News Summary

• Once a staple of American fiction, novels about suburban malaise have largely stopped being written.
• The last to have been a hit was probably Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, about an affair between bored stay-at-home parents in a Massachusetts suburb, in 2004.
• The suburban novel was never about the American experience, in some essential sense, but about a certain iteration of it.
• America today is characterized less by mass affluence than by extreme income inequality and widespread financial precarity.