Introduction: Suburban Realities

Abstract

This book is a reading of London suburban fiction. More exactly it is also a study of the complex connections between fiction and the human need to belong to a particular known habitat, that is, to make a home. In this sense, writing and dwelling are intimately connected. Peter Brooks argues that ‘fictions arise from our need to build a space or even a shelter for ourselves in an alien world’, in a world not our own (Brooks, 2).The art work, the ‘poem’, then, ‘is our attempt to humanize that world’ (2). Cultural work, literature, does not merely reflect our place in the world; it renders an alien, incomprehensible world meaningful. It helps bring that world into being. The century and a half of suburban fiction dealing with mass suburbia is really the story of writers struggling with the suburb as a site capable of providing the basic features of what home should be; it is part of that creative struggle to produce what Raymond Williams has called ‘knowable communities’ (Williams, 1985b).