Boyd Tonkin, the Independent’s wonderful book person, riffs on writing about the suburbs following the death of John Updike. He says the Americans are better at writing about the ‘Burbs than the Brits -I always thought the British were pretty good at dissecting suburban angst. What about E.M. Forster tackling Edwardian class in the suburbs in Howard’s End? Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, a supposed American suburban classic, simply didn’t appeal to me but I enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia.
