The novel sequence is perhaps the most obvious subject with which to commence a study of narratives that attempt to bring a sense of history to the suburbs. The two sequences examined in this opening chapter, John Updike's Rabbit novels and Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe books, have after all come to occupy a central place within the literature of the late twentieth-century American suburbs. The prominence of both sequences, moreover, owes much to their long form. After the publication of Rabbit Run in 1960, Updike returned to the ordinary exploits of Harry Angstrom at roughly ten-year intervals: a further three novels followed – Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) – with the novella ‘Rabbit Remembered’ (2001) providing the sequence a reflective coda. Ford's Bascombe tetralogy – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2005) and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014) – whose publication history overlaps that of the Rabbit stories, has helped confirm the novel sequence as the pre-eminent form for examining metropolitan change in the US. The regular appearance over many decades of the two sequences’ protagonists, their ageing in real time, and the books’ attendance to the impact of social, economic and political transformations on their protagonists’ everyday lives, have further served to consolidate Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom's and Frank Bascombe's status as white American Everyman figures. The two characters are thus not only the most familiar of literary suburbanites, they are also widely perceived to be the most representative. In any literary history of the American suburbs, they are going to have to feature.

Yet both sequences appear ambivalent about the usefulness of a historical perspective. Both, for one, are narrated in the present tense. In his afterword to the fourth Rabbit novel, Updike declared that his decision to employ a present-tense narrative voice in Rabbit Run felt ‘rebellious and liberating in 1959’. Updike contends that the formal device, which enables author and reader ‘to move in a purged space, on the travelling edge of the future’, constituted a break with a literary tradition bound to the past tense's ‘subtly dead, muffling hand’. But present-tense narration also provided a suitable mode with which to articulate the disquiet of a young male subject born during the Depression years who has come to feel uneasy about his social inheritance.