A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South.

I used to drive from my house in a small town to the suburb where I now live to use a laundromat that I liked because it made me feel that I'd stepped into a short story by Raymond Carver, although this was in upstate New York, not Carver's Pacific Northwest. The people there were "safe-looking," if a little nervous, as people are in the suburbs, careful of their privacy and mine, preoccupied with the work of sorting, shaking and folding. They seemed, like the characters in Carver's scarily oblique tales, to belong to a narrative of which I would only be allowed a glimpse and of which they, too, might not be able to explain any further, Whatever their stories were, their edgy reserve suggested intensity of emotion always experienced at some uncomfortably close remove -- like a newspaper photograph of two police cars stopped in a neighbor's driveway, the house unchanged, even peaceful in the vista of identical lots on a curving street.

This question of what might be revealed below the expected surface of suburban culture is central to A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South, a beautifully produced anthology of photographs and short stories from the suburban south edited by Alex Harris, founder and co-editor of DoubleTake magazine. A New Life shares the journal's commitment to "publish the works of writers and photographers who seek to render the world as it is and as it might be, artists who recognize the power of narrative to communicate, reveal, and transform." In practice, this promise has implied an aesthetic combining the precise, elegant rendering of word and image with a willingness to engage a great variety of human experiences and circumstances. The Winter 1997 issue about the "exploration of place," includes photographs by Jocelyn Lee and John Moses depicting teenage parents from across the country; excerpts from James Drakes's "Tongue-Cut Sparrows," a study of the sign language used by the friends and families of inmates in the El Paso County Jail; Tod Papageorge's images of contemporary Paris; John Vachon's photographs of Iowa near the end of the Depression; essays on AIDS and faith and anger; Tim Vanech's "White Flight," a scarring account of what race, class and "values" can do to a family; and poems by Seamus Heaney and William Carlos Williams This is only a short list of the richness of materials here, united by Williams's conviction that "outside myself there is a world... which I approach concretely." This passage reprinted from "Paterson," with Williams's "No ideas but in the facts," is as clear a statement of DoubleTake's intentions as Heaney's invocation of the miraculous as the "double-take of feeling" is of the editors' hopes. The power of this combination of information, emotion and reflection to give the viewer pause is most evident in work like Emmit Gowin's "Photographs Over Kansas," where beauty of the images of snowtinged circular fields needs to be seen again in the context of the photographer's commentary on the wastefulness of the agricultural methods that made them possible, information that reveals the connection between this accidental splendor and human folly.

Like Gowin's view of Kansas, A New Life is regionally specific, but committed to the investigation of broader cultural meanings. The details offered in this anthology are more particularly suburban than particularly southern, and the difficulties in articulating what it might mean to be there rise more essentially from the commonplace neutrality, the dislocation of suburban experience, than from complex bonds of landscape, history and family that traditionally define a region, that shape its stories of possibility and limit. After all, the suburbs are supposed to be left behind in the search for the authenticity of those "elsewheres," the city and the country, the craft fair, the ethnic festival and the fiddle contest -- venues for the consumably real. Governed by the collision of necessity and circumstance (rather than by fate, that density of narrative intent in which all the elements of a personal and historical landscape must conspire), the suburbs pose a particular problem for the artist whose work is to find meaningful images and narratives in the midst of this place that, as Harris's partly autobiographical introduction suggests, is often somewhere we end up and is not exactly where we had planned to be.

For writers, the difficulty is in giving the inarticulate its due, If, as Williams said in "To Elsie" (from Selected Poems, 1985), "the pure products of America go crazy" for want of the ability to speak of what they've experienced, if boredom, banality and befuddlement are the common currency of life in the modern suburbs, then the typical contemporary short story, in which the plot so often drives toward a character's sudden perception of the significance of events, may well be at odds with the recognition of a reality in which people accommodate a life where epiphanies are few, far between and perhaps not particularly relevant. Quinn, the recently divorced yuppie of Alan Cheuse's "Dreamland" could certainly use a redemptive insight into the emotional disaffection and cultural confusion of his new life in Atlanta. The frightening vision of racial and historical wrong that Cheuse provides seems like the answer to a dilemma in which Quinn was too desperately entrenched to ask. Carefully constructed, sharply observed and quite compelling in its accumulation of incident, this story shares with Lee Smith's "The Interpretation of Dreams" (in which a dream book predicts, accurately, the possibility of romance for an outlet store clerk) and Richard Bausch's "Tandolfo the Great" (a heart-broken, part-time clown transforms pathos into rueful pleasure when he deposits a wedding cake in the street in front of a house of a woman engaged to someone else, "like a sugar-icinged pylon," and waits for another car to approach, for "destruction, of flying dollops of icing"), both a sense of craft and an assumption that the author must offer a moment of clarity, no matter how bleary-eyed or diffident the characters' search for it. Perhaps this is the real anomie in the channel-surfing soul of the housing development, not that we don't desire meaning, but that we expect it to be given, and with the authority, the finality of literary convention.

The photographic essay, with the possibility of comparisons between images and its capacity for both immediate resonance and distance, is particularly suited to reveal a landscape in which such gifts are both rare and equivocal. The kids in Patricia D. Richard's photographs Fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen (1993) (from the series "Scenes from Early Morn Drive: Teen Years"), in duds straight out of The Gap, leaning against a 4x4 in stances reminiscent of James Dean road movies, have given over individuality to the expression made possible by available styles. If it were not for the scruffy, obscured rear-end of a poodle angling toward the camera, the disorderly scramble of leaves between the sidewalk and the curb and the ordinary suburban landscape behind them, this might be a catalog shot. But the distance between the display of attitude and the details of the composition tells the truth: these kids are presenting the photographer with a portrait of who they aren't. On the facing page. the subject of Chris, at sixteen (1993) sits precariously on an auto bumper. Hands clasped, mouth tight, eyebrows alert and a shock of hair failing below his backwards baseball cap, Chris is clearly less than happy, clearly self-aware -- the measure of his understanding being the distance between the observable outer world and how he feels.

Such self-consciousness, whatever the price in alienation, in irony, is the knife-edge of identity. Combining a snapshot's immediacy with a compositional elegance, the portraits in Clarissa Sligh's series, "Suburban Atlanta, 1994," are paired with images of the subjects' living spaces over which captions are hand-written in thick letters, both casual and, in their fragmentation and their interruption of the visual, intense. The material with which these people have surrounded themselves (most intriguingly, the commercial or personal images they have selected) provides an affecting lesson in self-portrayal inside the suburban frame of wood-paneled walls, wall-to-wall carpeting and soft furniture, while the texts are reminders of how much must be overcome and how readily identity is considered a corollary of race, gender and class. "WE QUESTION THE IDEA OF IDENTITY AS CATEGORIES AS LABELS," begins the caption lettered across the poster "Dykes Are Out For Power" above the shelf of videos (including The Lesbian Avengers) in the room next to the affectionate portrait of "Patti and Amy," an interracial couple. By the end of the inscribed paragraph, even the vehemence of resistance is feeling the pressure of the given: "IDENTITY IDENTIFY LABELS QUESTION??? QUESTION ???... QUESTION." Still, there is a victory in this acknowledgment of struggle. Patti and Amy, embracing as they stand against a vista of ground cover, mullioned windows and trees in a backyard, are claiming a place in this suburban scene, and the authority of their claim shows the sameness of the place for the illusion it is.

The tension between identity and the cultural landscape is expressed with an even more delicate irony by the self-possessed, articulate businessman, a Vietnamese immigrant, who narrates Robert Olen Butler's short story, "The Trip Back." He is given the most beautifully constructed sentences in the book; the linguistic equivalents, in their articulations of the confluence of the lost with the everyday, of Mitch Epstein's photo series, "Vietnam in Versailles," which follows Butler's story, producing a juxtaposition of sensibility as much as of subject. As he balances his affluence and his sharp sense of the pleasures of the present against all that he has abandoned or will lose, the narrator achieves an eloquence that is neither a substitute for hope nor an admission of despair Confronting his wife's grandfather, just arrived from Vietnam with no memory of the granddaughter who longs for his presence in her family (but with perfect recall of a picnic on the beach and a favorite car), the narrator fears for his own loyalties:

And that is what frightens me the most. I am afraid that deep down I am built on a much smaller scale than the surface of my mind aspires to. When something finally comes back to me with real force, perhaps it will be a luxury car hanging on a crane or the freshly painted wail of a new dry-cleaning store or the faint buzz of the alarm clock beside my bed, Deep down, secretly, I may be prepared to betray all that I think I love the most.

To come to such knowledge is to stand uncomfortably and sufficiently outside the self, to recognize it for what it is, at a cost that is both the payment and the bill.

In the space between experience that defeats expression and the refractions of ironic distance is the rhetoric of presence, the body itself articulating its place in the landscape. The writers in A New Life describe this well: a young girl's body, "rigid, vibrating," longing for a pet cat, in Bobbie Ann Mason's "Tobrah"; the older father of a young family dyeing his graying hair in order to stave off his fears of mortality in Marita Golden's "A Woman's Place"; the young couple of Alan Gurganus's "Toward A Creation Myth of Suburbia," who in the first flush of postwar passion visits an unoccupied model home where "in a fully-made-up bed (nonsqueaking) they listened to themselves demonstrate active athletic love between handsome young married adults, victors. "Gurganus's bravura, his breezy syntax, does all an image might to represent a revelation within the body itself of the person's place in the world. in Margaret Sartor's photograph My mother, Tommie Sue, Monroe, Louisiana (1994), from the series "Stealing Home," a woman stands, hands in pockets and head aslant, her tight-lipped balance of affection and skepticism and her body's shift away from the camera imply both self-possession and a survivor's wounded reserve. Almost the same physical expression appears in Sartor's portrait of a teenager in a catcher's uniform: Emily, Monroe, Louisiana (1988). Although Emily is not identified here as the photographer's sister (as she was in the photograph's earlier publication in the Fall 1996 issue of DoubleTake), the resemblance is an insistent one, a matter not so much of looks as of the body's particular determination to have both presence and privacy, to be a dwelling place and an indwelling of memory and the forms we give it. The cool carefully composed surfaces of Sartor's work have less to do with irony than with the way craft and experience make possible a second glance at relationships that might have seemed too immediate, too commonplace and too reserved for artistic use; their distances are intimate and familial, "For me," Sartor writes in her contributor's note to A New Life, "the photographs are a kind of autobiographical tightrope, a tense connection between my ongoing life and my memories." And, perhaps, this tension is at the heart of what it takes to make art out of so intractable a place: a willingness to stand between the authenticity, the quirkiness and the pain of individual experience and the suburban promise that happiness can be taken for granted.

JORDAN SMITH is the author of three books of poetry, An Apology for Loving the Old Hymns, Lucky Seven and The Household of Continuance. He teaches at Union College in Schenectady, NY.