I. DEFINING LURIEN WASTE

At the most basic level, trash in Lurie's fiction is a realist device: its proliferation in the novels under discussion reflects the actual proliferation of consumer waste in mid-century America.Footnote ⁸ Sorting paper and cardboard from food remnants and taking out the trash are examples of mundane tasks whose function, within the economy of the novel, is to situate the characters more securely within their middle-class context,Footnote ⁹ and to reinforce gender roles (in this case, that taking out the trash is a “man's job”Footnote ¹⁰). But the characters’ discussions of cleanliness and classifications of waste also serve to register a whole set of anxieties and tensions at the heart of 1950s and 1960s white middle-class experience – anxieties, as mentioned above, very different to those explored by male visual artists and writers during this decade.

To a certain extent, waste in these texts epitomizes Mary Douglas's notion of dirt as “matter out of place” – that which threatens us with its fundamental “otherness,” and which we seek to excise in an effort to maintain (the illusion of) control.Footnote ¹¹ Douglas's definition, which she acknowledged was partly inspired by disagreements with her husband regarding domestic hygiene and the “relativity of dirt,”Footnote ¹² is ideally suited to the texts at hand, where waste matter represents both the sullying of the nuclear family and a means to disrupt a patriarchal hegemonic order. I combine Douglas's definition, however, with a temporal conceptualization developed elsewhere, in which waste and dirt are “matter out of time,”Footnote ¹³ and which, I argue, helps highlight the economic subtext of some of the texts’ gendering of these substances. As numerous scholars have established, the vilification of dirt at the beginning of the twentieth century was inextricably linked to the growth of the commercial cleaning products industry, which also promoted around-the-clock cleaning, rendering housework potentially interminable.Footnote ¹⁴ Dirt thus has a gendered, temporal, dimension, both marking time and taking up time: the experienced housewife knows how long remains until she must clean the same spot again, while entire days are consumed in keeping at bay that which will inevitably return. In both instances, and in contrast to what advertisers promised housewives of Lurie's generation, the effort is ultimately futile – as famously stated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, “The battle against dust and dirt is never won.”Footnote ¹⁵ Lurie's texts likewise make clear that housework and social propriety occupy time and energy that could otherwise be dedicated to more creative pursuits: where writing, as novelist and housewife Janet Smith notes in Lurie's Real People (1969), produces a “story, which can be finished”; being a wife and mother and doing “The Right Thing,” as she puts it, “has to be done over and over again every day, like any housework.”Footnote ¹⁶ Both of the definitions discussed – “matter out of time” and “matter out of place” – are integral to the feminist readings that follow.

II. “THE WORLD … IS A DISORDERLY, DIRTY SCRAP HEAP”: DIRT AND DISORDER IN LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

Love and Friendship renders explicit the relationship between domestic dirt's codification and notions of marital harmony, gender, and class from the very first scene. The novel's opening line – “The day Emily Stockwell Turner fell out of love with her husband began much like other days”Footnote ¹⁷ – is followed by eight pages about house cleaning, during which Emmy (as she is known to her friends) tidies the kitchen and seeks to evade her new cleaning lady's endless chatter. While a wonderfully comedic opening in its own right, the deadpan statement and detailed account of the housewife's mundane activity are in fact characteristic of the novel's broader concerns.

Love and Friendship is set in the fictitious all-male liberal-arts university town of Convers, loosely based on Amherst, where Lurie's husband taught from 1954 to 1957, and draws upon Lurie's experiences during that period.Footnote ¹⁸ The novel traces the entwined stories of Emmy, her friend Miranda Fenn, their husbands Holman Turner and Julian Fenn (both recently appointed lecturers in the Convers English Department), and Emmy's eventual lover, failed musician Will Thomas. Reflecting the gender roles of the period, both women are housewives who, though assisted by a weekly cleaner, spend most of their time on housework.Footnote ¹⁹ Taking its title from an early novella by Jane Austen, Lurie's novel also pays tribute to Austen in playfully undermining the values of its middle- and aspiring-middle-class characters and parodying their efforts to eradicate (literal and metaphorical) dirt.

