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Revolutionary Road
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model American couple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is now about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
355 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1961
About the author
Richard Yates
74 books1,830 followersRichard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important, new writer. Kurt Vonnegut claimed that Revolutionary Road was The Great Gatsby of his time. William Styron described it as "A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." Tennessee Williams went one further and said, "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is."
In 1962 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, his first collection of short stories. It too had praise heaped upon it. Kurt Vonnegut said it was "the best short-story collection ever written by an American."
Yates' writing skills were further utilized when, upon returning from Los Angeles, he began working as a speechwriter for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy until the assassination of JFK. From there he moved onto Iowa where, as a creative writing teacher, he would influence and inspire writers such as Andre Dubus and Dewitt Henry.
His third novel, Disturbing the Peace, was published in 1975. Perhaps his second most well-known novel, The Easter Parade, was published in 1976. The story follows the lives of the Grimes sisters and ends in typical Yatesian fashion, replicating the disappointed lives of Revolutionary Road.
However, Yates began to find himself as a writer cut adrift in a sea fast turning towards postmodernism; yet, he would stay true to realism. His heroes and influences remained the classics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and short-story master, Chekov.
It was to his school and army days that Richard turned to for his next novel, A Good School, which was quickly followed by his second collection of short stories, Liars in Love. Young Hearts Crying emerged in 1984 followed two years later with Cold Spring Harbour, which would prove to be his final completed novel.
Like the fate of his hero, Flaubert, whose novel Madame Bovary influenced Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, Richard Yates' works are enjoying a posthumous renaissance, attracting newly devoted fans across the Atlantic and beyond.
In 1962 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, his first collection of short stories. It too had praise heaped upon it. Kurt Vonnegut said it was "the best short-story collection ever written by an American."
Yates' writing skills were further utilized when, upon returning from Los Angeles, he began working as a speechwriter for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy until the assassination of JFK. From there he moved onto Iowa where, as a creative writing teacher, he would influence and inspire writers such as Andre Dubus and Dewitt Henry.
His third novel, Disturbing the Peace, was published in 1975. Perhaps his second most well-known novel, The Easter Parade, was published in 1976. The story follows the lives of the Grimes sisters and ends in typical Yatesian fashion, replicating the disappointed lives of Revolutionary Road.
However, Yates began to find himself as a writer cut adrift in a sea fast turning towards postmodernism; yet, he would stay true to realism. His heroes and influences remained the classics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and short-story master, Chekov.
It was to his school and army days that Richard turned to for his next novel, A Good School, which was quickly followed by his second collection of short stories, Liars in Love. Young Hearts Crying emerged in 1984 followed two years later with Cold Spring Harbour, which would prove to be his final completed novel.
Like the fate of his hero, Flaubert, whose novel Madame Bovary influenced Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, Richard Yates' works are enjoying a posthumous renaissance, attracting newly devoted fans across the Atlantic and beyond.
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August 8, 2018
I let out a whoop of laughter on about page 180, when I finally figured Frank Wheeler out. You see, Frank spent most of his youth a scattered, bashful schmuck. Then after WWII, as a Columbia student and Village-dweller, he started getting laid all the time, thanks to a theatrically brooding pseudo-intellectual schtick. Nevermind that Frank is essentially a glib blowhard, talented in no artistic way (he's one of those tiresome people who whine about Conformity as if America invented it, threaten expatriation, etc.), but the sexual success of his hip, disaffected persona was the only success or strength he had ever really known, so it became the core around which he wrapped his entire being and identity. That's fine, we all need illusions, and if they get you laid, even better--but the hitch is that April, his wife and the last of his conquests, and the woman with whom he now lives in the suburbs, actually half-believes him, thinks that he's a noble soul who needs the rarefied air of foreign capitals in order to flower. This is hilarious because Frank is nothing if not the standard guy, L’homme moyen sensuel: his dissatisfaction with his life, which he pretentiously blames on the conformity and boredom of 1950s America, is actually pretty well mollified once he gets a promotion at work and starts screwing a secretary; the idea of moving to Paris the better to become a 'nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre kinda guy' vanishes once he starts having more sex; he affects a snooty disdain for his job, but he's actually quite good at it, and, in heartbreaking scene toward the end, when it's all too, too late, demonstrates that he kind of likes it.
