It's nearly 3 p.m., and I've been sitting on a green nylon weave lawn chair outside the Brampton home of Rohinton Mistry for the past five hours. His publicist thinks I'm a lunatic, his children refuse to make eye contact, and his wife worries what the neighbours will think of the gangly young man trying to coax passersby into picket fence conversation.
So far, only the plastic pink flamingos seem willing to keep me company. And our one-way discussions long ago became tiresome. But I remain perched on the front edge of Mistry's manicured lawn, trying to understand suburbia. Or at least Mistry's little patch. Herbert Gans, the sociologist and author of The Levittowners spent a year living in the suburbs back in the 1960s. The least I can do is spend the day.
I wish to throw a handful of dirt into the gulch between a global author whose work spans continents and the cul-de-sac that encircles him. The man who wrote A Fine Balance, Such A Long Journey and Family Matters lives five minutes away from a Tim Hortons.
Are donuts and New Deli incompatible? Is the distance between Bombay and Brampton narrowing? According to the 2001 census, the 905 is becoming more multicultural than Toronto. More than half the population of Markham is now comprised of immigrants. As the Toronto Star reported in January of 2003, "Ethnic neighbourhoods -- once the hallmark of Toronto's inner city -- are expanding into the surrounding suburbs."
Last year, Rohinton Mistry quietly moved into downtown Toronto (Rosedale, to be precise), before I had a chance to sit on his stoop. Thus, I am left to imagine what might have been.
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A red jeep manoeuvres across a large expanse of flat nothingness, a packed dirt field, once farmland, that will eventually be transformed into cul-de-sacs. The jeep stops, and a large man in a trench coat exits the vehicle and examines the desolation, a horizon punctuated only by large advertisements for the development-in-waiting. Then the camera pans left, to reveal three houses, alone, otherwise abandoned in this lunar terrain. It is a brief, fleeting moment that occurs early in The Adjuster by Atom Egoyan, set against a landscape devoid of identifying details. As Bubba, the man in the trench coat, will later explain, "So many places you see, you wouldn't think twice about. They pass right through you." Specificity appears impossible when aesthetic conformity is offered as a suburban virtue.
But watch the scene again, in slow motion if necessary, and you'll spot the distinct iconography of suburbia. Far behind Bubba are enormous electric Eiffel towers that hum and crackle. Denise Balkissoon rhapsodized about her own private Scarborough hydro corridor last year in Toronto Life: "The suburban meadows later became a space in which to experiment with adulthood -- a teenager's free zone, untrammeled by parents or other authority figures." Balkissoon describes a high-voltage backdrop to sneaking a first beer and sucking back "delicious, regrettable cigarettes." A place to gossip, commiserate and plot the future. Kerri Sakamoto repeatedly references a similar geography in The Electrical Field, a novel set in suburban Toronto of the 1970s, beneath the shadow of the "glinting electrical towers [that] marched like giants past the houses and into the distance."
Despite the prefabricated nature of most suburbs -- Lego brick assemblages of retail outlets and SimCity streets -- this landscape is not as forgettable as it might initially appear. It is time to again ask, as Northrop Frye once did so famously, "Where is here?" Millions of Canadians live in Burnaby, Airdrie, and Richmond Hill -- yet few artists dare to divine their essential suburban "whereness."
"A sinless, empty, graceless, chromium world" is how Graham Greene describes those plastic pink flamingos sprouting from manicured lawns in The Lawless Roads. American urban theorist James Howard Kunstler calls it The Geography of Nowhere. William Upski Wimsatt exhorts us to Bomb the Suburbs in his book of the same name. Given the prevalence of such a mindset, "Where is here" is assumed to be a rhetorical or irrelevant question.
But this suburban shorthand survives only as cliche, rather than reflecting the actual. The lag between stereotype and reality means that any artist who selects a Canadian suburb as subject matter faces having their work dismissed as ironic or insubstantial. Regardless, a brave few cultural cartographers continue to try and develop an authentic dialogue about the suburban landscape that incubated them, attempting to create a new aesthetic language. A poetics of space, as it were, a method of artistic representation shaped to respond to the concrete poetry of Costco et al.
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Lost in the Suburbs is how author Stephen Dale described his attempts to understand picket fence politics in Ontario: "No matter how far they roam, however, it's likely that these young suburbanites won't be able to leave the shopping malls and the Friday nights at the fast-food joints behind them. If you grew up in the burbs -- trust me -- it's something you always carry around inside you."
