In the opening chapter of Karolina Waclawiak’s second novel The Invaders, an ageing Connecticut trophy wife is birdwatching near the coastline when she happens upon a shrouded figure masturbating in the brush. Terrified by the sight, she nonetheless pauses to retouch her hair and makeup before scuttling away to the local yacht club’s summer fashion show.
It’s a narrative moment much like Jeffrey Beaumont’s discovery of a severed ear in the opening minutes of Blue Velvet. We read in this dissonant tableau a presentiment of the louche machinations simmering beneath the genteel facade of the Little Neck Cove suburb. In fact, David Lynch’s cinema of suburban horror would pair well with Waclawiak’s work both here and in her first, LA-based novel, How to Get Into the Twin Palms. Both writer and film-maker blend traditional social criticism and with a sort of rhapsodising of the quotidian and grotesque within suburbia. Along with DJ Waldie, Bret Easton Ellis, Jeffrey Eugenides and AM Homes, Waclawiak’s The Invaders belongs to this expanding genre of “new suburban” literature.
“Without people, Little Neck Cove was one of the most breathtaking places I’d ever seen,” writes Waclawiak in the voice of Cheryl, one of two central characters who narrate The Invaders in alternating chapters. “We were far enough away from New York to feel like we were in a different world, but close enough to have successful commuter husbands.” Cheryl’s husband Jeffrey is one such spouse, a successful pharmaceutical salesman whose professional and private life is plateauing with age – this includes his marriage to his second wife and his relationship to pill-popping, layabout son Teddy, the other narrator of the novel.
Teddy has returned to the couple after being expelled from Dartmouth. He finds them surrounded by a cabal of meddlesome, patrician neighbours, some famously rumoured to have presidential bloodlines and many of whom dallied in “key party” orgies and drunken bacchanals, but are now clinging desperately to middle age. The community’s one continuing pleasure is securing Little Neck Cove’s exclusive demographic by forestalling the invasion of the poor, the ethnic and the non-pedigreed on to their hallowed shore. Both Cheryl, a former outlet-store clerk, and Teddy, a cynical slacker who dreams of nothing but sailing away, are themselves part of this unwanted class.
John Cheever and John Updike were once the rulers of American suburban fiction; in Bullet Park, The Swimmer and Couples they outlined a portrait of the middlebrow milquetoast within the post-60s New Left. Waclawiak writes of the suburban rituals of status and boredom with the same acuity for detail as those writers, but the domestic setting she creates around Cheryl and Teddy is a thoroughly post-millennial world, the kind prophesied by Jean Baudrillard when he quipped, “What do we do after the orgy?”
High-definition flat-screen televisions and child sex abuse images (a sample of which Cheryl discovers hidden on Jeffrey’s web browser) proliferate, along with narcotic pharmaceuticals and the distinctly permissive ideology of contemporary neoliberalism. “He told me about Brainshark and Salesforce training,” says Teddy of his father’s corporate world. “Everything sounded tactical. Like we were waging a war with our products … He had words of wisdom printed out in huge letters pinned to the walls of his cubicle: IS THIS THE BEST USE OF OUR TIME AND/OR MONEY?” When the sudden appearance of a Hispanic fisherman on the premises provokes the neighbourhood to erect a barrier wall along the shore, the violence it sparks echoes the anti-immigrant/terrorist dogma of the Bush doctrine.
Despite its patent cynicism, The Invaders contains hints of the same fantastical realism found in Ellis’s Lunar Park or Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. All these books romanticise the lonely topographies, both emotional and natural, that its characters inhabit. Waclawiak’s unadorned prose puts in stark relief dark houses, vacant gardens, even the ominous churning of the sea without resorting to belaboured Freudian cant.
This keen sense of atmosphere, one suspects, results from the author’s use of Cheryl as a kind of feminist cipher in a genre long dominated by male voices. But the enfeebled doyens, trolling divorcees, desperate mothers and hard-bodied daughters of this novel are all nominally liberated but emotionally trapped; like songbirds they know the exact contours of their cage. “I looked at the daughters of friends shimmying out of short shorts and then at the older women who were watching them, forlorn, and I realized we weren’t ever going to be the ones men were looking at again,” laments Cheryl. “I stared at them and craved their youth and their bodies. Their youth! I would never be that young again.”
And it is they, rather than the absentee husbands, who compete for dominion over the suburbs. Yet when, at the end of The Invaders, Cheryl and Teddy are given a chance to escape their hostile enclave, it proves difficult to bring it off. Waclawiak has created a world where even the chance to disappear is both tempting and, ultimately, disastrous.