The following description of Emmy's perception of mess exemplifies this focus:

Here Lurie elegantly interlaces the material realities of a “generic” kind of mess with which any housewife will be familiar with that generic mess's personal significance for this housewife: an affront to her aesthetic sensibilities, and something entirely foreign to her class. In contrast to the phenomenological conceptualization of housework famously espoused by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space – “through daily polishing,” the housewife “awakens furniture that was asleep”Footnote ²⁰ – Emmy sees demeaning work for which her wealthy upbringing has not prepared her – and which, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes in her history of housework and domestic technology, a previous generation of faculty wives would not have had to do.Footnote ²¹

Crucially, the scene foreshadows the literal and metaphorical disorder to come, which is embodied in the figure of her cleaner, Mrs. Rabbage, in many respects a caricature of the meddling housekeeper. Her very name is significant in this regard, as it appears to be a cross between “rabid” and “cabbage” – the latter of which was used as an insult by housewives interviewed, in the 1960s, by the feminist anthropologist Ann Oakley (and was also famously used as a descriptor of the unnamed housewife in Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”Footnote ²²). The women in Oakley's study repeatedly used “cabbage” to designate “someone entirely immersed in domestic affairs … a drab, uninteresting automaton.”Footnote ²³ The term became mainstream in New Zealand and in feminist circles more broadly in 1968, after the feminist magazine Thursday featured a cover story on depression among suburban “cabbage patch wives,” provocatively titled “Who Says I'm a Cabbage?”.Footnote ²⁴ In both cases, the term would have stemmed from the story told to children that babies are born from cabbage patches – rendering a cabbage-patch wife a woman whose sole purpose is to procreate and tend her family. While Lurie's novel was published nearly a decade prior to Oakley's study and six years before the magazine feature, the striking parallels at the level of language enrich the reader's sense of Mrs Rabbage as a “rabid cabbage” – a sharply opinionated woman who ignores social codes and takes up far more narrative space than one might expect someone of her status to occupy. The following monologue is characteristic:

Aside from revealing Mrs Rabbage's strong opinions on waste (in this case, the perils of disposing of things that might come in useful later), the monologue is emblematic of her unstoppable logorrhoea. Mrs. Rabbage may empty the domestic spaces through which she moves of physical dirt, but she leaves in her wake a trail of figurative dirt: words more or less embarrassing (such as the reference to anal infirmity) and muddled to the point of making little sense. The comedic element of this and of the later passages in which she appears stems from the contrast between the cleaner's “rabid” speech and the rigidity of the social mores to which her employers – and the wider community of Convers – subscribe.

The threat posed by Mrs Rabbage's verbal diarrhoea is compounded by the fact that, though her employers perceive her to be “other,” they must allow her access to the most intimate spaces of their homes. The tensions resulting from this are most apparent in Mrs Rabbage's repeated objectification and conflation with her cleaning implements. Thus one faculty wife explains to Emmy and Miranda that she has replaced Mrs. Rabbage with “one of those new vacuums with all the attachments. It's really a more sensible solution” (LF 149) – for a vacuum cleaner cannot poke around where it shouldn't.Footnote ²⁵ This figuration is repeated later, when Mrs. Rabbage enters Holman and Emmy's bedroom to clean while he is lying sick in bed: “Giving up all pretence at dusting,” she “lean[s] against the dresser, rigidly, as a broom does,” before intimating to Holman that “some people” (Will Thomas) “keep dropping in” at the house while he is at work (LF 203). The scene ends with Mrs. Rabbage “[g]athering up the cleaning things” and leaving the room, “pulling the vacuum behind her. Its electric cord, like a long black tail, was the last to leave” (LF 203). Just as the vacuum cleaner confronts the cleaner or housewife with the dirt and dust sullying their home, here the vacuum cleaner woman confronts Holman with the metaphorical dirt sullying his marriage in a manner that reflects the long-standing association of sexual behaviour deemed unacceptable with filth.Footnote ²⁶

This attention to the codification of dirt is indebted in no small part to Austen, whose influence Lurie herself has acknowledged in interview,Footnote ²⁷ and whose own work, as several scholars have established, makes reference to dirt, cleaning, and disorder to subtly discuss issues pertaining to sexuality, the body, and class.Footnote ²⁸ Of particular note is Darryl Jones's identification of the fact that the scene in Northanger Abbey in which Catherine and Isabella meet “in defiance of wet and dirt” to read novels together immediately follows the text's famous defence of the novel form.Footnote ²⁹ Lurie follows Austen's cue not only in connecting the following or flouting of such codes to one's acceptance or rejection of the status quo (for example, in a scene in which Emmy appears at a concert in front of all of the town covered in mud from the wasteland where she and her lover have been going to make love), but in recognizing that dirt is, in fact, where the interesting “stuff” of life lies. Lurie, like Austen, intimates that the task of the novelist – and the novel form – is to give space to that which, in real life, we are socialized to sweep away, be this physical dirt or metaphorical dirt (smut). In this case, attending to dirt provides a means to question established social codes and rigid categories, as well as to allegorize the initial stirrings of their dissolution, embodied in Emmy's trajectory from cleaning up mess and feeling disgust at the thought of domestic disorder, to dwelling in it freely. This same idea is made explicit in one of the few discussions of domestic mess to feature in Real People, where novelist Janet Smith ultimately recognizes that she has been treating her short stories like her home – spaces to be sanitized and kept free of all incongruities and blemishes.Footnote ³⁰ Janet's otherwise disappointing affair with a junk artist who views waste as more interesting than new goods at least teaches her to look at dirt and debris as more “real” and “relevant” – like the mud and broken glass in the artist's junk assemblages, inconvenient or ugly emotions lend expressiveness to narrative (RP 146). To write well, and to challenge convention, one must “use everything” (RP 146).