Such rites of passage might appear trivial, but recall Dawn of the Dead, the 1978 B-movie classic by George Romero, where dull gray zombies seek succor -- where else? -- in a huge suburban shopping centre. After discovering the undead aimlessly wandering the promenades, non-zombie Francine asks her boyfriend Stephen, "What are they doing? Why do they come here?"
Stephen replies, "Some kind of instinct. Memory. What they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."
Andrew Burke, in a York University graduate essay entitled "Life and Death in Suburbia," explores the disdain city dwellers have toward their uncultured, undifferentiated suburban brethren. "Part of the homogenization, then, is an othering of the suburbanite. He or she is construed as foreign and inscrutable," explains Burke. "This inscrutability is articulated through metaphors which bring us back to the representation of suburban life as a kind of living death." The small-town gothics of Toronto novelist Tony Burgess describe actual, rather than metaphorical zombies, but most often, urbanites manage to stop short of accusing suburbanites of nibbling upon human brains.
In Russell Smith's novel How Insensitive, protagonist Ted Owen is returning to his Toronto apartment when he accidentally runs into Bill McLeod (an old high school classmate) and his wife Carol. They are badly dressed suburbanites, replete with Tupperware, foil-wrapped plates and a newborn in tow; Ted is an emerging playwright with a hip haircut. After a brief conversation, focusing on the taxing drive between their home in Markham and downtown Toronto, the three part ways. A few minutes later, Ted relates the encounter to his flatmate John: "I think I scared the shit out of them. Imagine living downtown! I think she wanted to get the baby away from me as soon as she could."
While suburbia has been acknowledged as essential territory in films such as Kitchen Party, The Stepford Wives and American Beauty, fiction on the topic remains rare. Bookstore shelves wheeze from the weight of brave, noble, rural novels, but the struggle to convince CanLit to recognize the type of urban fiction practiced by Russell Smith constitutes an ongoing thumbwrestle. The vetting process for suburban fiction has yet to begin.
Despite this, tendrils of prose have begun to wrap themselves around automatic garage doors and drive-through donut shops. Elyse Friedman describes a sibling reunion in her novel Then Again, set in her childhood suburban home. Lee Henderson sets his short story "Spines a Length of Velcro" during a block party, as two boys in special foam suits Sumo wrestle. Lee D. Thompson sprinkles magic realism upon minivans and trimmed hedges in "The Whales."
To piece together further examples of cul-de-sac culture requires patient detective work. References to suburbia are as isolated from one another as the physical territory they describe. It requires bravery to write about a geography considered slight or banal, and many authors are unaware that their contemporaries have expressed similar thoughts, making these decisions even bolder.
The result of such courage, however, can be sublime. Here is Lee D. Thompson: "I see that my daughter is distraught, so I tell her to hush. I tell her that this suburb is well known to the whales, has always attracted its fair share of whales, and so we should just be patient." Minutes later, "The nightair is thrumming with song, with haunting intertwining melody, with harmony that is all prayer, and the younger whale ripples to our driveway, flattens our prickly hedge, and settles in for the night."
Elyse Friedman, meanwhile, struggles with her surroundings: "The Towne & Countrye mall has changed. A massive and appalling turquoise entranceway thingy, reeking of the 1980s, has been slapped onto the main doors. The gates of po-mo hell." Lee Henderson shields himself with clinical indifference: "Their dumpy inflated bodies are a bit elephantine, sacks of skin exploding with more skin. Strange suburban baby-monsters."
Vancouver photographers like Arni Haraldsson, Stan Douglas, Scott McFarland and Jeff Wall have impressed the international contemporary art community with their representations of suburban landscapes. Musicians like the Matthew Good Band write popular songs with lyrics like "You're driving / it's rush hour / the cars on the freeway are moving backwards into a wall of fire." Burquitlam Plaza is band from Vancouver whose name references a suburban DMZ where Burnaby and Coquitlam conjoin. The second album from Toronto's The Hidden Cameras is titled Missisauga Goddam. Only in literature is the suburban slow to be celebrated.
