Given that outskirts of the city, which were mostly developed after swamplands were drained in the early twentieth century, suffered the lion’s share of the damage from the cataclysmic hurricane and levee failure of 2005, much of the writing of these areas is focused on loss and the power of writing to help one bear it. The first classic of the outskirts of the city is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which is focused on trauma and the struggle to recover from it, and thereby sets the stage for the great flowering of Black-themed writing from the suburbs in recent decades by Sara Broom, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Karisma Price, Rickey Laurentiis, Zachary Lazar, and Niyi Osundare, among many others. Many of these works, shaped by Katrina, voice anxiety about the natural environment, a theme first set forth for wide audiences in the graphic series, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, and other dystopian visions, from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to Moira Crane’s The Not Yet to Beyoncé’s “Formation.”

Percy’s classic novel grapples self-consciously with the complexities of its relation to a sense of place and its setting in mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Percy himself was ambivalent about New Orleans, just as the protagonist of his novel is, and chose to live on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to avoid the distractions of the city, and his deliberate dislocation vis-à-vis the famous city undergirds his deeply philosophic inquiry into the meaning of place, an inquiry tha, for the main character in the novel is tied to the posttraumatic stress disorder that followed his wounding in the Korean War.