Love and Friendship’s use of waste and disorder to challenge established categories is further manifest in a series of letter fragments (another tribute to Austen's epistolary novella) to a certain Francis Noye from his lover Allen Ingram, a visiting lecturer who is otherwise only mentioned in passing. In one of his final letters, Allen notes,

At surface level, this is an eloquent description of the rigid codes that shape and define the everyday life of small liberal-arts college communities, particularly in the twilight of the Eisenhower years (while Love and Friendship was published in 1962, Lurie wrote it during the last years of Eisenhower's second term). The world may be a chaotic scrapheap, but in this town everything is in its place – to the point of appearing artificial, or at the very least carefully engineered. The subtext, however, seems to be a more pointed critique of the things – people – that don't have a place here. Just as Ingram's homosexuality is never stated outright but merely implied, the discussion of fixed social roles and categories here seems to belie a more pointed critique of normativity in general, and heteronormativity in particular. This account of assimilation is in fact an indictment of small town life's equating of otherness with disorder. That the threat Ingram poses is precisely his “queerness” is implicit in the language of cages, tags, and labels, all of which are intended to contain and neutralize difference, an impression heightened by his own marginal position within the novel.

Lurie makes the link between waste, dissent, and queerness most explicit in a campus controversy in which Holman becomes embroiled towards the novel's end, and which anticipates the more explicitly political themes of her later novels. This controversy involves the construction of a new Religion Building, which the students oppose due to its “Traditional Colonial Split-Level Ranch-Style” (LF 232). To highlight their disgust at the building plans, the students give the building the nickname “Howard Johnson's,” after the American chain of turnpike restaurants and motor lodges best known for its colonial-style architecture, which was seen as synonymous with social conformity.Footnote ³¹ They then fill the excavation site with “the debris of a school year” (LF 253). Allen's emphasis on the juvenile nature of the protesters’ garbage heightens the brutality of Holman's reaction to the protesters’ actions: for Allen witnesses him push a torch-wielding protester – a homosexual student called Dicky Smith – into the excavation, lighting the whole pit on fire. While Allen sees Holman's involvement as accidental, the reader is privy to its darker subtext: only a few pages prior to the riot, Holman has been reflecting:

Holman's pushing of the student into a pile of rubbish is no accident, then, but rather a powerful – if ultimately ineffectual, since the boy survives – effort to literally “throw out” the “other” and preserve the status quo, imitation colonial architecture and all. What Allen sees as a humorous diversion from the homogeneity of small college town life, featuring boys being (again, literally) burned for “playing” at protest and a hapless and myopic academic powerless in the face of change, has a darker subtext: Holman's intervention renders disturbingly palpable the lengths to which those resistant to change will go to keep it at bay.

While Love and Friendship is less overtly political than Lurie's later texts, its representations of domestic dirt, waste, and incipient campus unrest as perceived by a cloistered academic community in the mid-1950s subtly anticipate the later convulsions of the 1960s. The text proposes an embryonic form of radically disruptive feminist and queer waste here that is developed more fully in The Nowhere City and The War between the Tates.

III. “ALWAYS IN FLUX, GROWING, SIFTING”: THE NOWHERE CITY

Lurie's second novel, The Nowhere City, deploys industrial waste and razed spaces to explore gendered anxieties around historical progress, capitalist acceleration, and temporality more broadly.Footnote ³² Published in 1965, the text was likely influenced by the four years Lurie spent in California between 1957 and 1961.Footnote ³³ Paul Cattleman, a PhD student in history at an East Coast university, and his wife Katherine move to Mar Vista, in west LA, after Paul has been hired to write the history of a large electronics company, Nutting Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) – an institution whose obscure involvement in weapons manufacture places it within a burgeoning military–industrial complex.Footnote ³⁴ While Paul immediately falls in love with his new surroundings, Katherine's original reaction to the city is intensely negative. Not just the “nowhere city” suggested in the title (a play on the direct translation of “utopia”), LA for Katherine is also a “nothing city,” insofar as its entire economy is based on the circulation of meaningless goods and empty symbols:

