In the Toronto Star, Nicholas Hune-Brown surveys the way the ‘burbs have been depicted in literature and film, then veers off into his own, equally peculiar gloss.

He begins, reasonably enough, with this observation:

The North American suburbs of 2006 are a world away from the imagined suburbs of Cheever or Lewis. Traditional suburbs have grown and aged. Many of the once identical houses of Levittown and other subdivisions have now been customized and renovated. As developments on the urban fringe have become increasingly independent from their urban centres, the very existence of “suburbia” in the traditional sense has been questioned.

Fair enough. But Hune-Brown’s most earnest complaint is not that writers fall back on cliche when setting their narratives in the ‘burbs. It’s that they “ignore the real problems of suburban development,” that is, the “hideous” esthetic of the modern subdivision, segregation, and “sprawl.”

So. Hune-Brown would have writers jettison one set of the over-exposed abstractions, only to pick up another.

But that’s the wrong fix. I mean, think about it, a movie on the evils of sprawl? Characters adrift in emotional malaise because they they burn too much gas to get to work? And not only that, they have to drive past ugly 7-Elevens all the time, and don’t have ethnically-mixed neighbors?

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams. Anyone looking for artistic inspiration needs to start there. Not with abstractions, because beginning with an abstraction makes for lousy art, even if your abstraction is the political cause du jour.