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Title: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates ISBN: 0-375-70844-8 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 25 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.47 (53 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I Have Met the Enemy, and He is I
Comment: I am so grateful to Allen Smalling, Amazon Reviewer, whose fine review led me to buy and read this excellent story. Much has been made of its 50's, suburban setting; yet the characters are timeless. Frank & April, Shep & Molly, Mr. & Mrs. Givings are alive and not-so-well and among us today. One thing that struck me was the characters have been described as "materialistic." Compared to Americans of the 21st century, they only had the smallest notion of what true materialism is all about. They seem curiously innocent in that respect.
Richard Yates is a giant of a writer who will make his way to the short list of great authors of the 20th century. His capturing of the momentary feeling, the basic sham of the faces we present to the world cut very close to the bone. Frank Wheeler receives the worst drubbing from readers and critics, I believe because we all see ourselves in Frank, and do not like what we observe. Frank is a man capable of introspection, and his small façade as an intellectual, brilliant misfit in a dead-end job is not despicable, only mediocre, and he sees his own mediocrity. This is what makes us uncomfortable, and what is painful, we dislike. Shep is the flip side of Frank, but his face to the world is one of a regular guy, straight talking, practical and dependable; he is truly a sensitive romantic who has thrown his life away to be someone he doesn't even like very well. Somehow we forgive Shep, but not Frank. Mr. Yates does not have the same sure hand with the females; they do not come to life like the men. The use of John Givings, the mad man as the catalyst and truth-sayer is a brilliant novelistic device.
I thought of John Marquand and John Cheever who were roughly contemporaneous with Richard Yates. They had many of the same concerns, but did not have the incisiveness, humor and depth of Yates. You not only will enjoy the read, but I am sure will want to re-read and reflect upon this powerful novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: hard lessons
Comment: Reading the praise for this book actually made me less inclined to read it. Another unmasking of the banality of the suburbs and the bland conformity of the 50s didn't strike me as particularly appealing or necessary. Both of those things have been unmasked so often that I wonder why anyone bothers with either; there's nothing left to expose.
The choice of target is also a little unfair: first, hypocrisy and small-mindedness are not localized in the suburbs to the extent that authors and filmmakers seem to think. If a writer deliberately populates his story with caricatured materialistic bourgeois, then he shouldn't expect it to be a legitimate criticism of the age. In any case, if an audience can separate themselves too easily from the people being described, the book has no sting - like American Beauty had no sting. A real work of art should hurt a little.
But Revolutionary Road was not what I expected from the reviews. Yates knows all of the pitfalls of the standard send-up of the middle class: the main characters in his story are not the usual suburban types, but people who consider themselves better than the dull people in their neighborhood; they mock the people that we, as readers, are so used to mocking, and become our surrogates.
The real theme of this book is much deeper, and it transcends the era and even the plot of the book: what do people do when they are intelligent and spirited enough not to be satisfied with the conformity and blandness of their surroundings, but lack the drive to ever escape mediocrity, because they are, fundamentally, much more a part of their environment than they imagine?
The tragedy of this book is the discovery that you are, after all, perhaps not as extraordinary as you thought - and that has sting, because all of us, at some time, have thought that we were a bit better than the people around us, and most of us have realized with horror (although the realization doesn't always stick around) that we aren't as different, as far above them, as we thought. Many of the moments in this book stick with you because they remind you of those moments when you came face to face with your own mediocrity, and challenges you to either be honest with yourself about what you are, or try sincerely to fulfill the ambitions that you have pursued so halfheartedly until now.
It's a hard lesson to deal with: I can tell why this book didn't sell. The writing, by the way, is beautiful; scene after scene springs effortlessly to life, and you can't tell how much skill is involved until you go back and read it again.
I remember reading once that Yates - against the advice of his publishers - called this book Revolutionary Road because it seemed to him that the promise of the nation was petering out in the 50s, that the ambition and hope that had marked its founding had slowly led to a dead-end of uninspired and uninspiring prosperity (for some people, at least) - that the end of the revolutionary road had been reached.
This is overstated, and Yates's vision often seems to me unaccountably dark, as if he was blind to everything but his thesis. Something about his outlook is right, though; the problem with the society isn't necessarily that it's hypocritical or conformist or mediocre, but that it produces people with such a horrible gap between aspiration and capacity - it gives them the leisure and intelligence to want a fuller life while robbing them of the backbone to get it.
Rating: 5
Summary: A very modern book written in 1961
Comment: April and Frank Wheeler are around thirty and live in a suburb in Connecticut. They have a nice house, Frank has a job that is not too demanding and they have two small kids, so in essence all a couple can wish. Except, that they are not happy at all: April has not become the actress she wanted to be, they consider their neighbours and friends to be narrow-minded and they have fights over small matters that become so big that it is practically impossible to cope with it. In a last attempt to escape April decides that the family will move to Europe: she will work and Frank will finally have time to develop his talents. Frank does not exactly want to go, but he does not know how to tell his wife. And so the family heads for disaster without anybody noticing or knowing what to do about it.
This book was written in 1961, was nominated for big prizes together with such classics as Catch-22 and was forgotten after that. It is really a very modern book: the dreams and expectations of "the common" people have not changed much in all those years and the way in which Frank and April react and interact is only too recognizable. At times this book really hurts. You would like to shout to them: "Listen to each other!" "Don't fight over marginal subjects!" A good book that deserves to be rediscovered.
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Title: The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates ISBN: 0312420811 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 03 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Easter Parade : A Novel by Richard Yates ISBN: 0312278284 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 04 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey ISBN: 0312287216 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: A Good School: A Novel by Richard Yates ISBN: 0312420390 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Special Providence : A Novel by Richard Yates ISBN: 0312420404 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 03 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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