This perception of LA as an assemblage of meaningless signs and vacuous promises papering over civilization's remnants is not itself unique – rather, it echoes a long tradition in “anti-LA” writing that dates back to the 1920s,Footnote ³⁵ including Morrow Mayo's seminal book Los Angeles, in which Mayo described LA as “a commodity … like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.”Footnote ³⁶ Lurie self-consciously echoes this tradition through numerous references to Nathanael West's waste-laden indictment of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust (1939), but also through myriad allusions to The Waste Land (1922) – arguably the twentieth century's most ambitious effort to retrieve the remnants of civilization from the jaws of a relentless capitalist modernity, and which influenced West's own work.Footnote ³⁷ The form of the novel itself mimics the city's collagistic architectural style. Most notably, each of the text's four parts, themselves named after specific neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, features a series of epigraphs: fragments of classified advertisements and headlines from the Los Angeles Times, including an ad for “Madame Anni, psychic reader” (NC 120) that echoes Eliot's “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant.”Footnote ³⁸ Meanwhile, descriptions of beatniks driving around in hot rods – cars “of the early 1930s that had been more or less radically altered [and] freshly painted in all the colours of the TV screen” (NC 85) – render the setting itself a melange of temporalities.Footnote ³⁹

What renders The Nowhere City noteworthy, however, is that Lurie makes this geophysical embodiment of the society of the spectacle the site, too, of Katherine's emancipation from an unhappy marriage and controlling husband. For Katherine's denunciation of LA at the beginning of the novel is tempered by her eventual acclimatization to the city and self-reinvention, while Paul's fantasies of love affairs with starlets and publications in eminent journals are quashed following a series of disasters involving material waste of different forms. He thus leaves the city and returns back east to teach – in a brilliant intertextual sleight of hand – at Convers College, the setting of Love and Friendship, while Katherine remains in the city that “made” her. According to Davis, “The ultimate world-historical significance – and oddity – of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In Lurie, that double role is played out through the characters’ shifting understanding of the city, its by-products, and its surrounding wastelands, which she shows to be inherently gender-dependent.

The unravelling of Paul's idealized vision of LA is already foreshadowed in one of the opening scenes, in which the reader is informed of Nutting Research's approach to its own output:

The logic governing this whole process is that while the documents being destroyed are no longer of any value to the corporation, they would be of great value to a business competitor, or to anyone (journalists, foreign governments) intent on finding out about its activities. In that sense, their disposal is merely an extension of the profit motive. As I have noted elsewhere, waste under capitalism becomes important – and warrants discussion – only when it can be made profitable, threatens productivity, or (as in this case) threatens to profit someone else.Footnote ⁴¹ Nutting's disposal system is thus but a corporate version of a scorched-earth policy, premised on the paradox that the stuff in question is simultaneously valuable (to a competitor) and not valuable (to the company that produced it). The waste in question is likewise entirely at odds with the domestic junk with which the housewives in Love and Friendship contend, forming part of a broader discussion of national security rather than marital harmony or social propriety. Lurie in fact devotes several – highly amusing – pages to explaining the disposal process's shortcomings, including Paul's colleague Frank Skinner's panic when a “half-charred piece of paper” escapes the incinerator and blows over the fence on the perimeter of the corporation's land (NC 17). While apparently worthless, this “disreputable object” poses a distinct threat both to Skinner's continued employment and to the very continuing of the corporation's operations: according to the company rule book, it “constitut[es] evidence of an unauthorized … removal of classified documents” (NC 17). In this way, the fragment is very powerful indeed – a point Lurie underscores by replicating both its contents and the typewriter font in which the text is written:

Paradoxically, the indecipherability of the text contained in this fragment renders the object innocuous, since the threat it originally posed stemmed from its capacity to disclose classified information. And yet within the context of corporate bureaucracy, what matters is that the waste paper (regardless of its contents) has exceeded its boundaries. The threat of information leakage is superseded by the remnant's indication of the fallibility of the company's security protocol.

The novel links Nutting's approach to its own excretions to its broader corporate ethos, most notably in Paul's recognition that the company's ineffectuality makes its involvement in the weapons industry harmless: “the purpose of this whole economy is to expend as much time, money, and material as possible without creating anything useful” (NC 111). Nutting does no harm, because (as its very name suggests) it does nothing. The ultimate irony is that Paul's own work falls under this same remit: “it was the expensive public manufacture of nothing: the vaguely deliberate consumption of time, energy, intelligence, knowledge, and money, with no result – no product” (NC 159). The disappearance of all three copies of his historical study suggests that he himself is no different from the company's disposal mechanism (NC 160). Historiography here is merely propaganda for the military–industrial complex, the historian an extension of the city's entertainment industry. As Judie Newman notes, “Paul's history turns out to be ‘Nutting’ in every sense.”Footnote ⁴²

Taken together, Nutting's paranoid stewardship of its excretions and Paul's realization that his own work is considered trash serve as a broader comment about both LA's economic base and the city's attitude to the past – but because they are voiced by a character so intensely dislikeable, they also appear as a satisfying rebuttal against male entitlement, which complicates a straightforwardly Marxist reading of the text. Such an impression is borne out by waste's role, in a series of subsequent scenes, in scuppering Paul's “California dreaming” and eventually confronting him with the fact that in this utopia he is redundant. The first of these is an arresting description of Paul's flânerie, in the company of his beatnik lover Ceci, through the slums of Venice:

