Ever since the mid-20th century, novels, movies and TV series have explored our fascination with the secretly troubled lives of people living in the suburbs — perhaps because the majority of Americans, including in the Bay Area, live in suburbs.
In narratives from the “dark suburbia” genre, the characters want to enjoy the American dream of finally owning a nice house with a big yard in a safe, pleasant town. But they are deeply unhappy. In classics of the genre, the husbands go off to their soul-crushing corporate jobs, while their wives are stuck at home, despairing over wasted college educations and the mundane tasks of housekeeping and raising the next generation of upwardly mobile suburbanites.
With her new novel, “Coyoteland” (Flatiron Books), East Bay author Vanessa Hua brings the genre into the 2020s and into the strange, post-pandemic Bay Area we live in now. The wives are just as likely to have the soul-crushing corporate jobs, while the kids are most definitely not all right, as they deal with pressure to look a certain way, get into top colleges and not do anything on social media that will destroy their futures…