Guys & Dols

THE EXURBANITES (278 pp.)--A. C. Spectorsky--Lippincott ($3.95).

The Fairfield County Protective Association and Anti-Defamation League, hastily formed only a few days before, assembled in the spacious (definitely not split-level) dwelling belonging to an account executive of one of the larger New York advertising agencies. Clutching an unaccustomed cup of coffee, and reclining in a canvas chair that sagged gracefully beneath his trim figure, the host and chairman began:

"Now, I really don't think we are being hysterical or anything. But look here, this fellow Spectorsky, has he or has he not been drinking our liquor for years?"

"Damn right," said a vice president of a major New York book-publishing firm, leaning against the rough oak mantelpiece. "Boy, we even had him out for a, weekend last spring. He kept smashing his martini glasses into the pool. It wasn't safe to go swimming for days."

A theatrical lawyer, who had only recently moved out from Scarsdale and thus was still on probation, waved a green-covered book and exclaimed with the new boy's eagerness: "Of course, I haven't actually read this, but I walked through it pretty carefully coming out on the train. Do you know what this fellow says? He says we spend most of our money on booze, foreign cars and regional stigmata. Stigmata, oh my God! He says we get drunker than anybody else. He says we keep electric wormdiggers in Hepplewhite chests. Now who the hell has ever seen a worm digger around here?"

The lawyer's wife, who wore a gold pin shaped like a poodle with ruby eyes on a fashionably faded denim dress, spoke up for the culprit. "Maybe," she said, "he's just neurotic. You know, a member of the out-group trying to get in. Or maybe," the afterthought was startling, "maybe he's just trying to be funny."

"Funny, my eye," roared the host. "Wait till you see what he says about you girls. He makes you all sound like a bunch of overcompensating sexpots."

Well might Connecticut's Fairfield County be indignant. Well might the fire bells ring through Pennsylvania's Bucks, and icy disdain waft across Long Island's North Shore. For Author Spectorsky, once a commuter himself, has turned traitor to his class and performed a hatchet job on the commuting world around New York City. He writes not about Suburbia ("dull and demure domesticity") but about Exurbia, his word for the belt just beyond. Unlike many more naive chroniclers, Spectorsky does not pretend that all the suburbs or exurbs are alike. And he records the differences with the thoroughness of a Baedeker and the sincerity of a presentation designed to steal an agency friend's soapflake account.His observations should perhaps be taken with a good deal of salt, but they will form a basis for discussion during the long winter ahead.

Fairfield County, he says, is commercial, childishly ribald, echoing with the funniest and dirtiest jokes. Yet it is the sort of place where the A & P stocks pheasant. Fairfield's per capita buying power, according to Spectorsky's figures, is ahead even of Amarillo, Texas, yet its inhabitants are not the "loot-heavy monsters" of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. In Fairfield there is little leisure and not much class, not really. There is instead a kind of inverted snobbery, which seeks to achieve class by a pretending devotion to the "old and sincerely beat-up."

Bucks, heavily colonized by an artistic crowd, is somehow simpler and more genuine. There are often real cattle on the farms, people get drunk far more quietly, jokes are cleaner. In Rockland, on the other hand, no one tells jokes at all--"sharp and witty conversation and character assassination by epigram have taken their place." In Rockland, when someone name-drops "Truman," it means a playwright, while in Westchester (northern) it means an ex-President. A kind of "murderous Gemutlichkeit" persists in Rockland. What would strike a Rockland lady as "sweet and touching"? Well, naturally, the case of the sweet and touching second wife of a successful Rocklander, who one day stopped in at a neighbor's house, saying: "You must help me. I'm on my way to my analyst's and I haven't dreamed anything. Lend me a dream."

Generally, the exurbanites are driven to live on the other side of the "mink curtain" by a kind of rural nostalgia ("we haven't any of us got any goddam' roots"). They are "idea-manipulators," as Author Spectorsky puts it, who yearn to be "object-manipulators"--hence their passion for power mowers, fences, flagstones.They are Babbittical only in their determined refusal to be Babbitts. They work mostly in the "communications industry" (radio, TV, advertising, publishing, etc.), and "these people, God save us all, set the styles, mold the fashions and populate the dreams of the rest of the country."

Maybe it is the liquor bill ($1,000 a year minimum) or the kids' ballet lessons, but whatever it is, Spectorsky is able to spell out the dollars and cents of the Age of Anxiety. Like his urban counterparts the exurbanite, if he makes $12,000 a year, will spend $15,000 and if he makes $20,-ooo, will spend $25,000. The way Spectorsky tells it, Brooks Brothers' most celebrated item of haberdashery is really the hair shirt. These successful young guys have their dols (a unit of psychological pain), and most of the dols come from their fiercely competitive jobs. Yet Spectorsky ends, as did Sinclair Lewis with Babbitt, by half falling in love with his victims: "Not only do they do their best at the difficult and exciting job of living, but the job they do is, under the circumstances, often remarkably good."

Despite this concession, it is doubtful whether the Fairfield Protective Association and Anti-Defamation League can ever forgive ex-Exurbanite Spectorsky.

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