Initially, the passage recalls Walter Benjamin's meditations, in The Arcades Project, on the sociohistorical significance of the Paris Arcades, which were rendered obsolete by the end of the nineteenth century by the city's first department stores.Footnote ⁴³ For Benjamin, the Arcades were perfect symbols of the speed with which capitalism shrugs off the old to make way for the new. Paul is no Benjamin, however – for his disgust is aimed not at the system that has rendered Venice obsolete and turned it into a home for society's unwanted, but rather at the unwanted themselves, who sully his idealized vision of the city and insult his aesthetic sensibilities.

Waste plays a more personal role in disrupting Paul's hope for fulfilment in LA at two subsequent points in the novel. In the first of these, he takes Ceci on a drive to the countryside only to realize that it has been replaced by a “waste ground bright with real estate signs” advertising luxury developments that have yet to be built. Paul's pastoral vision of lovemaking on a grassy slope is thus quashed: “Somehow they had got out of Walden into ‘The Waste Land’” (NC 165). Lurie expands on this conceit in a later scene in which the Hollywood home of Glory, a starlet for whom Katherine works as an assistant, is flooded due to a bathroom tap being left on. Paul and Glory wade through the mansion's flooded rooms, pushing away disintegrating copies of Vogue magazine and floating furniture, before inevitably having sex in the waterlogged bathroom (NC 242–44). At a basic level, the scene serves as the novel's very own “Death by Water,” a watery petite mort to counter the barren landscapes throughout the rest of the text. But more importantly, the disappointing nature of this brief encounter offers a corrective to Paul's original fantasy of LA as akin to the sixteenth century, his period of specialism, where “he might find other paraphernalia of courtly love: the impenetrable castles … the worship from afar of the beloved movie starlet” (NC 8). Sex in the flooded bathroom of a third-rate movie starlet's mansion undermines Paul's vision of impenetrable castles and courtly love, just as the uncomfortable lovemaking among empty cans and dried twigs, and the disposability of his historical study, undermined his dreams of a countryside dalliance and academic legacy. Waste and disorder once more expose the fallibility of “California dreaming” as well as revealing the dreamer's own self-delusion.

This feminist reading of the “nothing city” and the remnants left behind in its continual redevelopment is borne out by Katherine's narrative trajectory. Having moved to LA with no plans, Katherine has little to lose beyond the symptoms of a perennial psychosomatic sinusitis, and a garage full of antique furniture once owned by her parents that doesn't fit in with the California aesthetic (NC 130). While in Paul's case waste is a corrective to fantasy, in Katherine's it stands for an obstructive, and inherently patriarchal, past: her re-invention is thus framed as a process of leaving matter behind. Sinuses drained of mucus, old clothes discarded, she now answers to the new name of “Kay.” LA's ahistoricity, its willing subjection to the tyranny of consumerism, and its ceaseless renovation and redevelopment are posited as potentially liberating in this instance, offering the opportunity for female emancipation. This is conveyed beautifully – and comically – in the novel's last pages, when Paul returns to LA to retrieve Katherine and discovers not only that she has “disappeared” and been replaced with someone he doesn't recognize, but also that the other houses on his street have vanished as well to give way to the construction of a new freeway. While the sight of the dirt mounds leads Paul to imagine the end of civilization (NC 274), “Kay” is unconcerned, merely interpreting the neighbourhood's razing as reason to find a new apartment. Likewise, while Paul assumes that by taking Katherine's furniture back east he will eventually lure his wife home, “Kay” is relieved to have gotten rid of both husband and unwanted objects. To the view of LA as an Eliot-esque heap of broken images – as exemplified by the poor and dispossessed who inhabit the dirty margins of John Fante's LA in Ask the Dust,Footnote ⁴⁴ the junked cars and cryptic W.A.S.T.E post boxes in Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49,Footnote ⁴⁵ or the members of the Chicano Moratoriaum in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People,Footnote ⁴⁶ who are depicted as embodying all that corporate LA wishes to forgetFootnote ⁴⁷ – Lurie posits the city as a regenerative, and potentially emancipatory, space.

