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“Irreversible Torpor”: Entropy in 1970s American Suburban Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2018

PETER LATHAM
PETER LATHAM*
Affiliation:
School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary University of London. Email: p.latham@qmul.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Although entropy has been identified as a theme in urban American fiction of the 1960s, it is far more significant in a strand of 1970s suburban fiction, in Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974), John Updike's Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and the stories of Raymond Carver. I argue that in these texts the suburbs function as closed systems, subject to entropy, and that the suburbanite protagonists have a heightened sense of physical and metaphysical entropy, a reflection in part of the prevailing sense of irreversible economic and cultural decline and decay in that decade

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 131 - 158
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018

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