Think of “the suburbs” and multiple images come to mind. Victorian homes on tree-lined streets. Postwar tract housing for what was once the growing middle class. There are the suburbs of strivers, who dream of a white picket fence and a yard of one’s own. And the suburbs of the super rich, who dream of luxury within commuting distance to high-powered jobs. For many people, the suburbs represent safety, security, and square footage. But any enclave inevitably brings ideas about who’s welcome in a neighborhood, and who’s not.
An hour from Manhattan by train, Greenwich, Connecticut is one of the most well-known and exclusive suburbs in America, with resident-only beaches, gated mansions, and private country clubs. The town is instantly recognizable as a bastion of wealth and privilege. In my novel, Greenwich, the name evokes not just a physical place but an ideal: a symbol of the American dream that’s less about keeping up with the Joneses than eclipsing them.
Here is a reading list of novels about class and racial tensions in the American suburbs, each of them engrossing and unsettling, concerned with the powerful forces that shape a community. These are books about belonging, about insiders and outsiders, that ask how far we’ll go and how much we’ll risk in pursuit of the good life.
Our Best Intentions by Vibhuti Jain
High school sophomore Angela Singh is just trying to fit in with her Westchester classmates when she stumbles across a popular white boy bleeding on the football field with a knife in his abdomen. He accuses a Black girl, Chiara Thompson, of stabbing him, and while Angela isn’t sure that she believes him, she did see Chiara nearby. Chiara and Angela, who is Indian, are among the few students of color at the school, and Angela is caught between the mounting outrage of the powerful white community and her sense that something about the stabbing doesn’t line up. This portrayal of class, race, and belonging in Kitchawan, New York is heartbreaking and insightful, and a scene in which Angela tries to apologize to Chiara’s cousin has lingered with me years after reading.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Elena Richardson’s life is as perfectly planned as her hometown of Shaker Heights, an affluent, majority-white suburb of Cleveland where everything is in order—until Mia Warren and her teenage daughter move to town. Mrs. Richardson likes to see herself as helping those in need. But Mia is a free spirit with a mysterious past, and she doesn’t play the part of the grateful single mother the way Mrs. Richardson demands. When a white family in Shaker Heights tries to adopt a Chinese American baby whose birth mother is working to get her daughter back, Mia and Mrs. Richardson wind up on opposite sides of a divided town. There are other driving questions—like who set little fires in all the Richardsons’s bedrooms—but what makes this novel so compulsively readable is how deftly Ng interrogates privileged white motherhood and its cookie-cutter ideals.
The Whispers by Ashley Audrain
Whitney Loverly is the Queen Bee of Harlow Street, with the largest house and an enviable, high-powered job. But she has a secret: she kind of hates motherhood. At a backyard barbecue, everyone hears her berating and screaming at her ten-year-old son. A few months later, he’s in a coma after falling from his bedroom window. Was it an accident? Did he jump? Did his mother push him? Harlow Street is in an affluent section of an unnamed city, but the suburbs are a lifestyle even more than a specific location. As Audrain explores the secrets and lies among these close-knit (and backstabbing) neighbors, she calls attention to the ways that gentrification pushed out other residents to create such a wealthy, white, homogenous enclave. It’s supposed to be an ideal place to raise a family, but these neighbors certainly suggest otherwise.
One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon
Jasmyn Williams is pregnant with her second child when she moves with her husband and son from Los Angeles to the nearby town of Liberty, where everyone from teachers and cops to the wealthy residents are all “like minded, thriving Black people.” She’s reluctant to leave her old life behind, but the massive, picturesque houses and the prospect of a safe and carefree childhood for her boys make her think that maybe this oasis is what her family needs. There’s something odd about Liberty, though, and the more Jasmyn discovers, the more she realizes her husband is changing in profound and frightening ways—and she’s about to be next. Building on the history of all-Black towns that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries, Yoon challenges prevailing views of wealthy suburbs as majority-white spaces, while considering the competing ideals of assimilation, revolution, and respectability politics. The result is a horror novel that builds to a chilling and controversial conclusion.
Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
New to suburban Long Island, Brooklyn transplant Gertie Wilde thinks she’s finally found an idyllic home for her family on Maple Street, especially thanks to her new friend and neighbor Rhea Schroeder. But when a sinkhole opens in the neighborhood and Rhea’s daughter falls in, Rhea turns against the Wildes in a frantic effort to protect her own reputation and find an easy target to blame. She hurls vicious accusations against Gertie’s husband, and things quickly escalate into a frenzied neighborhood witch hunt. Maple Street is majority white, and it’s clear the one Indian American family on the block had better get in line. But class in this novel is as much of a marker of outsider status as race, and the consequences for anyone who doesn’t fit in and follow the rules can be deadly.
Our Little Racket by Angelica Baker
Of course I have to include a novel set in Greenwich, and Baker’s had me riveted. Set during the 2008 banking collapse, the book traces the fall of disgraced CEO Bob D’Amico, whose possible malfeasance has ramifications for his family as well as the country at large. Baker is focused on the perspectives of the women around him: his wife and daughter, their nanny, and family friends both anxious and gleeful about this family’s downfall. The privileged white women of Greenwich wield tremendous power, yet they have little control over their own futures. Bob’s teenage daughter Madison at times tries to push against the constraints of her upbringing, calling out her mother and grandmother on their casual racism and trying to find another way to live. But family is a powerful force, just like the Gold Coast itself, and difficult to fully escape.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
A white family drives from Brooklyn to an expensive Airbnb in the Hamptons for what’s supposed to be an idyllic summer vacation. Then the phones go down. The internet. TV. An elderly Black couple knocks on the door in the middle of the night, claiming to be the home’s owners. They drove from New York City to escape a mysterious power outage ravaging the East Coast, and although the white couple has their doubts, their fear of being found out as racists is even greater than their fear of letting in these strangers. What follows is a rich, psychological exploration of the terrors of not-knowing, and a reminder that even when faced with the possible end of the world, people will always be people, playing the roles they know best.
Luster by Raven Leilani
Edie is a young Black woman in New York City with a dead-end job in publishing. She’s sleeping with all the wrong men and has no idea what she wants from her life. Then she begins a relationship with Eric, an older white man in an open marriage. Eric lives in New Jersey, and it’s his wife, Rebecca who—surprisingly—invites Edie to move in with them. The couple’s adopted daughter is isolated and struggling, one of only a few Black girls in their majority-white suburb, and Rebecca hopes Edie might be able to help. Edie is self-destructive, horny, sharp, lonely, and insightful, and the chasms between her and Eric make for trenchant commentary around class, race, misogyny, and power. She slips back and forth between New Jersey and Bushwick, but the two places, and her lives in each, couldn’t be more different.
