By deftly manipulating popular media representations of suburban malaise and out-of-context advertisements, Bachman turns the seemingly innocent, but obviously offending, image against itself.
That proved to be a reasonably effective therapy for his suburban malaise until 1975, when he was camping and hiking in the Williams Mountains near Aspen, Colo. "I became acutely depressed," he writes.
Drawing on both hard rock and punk-rock, collegiate types turned suburban malaise and uncertainty inward to create alternative rock, with its complaints, defensive noise, arty tangents and self-mocking irony.
Harvard will house the John Updike archive-three hundred and eighty linear feet of suburban malaise.
The Melbourne Australia Film Festival called it a "brilliantly black comic look at suburban teenage malaise."
Driven by an interest in understanding poverty and urban culture and yearning for an escape from suburban malaise, the white teen-ager persuaded his parents to pay almost $5,000 to send him to Trenton High School last year.
The term "Cheever Country" has become synonymous with well-to-do suburbs and suburban malaise.
Susan is a dim, Barbie-doll pretty girl who marries a handsome, hard-working oaf to escape her father's incestuous attentions; she ends up having a furtive affair with a local tree surgeon and succumbs to suburban malaise.
Novelists, in turn, transmuted the theme of suburban malaise in fiction.
As in Mr. Shepard's earlier work, many of these stories are set in the West or Midwest, places where old frontier landscapes and ideals are giving way to malls and subdivisions and suburban malaise.