The novel's ending, then, does not gesture so much to a shoring up of remnants than to a return to the past for Paul, and a complete disposal of the past for Katherine. And while Katherine's subscription to Hollywood ideals of beauty could be seen as limiting this emancipation, such incompleteness reflects the fledgling freedoms of women themselves in this period. Katherine's trajectory suggests that the extreme form of American capitalism embodied in late 1950s–early 1960s LA and assimilation of the beauty myth is a more liberating alternative to the “nothing” available to a faculty wife at an all-male college. Whether this is empirically true or not is a moot point. Feminist critics tend to view capitalism as particularly bad for women,Footnote ⁴⁸ while scholars such as Ann Cudd take the view that (controlled) capitalism promotes social innovation, and in particular “the destruction of harmful, patriarchal traditions”Footnote ⁴⁹ – but for our purposes, what is significant is Lurie's deployment of the latter view to complicate the anti-LA genre and to ultimately subvert the reader's assumptions about where cultural value lies. Despite focussing relentlessly on the ruins of tradition that LA has left in its wake – or, more accurately, mixed together with no thought to order or sequence – Lurie's novel posits the city itself as an important starting point for the negotiation of a new gender politics. In this context, the fragments of culture and tradition that “Kay” has left behind are not that dissimilar to the mess that Love and Friendship’s Emmy chooses to stop cleaning up, for they are as obstructive to her emancipation as an overflowing bin or sink full of dirty dishes.

IV. “CONFUSED, DISINTEGRATING IN TIME AND SPACE”: THE WAR BETWEEN THE TATES

The War between the Tates returns the reader to the world of East Coast academia and to the fictional college town of Corinth, in upstate New York – believed to be based on Ithaca, home to Cornell, where Lurie and her husband both taught for many years.Footnote ⁵⁰ The novel follows the intertwined stories of housewife Erica Tate and her husband Brian, a history professor busy writing a book on American foreign policy in the Cold War and sleeping with a postgraduate student named Wendy. The Tates’ marriage is convulsed first by Erica's discovery of the love affair and of Wendy's pregnancy, and later by Erica's own love affair, after the couple separate, with the owner of a local Zen bookstore, and Brian's unwitting involvement in defending the History Department against allegations of sexism. As in Lurie's earlier fiction, the intricacy of this plot is tongue-in-cheek, parodying the ubiquitous love triangles found in popular fiction. And as the title itself indicates, each of these narrative strands is framed in the rhetoric of warfare, serving to reflect, more broadly, on the national crisis of identity that accompanied the social upheavals of the 1960s. Set in 1969, at the peak of the US's involvement in Vietnam, The War between the Tates is, above all, a novel about dislocation – exemplified, for Brian, by his students’ questioning of academic authority, embrace of Zen, and demands for gender equality; for Erica, by the redevelopment of the landscape surrounding their home into luxury apartment blocks, her own physical ageing, and her social irrelevance as an unattached woman; and for both, by the Vietnam War and their children's seemingly overnight transformation into teenage monsters. Various (darkly comical) reflections upon the parallels between the Tates’ family tensions and Vietnam (WBTT 77–79) heighten the connection between micro and macro, individual narrative and national, rendering this story of marital crisis an allegory, as well, for American fallibility. Like the dirt in Love and Friendship, garbage in The War between the Tates reflects the sullying of the family unit via the intrusion of unwanted foreign matter (in this case, Wendy and her unborn child). But it also serves as a metaphor for geopolitical tensions and ecological anxiety. As Brian wryly recognizes, “The war in South-East Asia is escalating, and Jones Creek is polluted with detergent. At home too everything is falling apart” (WBTT 77). Waste here is at once matter out of place and matter out of time: it is a radical disruptor of patriarchal traditions, as well as material evidence of both geophysical and sociopolitical transformation.

That waste might have a feminist dimension is made explicit in a scene following Erica's discovery that the woman with whom Brian is sleeping is physically unattractive. As she walks home, Erica looks with disgust upon the litter proliferating around the college's fraternity houses:

From the perspective of discard studies, and for readers familiar with 1960s and 1970s literary depictions of waste, the passage is fascinating in the way it equates consumer effluvia not with capitalist excess or the fickleness of consumerism, but rather with male excess and patriarchy. In contrast to the descriptions of trash in the work of Lurie's male contemporaries – most notably Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959); Barthelme's Snow White (1967); DeLillo's Americana (1971), Endzone (1972), and Great Jones Street (1973); or Gaddis's J R (1975), not to mention the meticulous account of planned obsolescence in Vance Packard's The Waste Makers (1960) – Lurie's waste is not a reproach either to capitalism or to bourgeois values, but rather to the inequities and contradictions of a patriarchal tradition. Where, for example, waste in Great Jones Street is part of a reproach to a marketplace that like a “living organism … sucks things in and spews them up,”Footnote ⁵¹ and waste in Barthelme's “The Rise of Capitalism” (1970) forms a means to parody both a consumerism gone awry and a Marxist rhetoric powerless to fight it,Footnote ⁵² in Lurie's text the messy by-products of a fraternity house's partying are presented as an embodiment of male excess and depravity. Likewise, the meaning Erica confers upon this garbage is entirely bound up with her husband's flouting of rules first set in place by patriarchy (in this case, that a husband's adultery is less insulting when it is with a woman more beautiful than his wife).

