“Today’s suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. It’s got its own new set of dysfunctions: boarded windows and weedy lawns, acres of sparsely used parking lots flanking clogged roads, immigrant workers jamming by the dozen into houses conceived for the Cleavers, household food budgets eaten up at the gas pump. Then there are all the old urban ills of poverty, violence, drugs, and racial friction, which have migrated to places that were designed for escaping them.”