But getting back to my whoop of laughter. That laughter didn't diminish my esteem for the novel--regardless of his characters, Yates is a godlike stylist--but for a while there I felt it played more as a macabre farce than as a Tragic Laying Bare Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream. Then the tragic gravity of the characters came rushing back in chapter 7 of part 3, when the narration switches to April's point of view, and Yates starts hitting you where the last pages of 'The Great Gatsby' hit you. I ended up with more compassion for Frank, I saw that his pose of superiority rises, at least partly, out of a desperate fear of ending up like his wilted, used-up working stiff of a father. Frank and April were drifting, lonely people who initially thought that one another looked like the kind of person (the 'golden' boy, the 'really first rate girl') who could whirl their lives into effortlessness and perfection and a final salvation from lifelong feelings of dread and inadequacy...just as everyone else in the book thinks that the Wheelers LOOK LIKE that golden couple with the world at its feet, and all problems solved. Stendahl said 'beauty is the promise of happiness.' That's it, merely 'the promise.' Yates is so eloquent on how easy (and how dangerous) it is to theatricalize our lives. He knows all the little gestures and poses with which we briefly and delusionally elevate flawed creatures into romantic figures.
But getting back to my whoop of laughter. That laughter didn't diminish my esteem for the novel--regardless of his characters, Yates is a godlike stylist--but for a while there I felt it played more as a macabre farce than as a Tragic Laying Bare Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream. Then the tragic gravity of the characters came rushing back in chapter 7 of part 3, when the narration switches to April's point of view, and Yates starts hitting you where the last pages of 'The Great Gatsby' hit you. I ended up with more compassion for Frank, I saw that his pose of superiority rises, at least partly, out of a desperate fear of ending up like his wilted, used-up working stiff of a father. Frank and April were drifting, lonely people who initially thought that one another looked like the kind of person (the 'golden' boy, the 'really first rate girl') who could whirl their lives into effortlessness and perfection and a final salvation from lifelong feelings of dread and inadequacy...just as everyone else in the book thinks that the Wheelers LOOK LIKE that golden couple with the world at its feet, and all problems solved. Stendahl said 'beauty is the promise of happiness.' That's it, merely 'the promise.' Yates is so eloquent on how easy (and how dangerous) it is to theatricalize our lives. He knows all the little gestures and poses with which we briefly and delusionally elevate flawed creatures into romantic figures.
April 3, 2022
Revolutionary Road - Set in 1955, portrait of American suffocating, grinding conformity. Author Richard Yates on his novel: "I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price." Republished as part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries series, Revolutionary Road is, for my money, the Great American 1950s Novel. Richard Yates at his finest, a true classic. In the spirit of freshness, I will shift the focus from the story of main characters Frank and April Wheeler to various ways the novel depicts 1950s American society and culture:
THE ALMIGHTY AUTOMOBILE – “Once their cars seemed able to relax in an environment all their own, a long bright valley of colored plastic and plate glass and stainless steel.” Yates’ description here after those 1950s cars are off winding, bumpy, narrow streets and onto the spanking new wide highway. Back in 1955 there still existed a contrast between narrow dirt roads and car-friendly highways and freeways. Richard Yates foresaw how the automobile would quickly come to rule and how American men and women could then relax behind the wheel and feel at home on the many smooth, newly constructed car-dominated roads.
WORRYWARTS – Frank spends all his work day anticipating April in her evening dramatic premier: “A mental projection of scenes to unfold tonight but nowhere in these plans did he foresee the weight and shock of reality.” Frank is a college graduate but hasn’t learned a fundamental, critical truth: constantly projecting your life into the future is a sure-fire formula for disappointment. And all during April’s actual performance Frank incessantly bites his nails and gnaws on his fist until it’s a raw, red pulp. Such anxiety and insecurity – Frank typifies the 1950s emotionally distraught worrywart. As Richard Yates notes above, a society of such worrywarts will cling to safety and security at any price.