This feminist potential of waste is explored further in a later scene, in which Erica mistakenly gives Brian a bag of garbage instead of a packed lunch:

Unsurprisingly, while Brian is in equal measure appalled and disturbed, Erica finds the mistake hilarious. There is great satisfaction to be had from feeding garbage to her cheating husband – to make him eat the litter she equates with his betrayal. In broader terms, however, what stands out here is how waste's evasion from the housewife's “production line” of morning tasks has resulted in the disruption of her husband's work, which it is her job to facilitate. As Strasser notes, the influence of Fordism and Taylorism extended, from the 1920s onward, to the redefinition of housework as a process of satisfying (husband and children's) needs quickly.Footnote ⁵³ In this context, the rubbish bag Erica gives Brian exemplifies the “inconveniences, obstacles, or annoyances”Footnote ⁵⁴ that the modern kitchen was intended to eliminate: it scuppers the smooth flow of productive work, and impedes the fulfilment of the two characters’ respective roles (homemaker and worker). Lurie's careful description of Erica's morning routine adds a pointed specificity to this radical act. Every Wednesday,

As a wealth of feminist critics writing in the 1950s and 1960s argued, the fact that housework is not considered “work,” and is in fact even considered a luxury, is in itself exploitative.Footnote ⁵⁵ By failing at this task, Erica effectively demonstrates her indispensability. Lurie's feminist waste disrupts and inconveniences the (male) hegemonic order, and participates in retaliating against the housewife's exploitation. The reference to Brian's “radical” graduate student lends the scene further irony: for his wife's actions unwittingly have an effect far more tangible than a seminar essay espousing leftist theory or new approaches to historiography.

Lurie's text, moreover, reveals an interesting paradox. If society expects women to clean up mess and judges them negatively when they don't, liberation might equally come from flouting one's cleaning duties entirely and dwelling in mess, or taking them to the extreme and expelling both mess and its main producer: the husband who doesn't tidy up after himself and who pollutes the marriage through infidelity. In the latter case, this results in being an ideal housewife to one's self. Where Emmy in Love and Friendship and Erica's friend Danielle opt for the former tactic, Erica opts for the latter.Footnote ⁵⁶ In keeping with the philosophy espoused in South Pacific, “I'm gonna wash that man / right out of my hair,”Footnote ⁵⁷ she spends the week following Brian's expulsion from the house euphorically erasing all traces of his previous presence: “Cleaning out his chest of drawers, she felt no nostalgia – only a faint distaste for all those identical rolled dark-brown orlon socks clustered together like horse-droppings” (WBTT 154).

By contrast, Brian's perception of the house, when he returns to pick up some items, suggests obvious anxieties about the potential disintegration of the home in his absence, as well as about his own status as an expelled entity. Brian's perception is all the more compelling in that it reflects his obsession with George Kennan's theory of containment (that the US should focus on containing Soviet expansionism rather than appease or engage in overt war with the Soviet UnionFootnote ⁵⁸). Lurie humorously depicts Brian applying Kennan's ideas, throughout the novel, to interdepartmental disputes, his marriage, and the women's rights protests on campus, but perhaps most notably in the neighbourhood dogs’ nightly invasion of the family's rubbish bins (WBTT 46). To deal with this latter issue of containment, Brian covers the bins with rocks every evening (WBTT 46, 55). However, no one takes up this task after Erica kicks him out: thus when he comes by he notes with horror the yard's “disreputable” appearance and the “offensive” garbage littering the driveway: “The dogs of Glenview Heights have been at their trash again, and no one has done anything about it” (WBTT 147). The house's interior has in turn devolved into a domestic wasteland-qua-battlefield in which “rock music soak[s] down from above,” “a box leaking crackers, a carton of milk souring, smeary jars of peanut butter and jam” litter the kitchen table, and the Tates’ daughter, Matilda, reads “childish trash” that Brian warns will “rot” her mind (WBTT 147, 151). Crucially, Brian perceives this chaos as a personal insult. Like his children, his undergraduate students, the campus feminists, and his lover Wendy's resistance to his pleas to have an abortion, this mess is an affront to his authority and evidence of failed containment. Indeed, both the mess and the disquiet it evinces in the head of the family exemplify what Alan Nadel has since described, in his seminal historical study, Containment Culture, as the “breakdown in American narratives of containment,” which he argues gave rise to American postmodernism – a failure based, in part, on “the dubious authority upon which [rules-governed authority] relied.”Footnote ⁵⁹ For Nadel, Kennan's theory of containment permeated American culture across the board, manifesting itself in McCarthyism, the enforcement of traditional gender roles, heteronormativity, and racism, all of which sought to “maintain [the] impossible boundary between Same and Other.”Footnote ⁶⁰ While Lurie is not, of course, expressing an incipient postmodernism – a term that did not come into use until over a decade later – one can certainly argue that the waste Brian surveys and that appears to have effectively taken his place embodies both the breakdown of containment culture and the anxieties it elicited in members of the dominant order.Footnote ⁶¹ The scene's humorous tone – which is starkly at odds with Erica's mournful contemplations of litter or of her children's disinterest in her – in turn lends it a gleefully radical, even anarchic, quality.

