Not as easy at it looks: Amy Silverburg's "Suburbia!"

Exaggerating one feature in a narrative grotesquely while keeping all the other elements normal-sized is an old technique. Kafka is probably the best known practitioner of this tactic, but it's been used pretty regularly since the advent of magical realism. Just a few years ago in another Best American Short Stories anthology, Nell Freudenberger used it in "Hover," in which everything in the story is just like normal life, except that a man finds himself suddenly able to hover above the ground a little bit.

It sounds easy: just find something that people all recognize and blow that feature up. But it's hard to do well. You can't just exaggerate anything and have it work. Ideally, exaggerating one element of a story enables the reader to consider that element in a strange sort of isolation. You could, say, examine what it feels like to be a new person in a group by having a character who moves to a new location have a weird disease that turns her into a lizard, but a lizard who maintains human sentience. It's just the normal human experience of being out of place, but multiplied to extremes. But you probably wouldn't be able to just have someone have giant feet that took up a city block and say you were trying to communicate the feeling of having big feet. It's got to be something where people will read it and immediately connect, where they will say, even as exaggerated as the element of the story is, that the feeling that exaggerated element evokes is exactly how it feels. 

That's what Silverburg does with two aspects of her story. In spite of both of these aspects being well-trod territory, Silverburg makes them fresh through her grotesque exaggerations.


The first aspect exaggerated is the notion of "pushing young ones out of the nest," or "letting them spread their wings" or whatever leaving-home cliche you want to use. Maria's father convinces her to leave home by means of a simple bet. Her dad bets her she will leave the house the day after she turns 18 and never come back. If she does come back, she loses. It's not clear what she loses, but she will lose. The day after her 18th birthday, he wakes her up while the rest of the family is gone, takes her to the train station, gives her a wad of cash, and tells her to leave and never come back.

Most parents, of course, would never do this, and it's borderline psychotic. But it's not meant to be a real-world parenting strategy. It's a hyperbolic and fun stand-in for the idea of getting your kids to go out and find themselves. And find herself, Maria does. She no sooner gets on the train than she is re-defining herself: "I decided the fewer words I said, the better. I'd be a person who spoke very little, but when I spoke, it would be especially important." Whatever else being dumped on the shore of life does for you, it allows you to re-make your own self-identity.

Maria ends up figuring it out. She goes off to the big city, meets a boy, takes her time deciding what that means. She gets a job, sort of succeeds at it. Finally, she decides, when her parents never come to visit like they promised, that she will lose the bet and go home. That's when the second exaggeration happens.

I feel like this story was based on a Dixie Chicks song, but in a good way. 

Everyone is familiar with the feeling of going back to some place you spent a lot of time as a child and finding it smaller when you return. Maria finds that to be the case, and then some. On the way to the house, knowing she will lose the bet, her boyfriend tells her they should have called first, out of consideration. Maria says she has "outgrown" consideration. That's not all she's outgrown. When they pull up to the house, it's literally not there: "The curb was still painted with the numbers of my address, but the land was filled with grass and dandelions and other unnameable weeds."

Maria looks further, and finally finds something that "shone in the sun like a tin can." She sees it's like her house, only it's a doll house-replica of her house. It's smaller than a toaster, she notes. Her parents, she finds, have shrunk down to its size as well. The father is disappointed, "I didn't want you to see us like this," he says. We are left with Maria still marveling at her parents' diminutiveness at the end.

You could see Maria's father as vain, someone who wanted to get rid of his daughter before she found out what they really are, but I see him as kind. He wanted his kids to know what they are capable of, but they'd have never known that if they couldn't get away and get enough perspective to see how much bigger they could be than what they'd known.

Seeing the father as kind rather than vain has an impact on the meaning of the title as well. One could read it as a dig against suburbia, one that sees suburbanites as small people. Maria's father didn't like his own life, after all, seeing his choice to be a real estate agent (no doubt selling more tiny parcels of suburban life to others) as a kind of failure. But it's also true that from that suburban landscape, Maria's parents raised two kids who went off to do great things, things they didn't even know they were capable of. Suburbia is like the calm waters where whales raise calves. After they're big enough, they move on to the big ocean, but that doesn't mean the calving ground is somehow a terrible place. It's only terrible when the people in it don't realize their own significance in the grand scheme of things. Maria's parents do.

Silverburg is a comedian, according to her contributor notes. She certainly has a comedian's knack for pointing out some aspect of life you always knew had something funny about it, but never noticed until she did that bit about airplane peanuts. Certainly, the surest sign that this story hit home with me is how sure I am that I'll think of it for a long time whenever Mrs. Heretic and I are talking about our son leaving home.