LOGORRHEA – “Could you please stop talking.” So asks April of Frank ridding home after her theatrical disaster. She doesn’t realize she is asking the impossible since this is America 1955 where silence has become the dreaded enemy; an entire society of know-it-alls drowning in their own chatter. Talk as a prime tool to establish how absolutely right you are. And if anyone else doesn’t see it your way or dares to disagree, God help them, they must be quickly set straight. Yak, yak, yak, jabber, jabber, jabber, fueled by those two prime 1950s pick-me-ups: chain smoking and martinis.
BABBITT LIVES – Frank and April’s suburban realtor, a two-faced, despicable, intrusive gatekeeper of the growing suburbs, Mrs. Givings, runs around doing her best to make sure new residents equate personal value with real estate value. Frank’s inability to stand up to this loutish, boorish woman speaks volumes about his insecurity and pitiful lack of character.
A WOMAN’S PLACE – Nowhere is Frank’s hypocrisy and ugly ego on display more than in his dealings with his wife, April. Frank condescendingly snickers at the middle-class mentality and lifestyle where “Daddy is always the great man and Mommy always listens to Daddy and sticks by his side” but Frank quickly boils over into a rage at those times when April doesn’t do exactly that, listen to him and sticks by his side. Turns out, April is quite capable of speaking her own mind, especially in matters of importance such as dealing with her pregnancy and the decision to have a child. This novel captures how the 1950s scream out for much needed women’s liberation.
TELEVISION RULES – Frank and April’s choice to have a TV in their new suburban house: “Why not? Don’t we really owe it to the kids? Besides, it’s silly to go on being snobbish about television.” The author's penetrating insight into 1950s mentality: educated men and women want to scoff at television, thinking their tastes much too cultivated and refined to constantly stare passively at the boob tube, but that’s exactly what they do for hours and hours. “Owe it to the kids” – sheer balderdash.
THE WORLD OF MEN AND GIRLS – Every single scene in Frank’s midtown Manhattan office is a revealer of the strict stratification in the grey flannel 50s - men doing the serious work on this side; girls performing secretarial and filing on that side. And it goes without saying every single person in the office is white. Frank’s father’s name was Earl, a serious handicap in a world of Jims, Teds, Toms, Mikes and Joes, since in workplace USA men are called by their shortened first names. Ah, to make such a big deal over names! Just goes to show how suffocating and strict the conformity. Sidebar: I always have found it amusing that as soon as the post-1950s business world discovered women will work harder than men, generally do a better job than men and work for a lot less pay then men, all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, huge shift in the American workforce.
TRUE REBELLION AND PSYCHIATRY – Serious energy is infused into Yates’ story when April and especially Frank are given a dose of what it really means to rebel against standardized, conventional society: John Givings, fresh from a mental hospital, pays a number of visits to their home. In the black-and-white 1950s world, if someone had to be dragged off to a mental hospital aka nut house, loony bin, funny farm, that person was instantly labeled totally insane or completely crazy, placed on the same level as a leper in a leper colony. And God help the poor soul who is told they should see a psychiatrist. In the 1950s, telling people they need mental help was a key method of intimidation and control, as Frank well knows when he tells April she needs to see a shrink.
THE LURE OF MONEY AND SUCCESS – Oh, Frank, how you spin 180 degrees when a company executive sits you down, gives you some honest-to-goodness appreciation and judges that you, Frank Wheeler, have what it takes to join him in a new business venture and use your ingenuity to move up in the company and make some serious money. With such a glowing prospect, following April’s plan of moving to Paris so you can sit around and “fine yourself” begins to smell like a big pile of dog you-know-what.
