Don DeLillo uses the town of Blacksmith and the College-on-the-Hill to illustrate ideal American communities. By naming the school that Jack Gladney teaches at, “College-on-the-Hill”, the institution is immediately put upon a pedestal. The simple, good-natured town of Blacksmith and the college epitomize the idea of utopian suburbs.
At the beginning of the novel, Jack Gladney describes the “long shining line [of station wagons] that coursed through the west campus” (DeLillo 3). These station wagons- symbols of conventional conformity- are filled with college students returning from summer break. Gladney notes the “assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and spiritually akin, a people, a nation” (DeLillo 4). The station wagon is a stereotype of the all-American, middle-class family. In Gladney’s perspective, it is also apart of the charade that these families put on so that they can fit in.
Murray Siskind, a visiting professor at the College-on-the-Hill, is from a nearby city. His accounts of city life contrast the “small-town setting” of Blacksmith (DeLillo 10). Murray Siskind reveals to Jack Gladney that “[he] can’t help being happy in a town called Blacksmith” (DeLillo 11). He says that he “[wants] to be free of cities and sexual entanglements…[In cities] you get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings” (DeLillo 10). Not only does Blacksmith differ from big cities physically, but it differs from big cites morally. The juxtaposition of the “small-town setting” and the city, exaggerates Blacksmith’s moral purity.
The primary settings of the novel, Blacksmith and the College-on-the-Hill represent common America: the values, the people, and even the uniformity that suburbs force people to succumb to.
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