Panic in Suburbia
Burke, Tom
Panic in Suburbia by Tom Burke Matt Jones is the hero of Keith Wheeler's novel Peaceable Lane (Simon & Schuster. $4.50), and he is as nice a guy as you'll find on the streets of any typical...
...The prospect of shrunken property values galvanizes the Lane's residents to action...
...He is an adman, but don't let's be bigoted: Matt is one of the nice ones...
...She is faithful, courageous, attractive, and she organizes a mean car pool...
...He is a buddy to his young son, and he loves his wife...
...This must be done in secret, of course: the Lane has no restrictive covenant involving race...
...otherwise Wheeler chooses to sweep the here-today dilemma of the street's parents neatly under the wall-to-wall carpet—and Peaceable Lane remains, figuratively as well as literally, a dead end...
...The deed must be signed by only one among them...
...They meet, and after a good deal of quibbling and conscience-ridden speech-making, they agree to buy the house in question through a syndicate deal...
...Up to this point, Wheeler has demonstrated a fine sense of organization and pace, though his style is banal and his dialogue disturbingly contrived...
...He names Matt Jones as manager of the property, thereby defeating Barton's "blockbusting" tactics...
...But just when the Lane will be required to make an ultimate ac-ception or rejection of Winter, an abrupt deus ex machina is introduced in the form of the street's biggest oak tree...
...Barton, a Negro lawyer and professional "blockbuster," hears of the deal...
...A volunteer is called for, and Matt Jones heeds the call...
...When another of the residents prepares to turn tail and run, Winter buys that house as well...
...he attempts to spread panic in the Lane, in order to force the whites out, buy their homes for a song, and resell to members of his own race at a handsome profit...
...After a long session of what Matt's advertising colleagues might refer to as "soul-searching," he decides to sell the house—secretly—to Winter...
...Matt's only real problems are mortgage payments, but all the families of Peaceable Lane have to deal with them...
...then the ladies join their husbands in conversation, and reality goes the way of water drained from Peaceable Lane's swimming pool...
...But when Lamar Winter is eliminated so abruptly from the action, the expected comment upon the profound problem of contemporary racial prejudice vanishes with him...
...All eleven are typical ex-urbanites, friendly enough, though not particularly intimate...
...Matt is beaten up by Barton's henchmen...
...Before his death, the Negro expresses hope in the street's children, a pallid half-formed hope that they will someday learn to live side by side regardless of race, creed, or color...
...Almost before he has pocketed the deed, all hell breaks loose...
...Barton's "blockbusting" techniques culminate in violence that involves both Winter and his white neighbors...
...at least not until they hear that a Negro is to buy one of the street's finest pic-tured-windowed homes...
...Winter speeds home with his new deed, swerves his car to avoid hitting one of the Lane's less tolerant children, and crashes fatally into the tree...
...And then, quite suddenly, novelist Wheeler snuffs out the fuse he has set to burning so steadily toward the Peaceable Lane powder keg...
...The artist carries a chip on his shoulder the size of a telephone pole, and when he moves in, Peaceable Lane gives him something of the fight he has been aching for...
...The street owns a community swimming pool for residents...
...a bigoted housewife orders it drained after Winter takes his wife and nine-year-old son for a summer afternoon dip...
...His conscience has been bothering him, and it nags intolerably when he learns that the Negro who would have become his next-door neighbor is none other than Lamar Winter, his ad agency's top artist, and a man with whom he has worked, lunched, and joked for years...
...Some verisimilitude is achieved when the men talk together, though they often sound like Hollywood's version of old Flying Tiger pilots out of place in a post-World War II world...
...With the help of a neighbor Matt collects the appointed sum from each resident and buys the house...
...4.50), and he is as nice a guy as you'll find on the streets of any typical American suburb from Scarsdale to Levittown...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