THE KIDS – Frank and April have two children: six-year-old Jennifer and four-year-old Michael, running back and forth in the backyard, playing with the neighborhood boys and girls but most of the time sitting in front of the TV watching cartoons. And where will Jennifer and Michael be as teenagers in 1969? At Woodstock, wearing their hair long, smoking grass, listening to Joan Baez and Richie Havens and Santana. Bye, bye 1950s. Good riddance!
American author Richard Yates, 1926-1992
December 23, 2009
For the longest time I just wanted a family, kids, a decent job, and a happy life in suburbia. That was all I wanted. That's it. It seemed so simple, predictable, and reliable. It was my ideal image.
It seems that society has done a good job of putting that thought in everyone's head. The best thing for a young man is for him to go to college, get married, get a reliable job with a steady company, have babies (2 or 3, of course), make friends with neighbors, have birthday parties for the kids, do little cocktail parties with the adults. Then he needs to tell his kids to do the same thing. And the cycle continues.
That's "just what you do."
I know that mindset isn't as prevalent now as it was when this was written in the 50s. And I haven't a doubt that the aforementioned lifestyle was/is the best life for many people. No doubt at all.
I think the problem lies in rushing into that lifestyle, before really knowing what you're getting into, without really knowing your spouse, without even knowing who you are, and what you really want, and what would really be best for you. People get trapped and don't even know they're trapped; caught inside their anger, not even knowing what they're angry at. Trapped inside the jail that is their home, forced into a miserable life of their own choosing, not knowing why or how it got that way, and even more miserable about it for that very reason.
And it's scary for me, because a few bad roles of the die and I could have ended up like Frank-fucking-Wheeler.
And it's funny. That whole lifestyle. Especially the tedious details and what often becomes our self-obsessive thoughts. You know why it's funny? Because it's both ridiculous and real. So all the laughter this novel caused me was because shit, man: it's real. It's very real that most of us are this ridiculous; it's very real that we go through the motions each day unaware, petty, and self-absorbed; it's very real that the most "normal" among us are among the most insane. It's very real that a lot of people are living the ideal lifestyle and are fucking miserable.
And no matter our life situation, we're always hoping for more. That keeps a lot of us going. And we're all pretty fucking shallow too, aren't we? Yes. People die all the time, and we get over it. Yes. We. Do. And often quickly, I might add.
The word "timeless" probably gets thrown around too much. But this novel doesn't just seem timeless. And it doesn't just seem relevant today. It seems fucking instructive. Be careful what you wish for, and pay attention to who you are, and don't suck others dry, and don't suck yourself dry, and search for truth no matter how painful.
And we continue to be self-absorbed and ridiculous. We make our decisions based on what we think will bring us the most happiness, like life is a game of chess. And it is. And it goes on.
And I still want my reliable job and my white picket fence. And a pretty wife. And babies. 2 or 3 of them.
But you see, I'm crazy.
It seems that society has done a good job of putting that thought in everyone's head. The best thing for a young man is for him to go to college, get married, get a reliable job with a steady company, have babies (2 or 3, of course), make friends with neighbors, have birthday parties for the kids, do little cocktail parties with the adults. Then he needs to tell his kids to do the same thing. And the cycle continues.
That's "just what you do."
I know that mindset isn't as prevalent now as it was when this was written in the 50s. And I haven't a doubt that the aforementioned lifestyle was/is the best life for many people. No doubt at all.
I think the problem lies in rushing into that lifestyle, before really knowing what you're getting into, without really knowing your spouse, without even knowing who you are, and what you really want, and what would really be best for you. People get trapped and don't even know they're trapped; caught inside their anger, not even knowing what they're angry at. Trapped inside the jail that is their home, forced into a miserable life of their own choosing, not knowing why or how it got that way, and even more miserable about it for that very reason.
And it's scary for me, because a few bad roles of the die and I could have ended up like Frank-fucking-Wheeler.
And it's funny. That whole lifestyle. Especially the tedious details and what often becomes our self-obsessive thoughts. You know why it's funny? Because it's both ridiculous and real. So all the laughter this novel caused me was because shit, man: it's real. It's very real that most of us are this ridiculous; it's very real that we go through the motions each day unaware, petty, and self-absorbed; it's very real that the most "normal" among us are among the most insane. It's very real that a lot of people are living the ideal lifestyle and are fucking miserable.
