| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. By Catherine Jurca. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. viii, 238 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-691-05734-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-691-05735-4.)

At the beginning of the 1999 film American Beauty, an aerial shot of a suburb, which could be "Anywhere, U.S.A.," cranes toward an undifferentiated house on an undifferentiated street. The film ends with the camera pulling backwards and upwards, away from the leafless streets. The suburb is a place you may have to visit, but you do not want to live there. As Catherine Jurca points out in White Diaspora, a pathbreaking study of representations of suburbia in twentieth-century American fiction, the repudiation of suburban life arises almost as soon as suburbs come into being. Moreover, from their inception, suburbs are implicated in discourses of ownership, racial difference, class coherence, and commodity culture. One of the unsung motifs of American fiction is property. Jurca justly articulates the complexities of property ownership through its fictional representations. . . .

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