines as, 44, 50, 95, 135. See also ravines Revelations, Book of, 119, 126. See also apocalyptic

Richler, Noah, 8, 110 Richmond Hill, Ontario, 11, 130, 132 ritual, 24, 46, 107–9, 112, 129, 142–3; cannibalism, 126–7; and communitas, 130, 144; and literature, 129; process, 16, 107–8, 120, 128. See also communitas; liminality; Turner, Victor romantic, commercial fiction and novels, 3, 49; desire, 74; myth, 121; obsession, 69, 88, 96, 100–1; relationships, 67, 101, 142; texts, 69–71. See also irony; romanticism romanticism, of characters, 15, 53, 57, 72 Romantic, The (Gowdy), 7, 15, 58, 60, 67–74, 102, 123, 146 Rosecliffe Park, 11, 131 Rose, Gillian, 56–7 Rosemary’s Baby, 121 Rouge Park and Valley (Scarborough), Ontario, 10, 135, 137, 139, 140 Rowanwood, 4, 12 Rules of Engagement (Bush), 11, 131 Sagan, Eli, 125, 126–7 Sakamoto, Kerri: The Electrical Field, 134 satire, 121–2 Scarborough (Hernandez), 8, 11, 133, 137–43 Scarborough, Ontario xii, 8, 11, 16, 24, 78, 97, 132–44, 146–7 science fiction, films, 35. See also disaster; horror scopophilia, and masculinity in suburban fiction, 80, 83–5, 90, 93 self-harm, and characters in suburban fiction, 100, 106–9, 129, 146 self-mutilation. See self-harm

Index

Seton, Ernest Thompson, 43 settler, colonialism, and suburbs, 6–9, 68–9, 110, 133, 141, 155n21. See also Terra Nullius Sewell, John, 10, 25, 77, 78; The Shape of the City, 77 Shape of the City, The (Sewell), 77 Shields, Carol: Small Ceremonies, 24, 60, 85 Silverstone, Roger, 10 simulacra, xi, 15, 17, 67, 74. See also Baudrillard, Jean; Disneyland Imaginary; hyperreal; simulations simulations, 15. See also Baudrillard, Jean; Disneyland Imaginary; hyperreal; simulacra Small Ceremonies (Shields), 24, 60, 85 Soja, Edward, 15, 17, 28. See also thirdspace Some Great Thing (McAdam), 14, 60, 79–80, 84–93, 146 Sontag, Susan, 113–14, 115 Souvenir of Canada, Souvenir of Canada 2 (Coupland), 110–11 sprawl, suburban, 6, 8, 61, 94, 145; and agoraphobia, 104; and automobiles, 32–3; depiction in suburban fiction, 8–9, 26, 30, 81, 90, 104, 124, 135; and containment, 25, 79, 90; horizontality of, 45; and human subjectivity, 26, 30; and hyperreality, 112; and hypertrophy, 74; and technology, 35 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 10, 12–13 structure, architectural, 26, 28, 91; social, 131, 137; “of feeling;” 22; and liminality; 16, 120, 131. See also communitas; liminality subdivision, as feature of suburban development, xiii, 5, 8, 15, 58, 94,

179

145; depiction in suburban fiction, 60, 62–3, 69, 72–3, 80, 95–9, 108, 111, 135–6 Subdivisions (Rush), 14, 94, 101, 104 sublimation, 127 substance abuse, as theme, 97, 103, 13–88. See also alcoholism SuburbiaNation (Beuka), 25, 30, 86, 113 suburbs, and Canadian cultural expression, xiii; as Canadian space, xii–xiii, 3, 23–4, 26, 110; contrast with United States, 10, 110, 113, 145; corporate development of, 77–8; current developments in, 77, 144–5, 155n6, 158n11; definitions of, 5, 10; as failed utopias, 119, 133; history in Canada, 5, 10, 13, 25; as metonym for Canada, 131; prehistory, xi, 6–9, 68, 110, 149n6; postwar development of, 4–5, 21, 77; and regionalism, 58–9; and spatiality, 17; stereotypes of, xii, 4, 30, 78, 94, 135, 140; and visuality, 30–2, 36, 39–41, 59, 80–1 studies, suburban, 6, 9, 12, 77 suicide, depiction in suburban fiction, 4, 13, 129, 136 Sullivan, Rosemary, 45, 46 Swamp Angel, The (Wilson), 8 Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (McLuhan and Nevitt), 26 Tannahill, Jordan, xiii Taylor, E.P., 78 technology, depiction in suburban fiction, 26–7, 31–42, 86, 115 telephone, 34–5 telescope, 31, 34, 41 television, 4, 21, 25, 28, 31–2, 34–5, 38–41, 63, 65, 85, 97, 116, 130

180

Index

Terra Nullius, 9, 110, 135 That Time I Loved You (Leung), 11, 133, 135–7, 141–2 Then Again (Friedman), 98–9, 101–4, 106–9, 129, 146 thirdspace, 15, 27, 28. See also Soja, Edward Thirsty (Brand), xii, 132 Thistle, Jesse: From the Ashes, 7 topographical map, 86 Torontonians, The (Young), 3–4, 12–13, 24, 27, 129, 154n16 Toronto, Ontario. See Greater Toronto Area Toronto Purchase, 110 Troutstream (Lynch), 12, 14, 60, 79–85 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 21, 122 Turner, Edith, 16, 131, 147. See also communitas Turner, Victor, xii, 16, 107–8, 120, 130–1. See also communitas; liminality; ritual Understanding Media (McLuhan), 34 Van Herk, Aritha: No Fixed Address, 88 Vancouver, British Columbia, 5, 7–8, 17, 22–3, 27–8, 33, 42–3, 73, 112, 114–20. See also western Canada Vassanji, M.G., 9; No New Land (Vassanji), 11, 131 Venous Hum (Mayr), 9, 111, 114, 121–7, 129, 143 voyeurism. See scopophilia

Wabakanine, 110 Wabukayne, xi, 110 Webster, Roger, 61 Weekend Man, The (Wright), 14, 22, 24–6, 27, 29, 31–5, 38, 40–1, 77, 80, 85–6, 93, 116 western Canada, 111. See also Calgary; Edmonton; Vancouver What We All Long For (Brand), 11, 130, 132 What We All Want (Berry), 105 Whore of Babylon, 114, 126 Whyte, William: The Organization Man, 25, 26 wilderness, as Canadian setting, xii, xiii, 17, 27–8, 33, 39, 41–2, 44, 46, 48, 50, 56–7, 61, 63–4, 68, 113, 117; as rural, 8 Williams, Ian: Reproduction, 133 Williams, Raymond, 22 Willowdale, Ontario, 95, 103 Wilson, Ethel: The Swamp Angel, 8 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 66 Wright, Richard B., 5, 9; The Weekend Man, 14, 22, 24–6, 27, 29, 31–5, 38, 40–1, 77, 80, 85–6, 93, 116 xenophobia, 24 Yanofsky, Joel, 150n7 York, Alissa, 43 Young, Phyllis Brett, 9; The Torontonians, 3–4, 12–13, 24, 27, 129, 154n16 zombies, in suburban fiction, 96, 111, 121, 125. See also monsters