Politics & Power Quote by Katherine Dunn

A polite brush-off that’s actually a small act of literary arson. “Let’s just say” is the tell: Dunn affects casual restraint while signaling she’s about to pass judgment. It’s a hedge that heightens, not softens, the dismissal - the rhetorical equivalent of lighting a match, then pretending you were only warming your hands.

The target, “the American school of suburban angst,” reads like a genre label she refuses to grant full dignity. Not just suburban fiction, not just domestic malaise, but a whole “school”: institutional, workshop-polished, self-replicating. Dunn is poking at a strain of late-20th-century American literature that treats middle-class discomfort as profound crisis, often with tasteful misery and carefully calibrated irony. Her phrasing suggests impatience with narratives where the stakes are spiritual ennui inside comfortable architecture - a critique of proportion as much as of style.

“Not my cup of tea” completes the maneuver: the genteel idiom of personal preference used to cover a sharper cultural critique. It’s coded as civility, but it’s also a refusal to debate on the genre’s terms. She isn’t arguing about whether suburban angst is “valid”; she’s declining the entire emotional economy it trades in.

Context matters: Dunn wrote toward the grotesque, the bodily, the misfit, the carnivalesque. From that vantage, suburban angst can look like curated suffering - pain with good lighting. The line draws a boundary: her fiction wants mess, extremity, and moral weirdness, not the nicely appointed dread of the cul-de-sac.