Revolutionary Road

Just finished the Yates novel, Revolutionary Road and allowed myself to read some reviews. I've not seen the DeCaprio/Winslet film adaptation. The novel is amazing. Heart stopping. Should be taught alongside Gatsby. Below is an excerpt from an essay called "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the age of anxiety disappeared from print." (Whole essay here)

You know those stories we tell ourselves? "I live in the suburbs but I'm not like all these other people that live in the suburbs." Belief that we're too cool to believe in the dream is the new dream. This book takes an unblinking look at this new dream. And it's just as deadly as the foul dust that floated in the wake of Gatsby's dream. Here's the O'Nan excerpt:


THE QUESTION of what the reader is supposed to do with his or her sympathy and empathy is complex in Revolutionary Road, and also in the later work. As Greek tragedy turns around its characters’ fatal flaws, so does Yates’s fiction. The depth and breadth of characterization is much fuller, of course, but the end result is the same: the characters earn their downfall, seem fated to it. It’s this merciless limning of his people that makes Yates unique and the process of reading his work so affecting (some would say terrifying). We recognize the disappointments and miscalculations his characters suffer from our own less-than-heroic lives. And Yates refuses to spoon-feed us the usual redeeming, life-affirming plot twist that makes everything better. No comedy dilutes the humiliation. When it’s time to face the worst, there’s no evasion whatsoever, no softening of the blows.

The reader recoils even before these scenes begin, like horror movie viewers realizing the victim is going to open the wrong door. In fact, part of the drama–as in Dostoevsky–is anticipating just how terrible the humiliation will be, and how (or if) the characters will survive it.

Not that Yates or his people are ever hopeless. No, unfortunately the opposite is true. Throughout Revolutionary Road, his yearning for a better life is so strong that Frank Wheeler regularly deludes himself into believing that someday, through some unforeseen mechanism, he might really achieve his dreams and become this other, more accomplished person. He has such stock in this fantasy of himself (and the world) that nothing short of April’s death will rid him of his illusions.

The book is painful and sad, and in the end the reader is left with nothing of comfort. The final scene, in which a husband turns off his hearing aid so he won’t have to listen to his wife prattling on about how she knew the Wheelers were bad from the very beginning, highlights the lack of communication (let alone communion) between people and how isolated we are from each other. It’s a perfect and powerful ending, one echoed, in gesture at least, by both John Gardner in his first novel The Resurrection and Tobias Wolff in the title story of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Yates himself said in a later interview: "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy."