Suburban Stereotypes:
STEEL, RONALD
Suburban Stereotypes The Split-Level Trap. By Richard Gordon, Katherine Gordon and Max Gunther. Bernard Geis. 348 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Ronald Steel Associate editor,, "Scholastic...
...Verbs become nouns: "Today twenty or thirty miles are a mere commute...
...Gina admired his dream...
...Russia and China," the authors inform us, "are akin to mobile newcomers who have struggled up from the lower classes to buy homes in the suburbs the newcomer nations are bringing in their own sharp brand of competition, and life will not be easy any more...
...Throughout the book, too, the authors take unrestrained liberties with the English language...
...Reviewed by Ronald Steel Associate editor,, "Scholastic Magazine' contributor, "New Republic," "Commonweal" When the oddities of our times are recorded by some unborn historian, he will surely find a place in his notes for that peculiar moment in mid-20th century America when psychiatry became hot journalistic copy and angst provided a comfortable meal ticket...
...The characters are You, Me and Aunt Minnie, all in our libido-masking disguises...
...He was a sandyhaired, genial, easygoing young man...
...Quite early in the narrative we are introduced to the inhabitants of a supposedly typical test-tube community...
...These are the keys to meeting "the stresses and strains of getting ahead...
...But when these disorders seem morbid, they can usually be readily managed through the nine simple techniques of emotional adjustment...
...They tried to bridge it, but things didn't work out and the bridge collapsed...
...Before the details of the collapse, however, we are given a glance at the courtship of Gina and John...
...There are elderly lady suicide charts which are meant to show that more older women are taking their own lives these days...
...But since the control group is almost never spelled out, and the figures are generally given in percentages rather than actual numbers, only spurious conclusions can be drawn...
...Each has a problem that the reader can fit himself into, if he's so inclined...
...And it is likely that the tribulations of Portia, Helen Trent and Ma Perkins were not unknown to the authors of this psycho-scatological study, which unblinkingly blends Lever Brothers, Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich...
...Rose Franzblau...
...Take Gina and John Conning, whose lives are "a study of the baby blues in deep indigo.' Theirs "is the story of a mobile young couple who started out with a wide cultural gap between them...
...John hoped to pilot Conning Sheet Metal, Inc...
...This convenient handbook of the psychoses of everyday life is written by Richard Gordon, a psychiatrist, and his social psychologist wife, Katherine, with the aid of an alltoo-visible ghost-writer, Max Gunther...
...If we are not strong as a nation, we will be trampled like the middle-aged George and Martha Kohler" (a particularly pathetic case...
...to new heights of success...
...Pages later Gina teeters on the edge of the looney-bin, but the anxious reader will be relieved to know that she "eventually struggled back to a normal and happy life—as we shall see later...
...We are even treated to a bit of psycho-sociological advice on international relations...
...Suburbia becomes known as "Disturbia"—a verbal creation that first appears on page 34 and carries through the rest of the book to haunt the reader...
...These techniques," we are told, "can be applied by all individuals in the suburbs— and cities, too—of America...
...To avoid similar sad fates, The Split-Level Trap offers us Nine Techniques of Emotional Adjustment...
...The plot is Upward Mobility in the Suburban Social Stratosphere...
...The authors buttress their sudsy tales of woe with a sprinkling of official-looking, but meaningless, charts...
...A self-help guide to the neuroses is appended in the back of the book...
...according to the preface, a New Jersey community...
...She met John Gonning at a coffee shop near the university...
...In his handbook of curiosities, our historian will probably include—alongside columns of psychiatric advice clipped from a hundred daily newspapers written by lay and aspiring analysts—The SplitLevel Trap, an appalling and potentially harmful book which masquerades as a work of legitimate social psychology...
...Those who are looking for a grisly sort of entertainment may find a certain dreary amusement in this book...
...Among them are an ulcerous husband, a paranoid mother, a suicidal housewife, a surly voyeur, a juvenile delinquent, an abandoned wife and many of the other usual case studies that have come to us from Krafft-Ebbing by way of Dr...
...girls learn "personality crafts...
...The reader, "like the people in these case histories, may have severe emotional disorders...
...An audience long used to building its own barbecue pits now has the opportunity to learn the latest techniques of do-ityourself psychology...
...But anyone in need of psychiatric assistance might well end up a serious case indeed by taking the Nine Techniques for autoanalysis to heart...
...The scene is Typical Suburb, U.S.A...
...She, too, had a dream, and she saw in John an opportunity to realize it...
...life becomes "more stressful...
...Here is a study, its authors would have us believe, of Life in our Times...
...There are salesmen's stress charts which show that "competition is with them every day, not merely lurking around the corner, but in plain view, teeth bared...
...It is a remarkable series of plots that would keep half a dozen afternoon radio dramas going for years...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 14
