Returning to Suburbia
Suburbia is now in vogue again, at least for many of today's contemporary writers. The tome I'm currently embroiled in happens to be one in a plethora of books that have been released in the last few months that dwell on the lives of the prisoners of suburbia. Tom Perrotta'a novel Little Children concerns the lives of many married couples, their children, and their interactions with one another. The plot isn't something earthshatteringly new, but few plots are nowadays, and the prose flows in a way that's natural and pleasant to read. Perrotta writes from the vantage point of so many classes of characters in such a seamless manner that it's hard to believe that he isn't writing about people that he actually knows, which brings me to the main query in this post.

Suburban novels have been written for decades now from all manner of writers, Updike, Roth, Bellow to name a few, and, for the most part, writers of good caliber who have a keen insight into the inner-workings of families living in America. The genre is time-tested, and not really something that's read for the plot, or, at least, that's not why I read them. I'm more inclined to believe that readers of these types of novels are attracted to the insightful portraits of everyday life in modern America, or, in the case of the older texts, perhaps how life was during the time when their parents were growing up. The plots themselves are merely a guide for following the characters. For suburban novels, the plot can be rather monotonous and, most likely, predictable to anyone who has read a significant amount of this writing.

To get to the point, one of the many plot points that usually occur during the course of these novels, is that somewhere, sometime there's some sort of marital infidelity occurring involving one or more of the main characters. In Little Children, it's no different. Couples that are increasingly frustrated, for whatever reason, are forced, if that's the right word, to commit adultery. My question is simply why this has continued to be the case after all these years? There are obvious time related details that give many of these books a time stamp, so to speak, but this plot point remains the same. Why? Are there really that many marriages that are plagued by the curse of infidelity? I can't say because I'm not married, and I don't know a lot of married couples. The few that I do know are happily married, and this just isn't my surface impression of how they conduct themselves in public. I know these people, and I know there's nothing incredibly heinous going on in their lives.

This leads me to ask if there's still a rampant amount of marital harmony that's threatened by the curse of inadequacy?