TITLE:
“Model” and the “Empty Shell”: A Study of White Male Identity in the American Suburban Novel Model Home
AUTHORS:
Ke Lu, Dengheng Zheng
KEYWORDS:
American Suburban Fiction, White Middle-Class Men, Identity, Model Home
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.10,
October
15,
2026
ABSTRACT: This article examines the instability of white middle-class masculine identity in Eric Puchner’s Model Home through close textual analysis. Focusing on Warren Ziller’s financial decline, marital conflict, parenting failures, racialized perceptions, work, and housing, it analyzes identity at three connected levels: familial identity, community identity, and social identity. Familial identity concerns Warren’s performance of the roles of husband, father, and breadwinner; community identity concerns his perceived belonging and status within suburban social relations; and social identity concerns his relation to class aspiration, institutional power, and consumer culture. The article argues that the novel stages Warren’s inability to sustain patriarchal authority, material security, and racialized middle-class distinction. His eventual residence in an abandoned model home reveals the gap between the suburban ideal he pursues and the precarious social position he actually occupies. Rather than treating Warren as representative of all white middle-class men, this article reads his predicament as the novel’s critical representation of the contradictions within white middle-class suburban aspiration.