Alice McDermott’s That Night and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road reveal the anxious doubt of the 60s as it replaced the conformity of the 50s. Some of my favorite streets exist only in novels, stretching through tree-canopied neighborhoods of suburban America, past and present. No violence is sharper than that which suddenly pierces the serene suburban scene. Moreso, it is the allure of the tension between the appearance of suburban life – trimmed hedges, front doors left unlocked, the family car washed and waxed every Saturday – and the human reality underneath, the two shifting like the convergence of tectonic plates, an eruption imminent. Perhaps, this is because I grew up in a small town on Long Island – close enough to New York City to feel its glittery pull, but too far to leave the shelter of middle-class haven without trepidation.

My favorite flavor of voyeurism is found in suburbia.

Our need to see outside our finite view – our sole picture window, so to speak – is what allows us to sink into a fictional character’s consciousness so deeply we can experience their most intimate fears and desires as if they are our own. Our desire to watch the lives of others (ourselves remaining unwatched) is what drives us to open a book. Hopper-esque tableaus of middle-class suburban life.Īll readers are voyeurs. Then I spot a woman staring blankly out a kitchen window, her yellow rubber-gloved hands holding a soapy dish. In another house, a man in an A-shirt perches on the edge of a bed. A family sits on a sofa, faces lit blue by the glow of a television. The meditative thrum of the car tires over asphalt, broken only by the thrill I feel each time I catch a glimpse beyond the lamp-lit windows of the passing houses.

The scent of my mother’s hairspray mingling with my father’s aftershave. Some of my favorite childhood memories are framed by a cold-fogged car window – me in the backseat of my parents’ wood-paneled station wagon, staring into the dark suburban night on a return trip from a holiday party. Julia Fierro on Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides

Interstate by Stephen Dixon