For our Villains Bracket week, a few Lit Hub staffers wrote about their favorite villain from our initial group of 64. Calvin wrote about suburban ennui, the villain of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and more.
The suburban ennui that was felled in the first round of voting—to the chagrin of much of the Lit Hub staff, to be honest—was that which permeates Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, though it’s the villain in countless other American novels from the mid-century onward. It drives most of Updike’s output, a healthy amount of Cheever, and it’s one of the unnamed despairs propelling the eponymous Virgin Suicides.
Did it lose in the first round because of its formlessness, because it doesn’t have a face, because it hasn’t been portrayed by an actor in a screen adaptation? Did it fail to escape the first round because the economic precarity of late capitalism has rendered the notion of becoming existentially bored by homeownership and financial stability no longer relatable to the average reader? Or did we simply get a little too abstract with it?
It’s not quite fair to say that suburban ennui is formless. It seeps into the characters of the novels in which it appears, gradually taking hold of them and turning them against themselves until the protagonists behave like they’re possessed, acting erratically, impulsively, driven against the preservation of themselves and the blinkered lives they’ve built. They engage in affairs they barely bother to hide, they ignore their children, they disappear into drugs or booze. If there’s a local practitioner of black magic to solicit, well hey, why not?
The insidious thing about suburban malaise is that it transforms the novel’s protagonist into the villain. If fewer readers have access to the stability that produces suburban ennui, we can still relate to being our own worst enemies. RIP to suburban ennui, the only villain in this bracket who also exists in real life.
And here’s Calvin’s bracket:
