Part 2: Suburbia’s broken promise - Life in the shadow of the American dream

A.M. Homes peels back the polished façade of the American suburb to reveal a world shaped by isolation, performance, and quiet unease. From identical houses to inherited beliefs, her fiction explores how the promise of the American Dream concealed deeper psychological and social fractures. As private lives collide with political upheaval, Homes asks unsettling questions about identity, conformity, and the stories families and nations tell themselves. This compelling exploration traces the hidden tensions beneath everyday life, revealing how suburbia became both a symbol of aspiration and a breeding ground for anxiety, leaving readers to reconsider what lies behind America's most enduring myth.

By Eugene Yiga

Suburban shadows: A.M. Homes and the psychology of American decline

If Taylor’s research reveals the structural machinery of exclusion, novelist A.M. Homes exposes what happens inside the communities that exclusion was designed to protect. For over three decades, Homes has been writing about the American suburb: its aspirations, its performances, its quiet terrors. Her work, from Jack to Music for Torching to The Unfolding, amounts to a sustained investigation into the psychological life of a social arrangement that was sold as a dream and experienced, for many, as a trap.

The American suburb is, at its foundation, a post-war invention driven by economics. Returning soldiers received money to build houses. Manufacturers needed them to buy appliances: washers, dryers, dishwashers, the full catalogue of modern domestic life. What emerged was the birth of American consumer culture, packaged as aspiration and broadcast through television shows, films, and advertising that projected the image around the world. The early suburbs that writers like John Cheever and Richard Yates documented in the 1950s and 60s were defined by two anxieties: the desire to match your neighbours and the fear of falling behind. Keeping Up with the Joneses was not just a phrase; it was the operating principle.

But beneath the manicured lawns and identical floor plans, a different story was always playing out. Homes draws a sharp line between the exterior and the interior, the public performance and the private reality. The nightmare of suburbia, she argues, has always been what happens inside the house. Women were expected to marry, move to the suburbs, and stop there. A husband took the car to work each morning, and the wife was left behind: first with the house, then with a child, then with a dog, then with another child. The isolation was structural.

There were no gathering places for women, no college programmes, no civic spaces designed for connection. If you pushed a stroller and happened to run into someone else pushing a stroller, that counted as a good day. The pharmaceutical industry stepped in where urban planning had not. Valium was invented. The Rolling Stones wrote about it.

This gap between surface and substance is what makes the suburb such fertile territory for fiction. When every house is built the same way (the kitchen in the same place, the living room in the same place, the blue glow of the television in every window) any disruption becomes amplified. A divorce becomes a neighbourhood crisis, not because of the personal pain involved, but because a single person threatens the couples around them. Suburbia was designed for the most standardised, heteronormative existence. Anyone who deviated from the template became a problem.

Homes’s 2022 novel The Unfolding took this observation and scaled it upward, weaving together a large-scale political narrative with an intimate family story. Set during the period around Obama’s first election, the novel follows a group of wealthy, powerful men who become convinced they are losing control of the country and begin plotting to reclaim it by any means necessary.

At the same time, it tracks the women in their orbit: a wife whose life has been on hold for decades, a daughter voting for the first time and beginning to realise that the family narrative she grew up with is only one version of history.

The book anticipated, with uncomfortable accuracy, the political extremism that followed. Homes began writing it before Trump entered politics, before QAnon, before January 6. Each time she pushed her fictional conspirators further toward absurdity, reality caught up. A German prince was arrested at his hunting lodge for plotting to overthrow his country’s government. The distance between satire and reportage kept shrinking.

What makes The Unfolding more than a political novel is its attention to how people inherit their beliefs. Everyone grows up hearing the story of their family and assumes it is the truth. Homes is interested in what happens when someone begins to see that this story is a story: constructed, partial, serving certain interests. Her character Megan’s gradual awakening to the fact that there are different kinds of history, that within any historical story there is more than one story, mirrors a broader cultural reckoning about whose experiences count and whose get erased.

Homes connects this to a deeper concern about the performative nature of American life. Suburbia, she observes, operates through social contract. When you move into a neighbourhood, you are agreeing to live a certain way. The act of mowing your lawn is performative. The swimming pool in the garden is performative. The Instagram photo of your dinner is performative. The question she keeps returning to, across all her work, is whether the performers know they are performing, and what happens when someone breaks character.

The acceleration of this performative culture worries her. The 24-hour news cycle, social media algorithms that deliver you to yourself, the speed at which communication now moves: all of it conspires against the kind of slower, more considered engagement that might allow people to actually see each other. She draws an analogy to artificial intelligence, comparing it to the atomic bomb: something we built, do not fully understand, and may have released too soon.

The people who created it are among the first to express concern about its implications. Her proposed response is disarmingly simple. She recently took an online course in compassionate listening, prompted by her family telling her she had a tendency to try to fix everything rather than hear what people were actually saying. The shift from problem-solving to genuine attention, from telling to asking, strikes her as both personally difficult and politically essential. In a world where people increasingly refuse to look at each other, let alone listen, the willingness to sit with someone else’s experience without immediately categorising or dismissing it may be the most radical act available.

The unfinished promise

Read together, Taylor and Homes describe two sides of the same American reality. Taylor shows how the dream was structurally denied to those it was never meant to include, how exclusion was laundered through market language and policy jargon until it became invisible to those who benefited from it. Homes shows what the dream did to those it was designed for: how the promise of security and belonging curdled into isolation, performance, and a fear of change so acute it could tip into political extremism.

As America marks 250 years of independence, both perspectives suggest that the founding promises were never selfexecuting. Equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness require infrastructure, both physical and psychological. Without it, the dream operates as aspiration for some and limitation for others, a story told so often and so confidently that questioning it feels like disloyalty. The work of understanding how that story functions, who it serves, and who it leaves behind, remains unfinished.

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