12 November, 2001: Goodbye without Leaving
Of all the dopey, facile things about American Beauty -- its dopey sexism; its facile reduction of homophobia to repressed homosexual desire; its dopey, facile, and unconvincing stance that a deliberate return to immaturity was a noble and praiseworthy goal -- it's hard to say that its attitude towards the suburbs was the worst. But it sure was dopey and facile. I'm a child of the suburbs; I grew up in a fairly well-known one. I know how stultifying they can be. Far too many middlebrow artistic works seem to hold that, because so many normal people's lives are unfulfilling (quiet desperation and that), the trappings of middle-class American normalcy are to blame. Thus, the reams of paper and miles of film wasted on cheap-shop suburbs books and movies. Laurie Colwin's Goodbye without Leaving is not one of them.