While the waste matter in The War between the Tates serves an important feminist function, disrupting male expectations on a number of levels, it also expresses anxieties that affect both genders equally: their own obsolescence in the face of time's passage and sociopolitical change. Lurie renders this explicit in Brian's sardonic realization that he is “not living in present-day America, but in another country or city-state … which can for convenience's sake be called ‘University’ populated by youth aged 18 to 22” (WBTT 29). More movingly, however, it is manifest in Erica's disconsolate sense of her own irrelevance. When she asks her daughter Matilda to clean her room, Matilda destroys all of her old toys: Erica is left to carry “what [is] beyond repair out to the trashcan” (WBTT 190). Among the few salvageable toys is an “elegant Colonial” dollhouse that “looks now as if it had been hit by a hurricane” (WBTT 190), which not-so-subtly reflects the dissolution of the family unit – as evident in Erica's reflection that the Tate house itself is a “broken home now … as if some stupid teenage giant walking over the world had picked it up and then losing interest flung it aside” (WBTT 191). That the dollhouse relic is a shattered colonial mansion is also significant. Like the vandalizing of the building site in Love and Friendship, the ceaseless razing and redevelopment of land in The Nowhere City, and Erica's discomfort at the new developments being built in her neighbourhood, the destruction of the dollhouse serves as an allegory for upheaval. And where a straightforwardly feminist reading might see its decimation as emancipating, the text in fact frames it as a source of great anxiety: a sign, for Erica, that her children no longer need her. Such sympathy is once more evinced in her expostulation, a few scenes later:

This sense of defeat differs starkly from the mobilizing efforts of the women's rights activists who seek, throughout the novel, to evince change in the campus's treatment of women, finally resorting to holding one of Brian's colleagues hostage. In direct contrast to these women, Erica assumes herself to be redundant: “There are already too many extra women in Corinth; spinsters, widows, ex-wives. One cannot have them all at once; they must take turns, and be grateful” (WBTT 204). This surplus status is made further apparent in Erica's description of herself as “used goods”: “If you know of someone who wants your old clothes, your day-old bread, it is wrong to keep them selfishly in the cupboard” (WBTT 243). Just as she used to save stale bread to feed the birds, she now waits for a male friend who is in love with her “to crowd, to grab” (WBTT 243).

This self-objectification, together with Erica's friend Danielle's eventual acceptance of marriage from a man who has raped her, counters any optimism the reader might feel in the face of Corinth's shifting politics: the rights being earned in this novel are exclusive to a younger generation of women to whom Erica and Danielle feel no real allegiance. By focussing on the losses and compromises of this middle-aged “left-over housewife and ill-paid assistant” (WBTT 266) and her friend and companion in disappointment, Lurie complicates utopian perceptions of the late 1960s as emancipating. The Tates’ eventual reconciliation at the end of the novel (like that of Emmy and Holman in Love and Friendship), and Brian's return home, heighten this. As in Lurie's previous novels, the feminist vision that the text puts forward is progressive precisely in its honest rendition of this uncomfortable interstitial stage in the history of women's liberation, its faithful representation of “things as they are” rather than “things as they should be,” and of change as perceived by those living through it – including, in this case, the members of the conservative “Happy American Homemakers,” who send love letters to Brian for “taking a stand” against feminism (WBTT 264). Building on Raymond Williams's distinction between the “dominant,” “residual,” and “emergent” strains to be found within any process of historical changeFootnote ⁶² – that is, between the hegemonic order, those elements that have “been effectively formed in the past” but continue to influence the present,Footnote ⁶³ and the “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships” that are “continually being created”Footnote ⁶⁴ – we might state that Lurie's fiction in this period explores an emergent feminism, not only in its recognition of the politics of cleaning, but also in its recognition that on a metaphorical level, waste is both a residue of the past and a component in constructing the future. The “surplus” ex-wives in The War between the Tates, like the “dirty” Emmy, are vital participants in an early stage of change.

Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City, and The War between the Tates provide an incisive account of the transformation of US gender relations over the course of the 1950s and 1960s through the decades’ effluvia. The texts discussed here approach dirt, waste and disorder from a range of perspectives that diverge in important ways from the waste narratives of Lurie's male contemporaries. In each of these texts, Lurie shows waste and dirt to be feminist issues, their codification frequently helping to justify gender (and class) inequality, but their representation helping to lay them bare.