Bye-Bye American Pie

Nick Gillespie from the December 1996 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

In perhaps the album's best-known song, "Youngstown," Springsteen assumes the voice of an Ohio factory worker who has seen his middle-class existence--and his children's future--end with the closing of steel and iron plants: "Sir you tell me the world's changed...Once I made you rich enough...rich enough to forget my name."

Within months of The Ghost of Tom Joad's release, however, the National Association of Home Builders ranked the Youngstown metro area as the 13th most affordable housing market in the country, even as housing resale prices from 1992-1993 jumped by a higher-than-national- average 7.9 percent; the area was enjoying its lowest unemployment numbers in 15 years; and it squeaked into the Places Rated Almanac's top third of metro areas (114th out of 343) as a place to live. None of this suggests that Youngstown's streets are suddenly paved with gold--or even that it has kept pace with the generally enviable growth throughout the not-so-long-ago rusted-out Ohio economy. But it does suggest that something more complicated than unambiguous ruin is going on.

Tom Joad garnered Springsteen his best notices in years and was widely taken to reflect the plight of "average" Americans. "A state-of-the-union message that you shouldn't ignore," wrote the Palm Beach Post in a typical review. "This land is your land, says Bruce Springsteen on his haunting new record....Ripped from today's headlines, it's a powerful indictment of a lost nation that Springsteen believes is no longer made for you and me."

The notion that these are Dust Bowl days has become a bedrock assumption needing no justification. Hence, The New Yorker, in a capsule summary of the recent Broadway production of Sam Shephard's 1978 play Buried Child, mentions almost offhandedly, "It takes place in the heartland, in the middle of the desiccated wasteland that America has become." A similar mindset informs the recent art-house film The Low Life, whose very title signals dissolution and despair. The movie follows a trio of recent Yale graduates (!) who move to Los Angeles and find that, unlike generations past, the world is no longer their oyster--or even their fried clam strip. "Just arrived in Los Angeles," writes the protagonist John to an uncle. "I'm going to try to be a writer. First will have to find a job. But, unlike a large portion of the newly arrived population, I will not fail." The best John can do is find a series of what pass for demeaning temp jobs: first sorting credit card slips, later working for a second-generation slumlord.

In his positive review, Los Angeles Times movie critic Kevin Thomas was quick to supply the larger cultural backdrop: "In decades past, lots of us with college degrees started out in equally menial positions. But we had reason to be confident that opportunities would open up and that we would eventually move on. With The Low Life, director George Hickenlooper and his co-writer, John Enbom, introduce us to the harsh realities facing young people in today's world of lowered expectations."

This sense of diminished expectations is all the stronger in Richard Ford's best-selling 1995 novel, Independence Day, which earlier this year became the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction--together, an Establishment imprimatur on the death of the American Dream. Independence Day, a sequel to Ford's The Sportswriter (1986), is narrated by divorced realtor Frank Bascombe of the tony community of Haddam, New Jersey (widely recognized as Princeton). The novel chronicles Frank's thoughts and activities over the Fourth of July weekend in 1988. Far from commemorating the country's origins, however, this holiday celebrates the dearth of a nation. Although the novel takes place in the Northeast, the larger setting is an America increasingly beset with fear and loss, largely as a result of what Frank calls "the big gut check of last October"--the stock market crash of 1987.

Everywhere Frank looks, he sees signs the bubble has burst: "high-dollar franchises--places that never staged a sale--have...given way to second-echelon high-dollar places where sales are a way of life"; local stores clear out "under the cover of darkness, owing people money and merchandise"; even Japanese car dealerships go "belly-up."

As a realtor, Frank is particularly attuned to plummeting real estate values--Haddam is a "town in the throes of a price decline." This is a world summed up by the "Just Reduced" stickers slapped on the ever-present "For Sale" signs. Focusing only on signs of distress throughout the economy, Frank fails to note that falling prices may benefit those less well off. Indeed, one of the worst aspects of economic instability is the "different crowd of visitors" it brings to Haddam. "In the early Eighties," Frank notes, Haddam's "typical weekenders were suave New Yorkers--rich SoHo residents in bizarre get-ups and well-heeled East Siders come down to 'the country' for the day, having heard it was a quaint little village here, one worth seeing, still unspoiled, approximately the way Greenwich or New Canaan used to be fifty years ago, which was at least partly true, then.

"Now those same people are either staying at home in their cement-and-burglar-barred pillboxes and getting into urban pioneering or whatever their checkbooks allow; or else they've sold out and gone back to KC or decided to make a new start in the Twin Cities or Portland, where life's slower (and cheaper)."

In their place is a decidedly more downscale set of folks with bad manners and thin wallets. These "less purposeful...humans...have more kids that're noisier, drive rattier cars with exterior parts missing and don't mind parking in handicap spaces or across a driveway or beside a fire hydrant as though they didn't have fire hydrants where they come from." Rather than spending real money at pricier local restaurants and hotels, they "keep the yogurt franchise jumping and bang down truckloads of chocolate chip cookies."

The first section of the novel revolves in large part around Frank's dealings with Joe and Phyllis Markham, middle-aged ex-flower children fleeing Vermont's "professional dropouts and trust-fund hippies." They want access to "NYC markets" for Joe's pottery and good schools for their daughter. After wading into Haddam's housing market, however, the Markhams find themselves in a "dilemma" that Ford suggests is "the dilemma of many Americans": "The whole country seems in a mess to me," Phyllis confides to Frank at one point. "We really can't afford to live in Vermont, if you want to know the truth. But now we can't live down here either."

Never mind that the infuriatingly clogged traffic on nearby Routes 1 and 27 hardly heralds the start of a new Okie exodus (even if it signals a downturn in local quality of life). Frank prowls the hungry streets of Haddam/Princeton and its environs, documenting the end of the American Dream in a part of the Garden State whose busts are stronger than most areas' booms. The same funereal vision infuses much of the politics, the media, and the popular culture--the psychic imagination of contemporary America.

It is worth pondering why this is so, especially since the death of the American Dream-- certainly its economic underpinning--is wildly exaggerated. Why are so many people selling (and buying) a message at so great a variance with shared experience? With regard to journalism, Newsweek's Samuelson contends the explanations fall into three basic categories: sensationalism, ideology ("journalists detest the profit motive"), and ignorance. That's not a bad start at an answer for the larger trend as well.

Part of the reason for the death-knell stories surely has to do with the famous dramatic axiom that Leo Tolstoy enunciated at the opening of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy's point is that there is inherently more conflict and tension--the raw stuff of good dramatic art--built into desperate, forlorn situations (sad songs say so much). The stakes are not only higher, they are easier to understand. The reader, the viewer, the listener needs a rooting interest, and the surest way to an audience's heart is by presenting a sympathetic character fighting the good fight against overwhelming odds.

Ironically, contemporary stories about the American Dream not only exclude the possibility of happy families, they present us over and over with unhappy ones who are unhappy in the same sort of way. But even when such stories are aesthetically engaging and satisfying, such narrative conventions fail to do justice to how the world operates; it is dangerous to view real life through dramatic conventions--the subject of a number of great novels, including Don Quixote and Madame Bovary.