In 1998, Christopher Brayshaw curated Edge City: New Art From (& About) Suburbia, an exhibition held in Surrey, B.C. As Brayshaw wrote in the catalogue of the same name, "Contemporary suburbs are shot through with regional and historical particularities that make them as complex as any city. The problem is, there is no firmly established artistic context for elaborating these differences." As Brayshaw argues throughout his catalogue essay, finding a new visual language to capture and detail the changing suburban landscape is an ongoing challenge. He goes so far as to ask, "Is it even possible to make images that reflect the heterogeneous complexity of contemporary suburbs?"
In the Fall of 2001 I began researching a guide to Toronto's 905 region and discovered it was anything but lifeless sprawl. By time my sleuthing was complete, I had witnessed enough signs, symbols and simulacrums to keep a cultural studies professor happily engaged in deconstruction for months. A giant theatre disguised as a spaceship. Planespotters. Barbecued pigeon. J-Town (a miniature Japanese mall). Massage parlours colloquially known as rub 'n' tugs. Life-sized terra cotta replicas of Chinese soldiers from the Underground Army guarding a washroom entrance. A mall with art replicated from the Great Wall. Muslim and Jewish worshippers sharing a parking lot. A spouse swapping publication called Tryst Magazine. Cougar bars.
I was not surprised by what I saw so much as puzzled that so few authors had seized upon this raw material. Herge, the creator of Tintin, once remarked that he had always wanted to set an entire book of adventures inside an airport. Why hasn't anyone thought to situate an entire novel (or at least a novella) inside a Canadian mall?
The apparently blank backdrop of the suburbs means almost anything can be projected upon the landscape, like a bluescreen. In The Adjuster, right after explaining how some buildings leave no visual impact, Bubba says, "And then, for no reason, you can see a house and find yourself wondering what is going on inside of those walls. And sometimes the opportunity comes to find out." Suburban fiction is about peeling back those walls. In Then Again, Elyse Friedman provides a peek: "The residents of Pinecrest. Most of the families appeared quite normal on the surface -- 2.8 children, Pontiac, barbecue -- but there was some serious strangeness going on behind all those double-paned windows and avocado green front doors."
Here is a novel idea: an office-park dad ("a married, suburban father who works in a white-collar job") becomes increasingly agoraphobic until his carcooning ("using one's car for working, playing, eating, grooming and other tasks normally performed at home or at the office") impacts his job and family. His neighbours are Wal-Martians and randy couples enthusiastic about "the lifestyle." The mission of the novelist brave enough to transform this rough sketch into 300 pages of prose is to create complex and nuanced characters that twist the expectations of the reader and undermine the familiar without losing credibility. For those able to the challenge, try and accomplish this all soon.
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Here, once more, is Michelle Schafer, the protagonist of Then Again:
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, moving lawns, sneaking surreptitious peeks at the redhead chain-smoking on the porch at number 5. The neighbourhood hasn't changed that much.
I grew up in Delta, a suburb of Vancouver. Ten blocks from my house was a Burger King, where I wasted many grade twelve evenings with my buddy Matt Janzi. Last year, that particular franchise, the most visible and prevalent symbol of North American corporate monoculture, was converted into an Indian buffet called Mehfil. In the process, all previous evidence of its former purpose was erased. Everytime I visit the restaurant with my parents, I am amazed at the building's reinvention. I think of how the city has come to the suburbs, and vice-versa. Downtown Toronto is being inundated with Tim Hortons -- the chain, having run out of suburban locations, has begun an urban influx.
In the absence of careful supervision, cliches have a bad habit of inverting their basis of truth.
* * *
The Adjuster again, forty minutes later. The same jeep moves languidly across the chalky dirt, following a near similar path. Eventually the triplet of houses reappear, and we are about to learn that they represent the conclusion, not the start of what should have been another ordinary suburban enclave. A young couple explains to Bubba that they bought the display home in the belief that the other units had been sold, but it turns out the developer went bankrupt.
What causes this landscape to shift awry is that these kinds of houses are not designed to be left alone. They work as multiples, not in isolation. The only evidence of what might have been are the large painted advertisements for various home styles, including The Squire, The Windsor, The Baron and The Nottingham. As if to attack the utopian sentiment that surrounds him, the owner of the house uses these ads to practice archery, sending arrow after arrow after arrow to pierce the faux fantasy. Behind the miniature billboard target is nothing but empty space, a landscape where anything might occur. All that remains now is to create a language describing this potentiality.