North Texas Libraries on the Go

Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway. With the dry wit of David Sedaris and Dave Barry's love of the absurd, Falanga details his new, suburban landscape from the point of view of a bewildered but gung ho everyman. From the complex political pecking order in the neighborhood, with its ultracompetitive block parties and its consuming holiday-card rivalry, to the surprises lurking on every corner - such as the twelve-year-old pyromaniac next door - THE SUBURBAN YOU describes in slyly understated prose the vicissitudes of life in the 'burbs.

Move to the Suburbs

You have spent three or four nights a week, or so it seems, over the past year and a half looking for a house in the suburbs. In the last month or so you have really ramped up your search for a suburban home because you had sex again and you just found out that your wife is pregnant with your second child. Alone, you leave your city house, while your wife stays at home with your child. You leave when your son goes to bed, usually between 8 and 10:30 p.m., a time that you are never able to predict, because with your first child you did not want to interfere with his natural sleep patterns (a philosophy that, by the way, your wife turned 180 degrees on with your daughter, your second child). From where you live in the city, you drive the half hour up to the North Shore suburbs, where you think you will live, because there you are close to the lake and your kids can go to the best schools around. They are public schools, and kids there know what a football is and can ride two-wheeled bikes.

You make this trek many evenings, armed with listings of properties that are for sale and a suburban map, which you have marked in advance, noting the exact location of each property. You arrange the listing sheets in the order in which you will drive by the homes that are for sale, so that you can perform this thankless task in as short a time frame as possible, so that you can get home and go to sleep, so that you can wake up refreshed and ready to be a corporate executive tomorrow.

Your task is to drive by each house and see if you can find one that you can imagine you and your family living in. You think that this task should not take that long, given the amount of money you are willing to pay for a house, but you are wrong. You are wrong because everything you look at looks so old and run-down. At the time, you are living in a four-story, contemporary city house. It is large and clean, and was new when you moved in. While you are stepping up in your purchase price-wise, it doesn't seem that way house-wise. You think that in the price range you are looking at you should be able to find a house on a hill, overlooking the lake, with a nice spread of land. And the house should ramble. You think that such a house should exist, but you are dead wrong. Rather, the houses are old-looking, they are on small lots, and they all need hundreds of thousands of dollars of work. This, you come to accept, is the price you pay for brick streets, big trees, living close to the lake, having smart neighbors who are interesting, and access to really good schools.

The brokers who assist you in this process are generally really old ladies. They are not like you and your wife at all; in fact, being old and being out of touch seem to be the two main characteristics of the brokers with whom you align yourself. These are brokers who were last in the city you are moving from twenty-five years ago, and whose main qualification is their tenure in living in the suburbs where you are looking.

You tell them, in great detail, the characteristics of a house and street that will appeal to you, but they keep on sending you listing sheet after listing sheet of properties that don't even come close. You invite them to your city house and try your best to articulate what you want, but they send you to see the opposite. You up your upper limit by a few hundred thousand dollars, but it makes no difference in what you see. The houses all need so much work and they were all designed for the way families lived eighty years ago, however that was.

This routine becomes redundant, until one day your friend-boss says to you, "Why don't you give Megan O'Connor a call?" You do...

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