The landscape is much the same as it was a generation ago. American suburbia has changed remarkably little, despite the advent of malls and bypasses, guns and drugs. Suburbia is a landscape of the mind, a utopian experiment. Its failures may be obvious: the protected model communities have proved no safe haven from divorce, alcoholism, suicide and violence. But the suburban ideal, a planned combination of community and privacy, is still resonant in America’s fantasy about itself.

Cheever’s and Updike’s suburbanites married early. They produced children in the Fifties and spent the next ten or fifteen years moving steadily ahead. Then along came the Sixties to shake them up. But since these were slightly square people, well insulated from artists and intellectuals, it was the Seventies by the time they caught on to swinging and wifeswapping, some five years after the Summer of Love. A number of marriages collapsed, or were severely damaged. Alcohol wreaked its havoc. The kids survived as best they could.

A generation has passed, and these same kids, born in the Fifties, are now not only grown up but nearing middle age. Brought up with every material privilege, given the best education, they might be expected to lead lives similar to their parents’. But the times have dealt out a few surprises, and the thirty years separating the generations have changed the rules. The upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies effected a genuine social revolution. The WASP no longer rules supreme. WASPculture