And no matter our life situation, we're always hoping for more. That keeps a lot of us going. And we're all pretty fucking shallow too, aren't we? Yes. People die all the time, and we get over it. Yes. We. Do. And often quickly, I might add.
The word "timeless" probably gets thrown around too much. But this novel doesn't just seem timeless. And it doesn't just seem relevant today. It seems fucking instructive. Be careful what you wish for, and pay attention to who you are, and don't suck others dry, and don't suck yourself dry, and search for truth no matter how painful.
And we continue to be self-absorbed and ridiculous. We make our decisions based on what we think will bring us the most happiness, like life is a game of chess. And it is. And it goes on.
And I still want my reliable job and my white picket fence. And a pretty wife. And babies. 2 or 3 of them.
But you see, I'm crazy.
February 11, 2021
I read this in anticipation of seeing the film. It is a grim tale. The primary characters are April and Frank. They both hold a rather lofty opinion of themselves, but fail to actually do anything with their gifts, real or imagined. They find themselves stuck in a classic suburban nightmare of disenchantment with their circumstances and resentment of each other. The affection they do feel for each other comes and goes, mostly goes, as they wallow in their narcissism. She imagines a wondrous life for them in Paris. He comes to realize that maybe he is, really, ordinary, and not the extraordinary person he has convinced himself and many around him that he is.
Richard Yates - 1926 - 1992 - image from The New Criterion
There are themes here about character being revealed in how we cope with stress, with self awareness. Ultimately April opts out, unable to cope. Frank attempts to adjust to his opportunities in the world when it becomes clear to him that his loftier, esoteric leanings were a form of self-delusion.
All the characters here are pained. Perhaps the most overtly pained person is the institutionalized, violent son of a real estate agent. His role here is as truth teller.
This book was written in the early 60’s about the 50’s. It has surprising relevance today, particularly if one sees it as a character study. The mores of those times have hopefully passed. Abortion, while still frowned upon, is not illegal or as deadly as it was then. The characters here are also skewed a bit, with more detail being given to Frank, for example, than to April. We see inside his head quite a bit more and understand him better. It does not make us like him any better.
I found many of April’s outbursts inexplicable, blaming herself, outwardly at least, for this and that. I could not see how she would reach such conclusion. Yes, I know people do this, have even swum those waters myself. But, while I may be missing something here. I found it a bit tough to swallow.
Revolutionary Road is definitely an interesting piece of work, with a keen eye for self-delusion, and a larger-picture scan of an era. Good stuff if you do not mind being a bit bummed out. It may encourage you to give a thought to how you might be kidding yourself. And that makes it a worthwhile read.
Richard Yates - 1926 - 1992 - image from The New Criterion
There are themes here about character being revealed in how we cope with stress, with self awareness. Ultimately April opts out, unable to cope. Frank attempts to adjust to his opportunities in the world when it becomes clear to him that his loftier, esoteric leanings were a form of self-delusion.
All the characters here are pained. Perhaps the most overtly pained person is the institutionalized, violent son of a real estate agent. His role here is as truth teller.
This book was written in the early 60’s about the 50’s. It has surprising relevance today, particularly if one sees it as a character study. The mores of those times have hopefully passed. Abortion, while still frowned upon, is not illegal or as deadly as it was then. The characters here are also skewed a bit, with more detail being given to Frank, for example, than to April. We see inside his head quite a bit more and understand him better. It does not make us like him any better.
I found many of April’s outbursts inexplicable, blaming herself, outwardly at least, for this and that. I could not see how she would reach such conclusion. Yes, I know people do this, have even swum those waters myself. But, while I may be missing something here. I found it a bit tough to swallow.
Revolutionary Road is definitely an interesting piece of work, with a keen eye for self-delusion, and a larger-picture scan of an era. Good stuff if you do not mind being a bit bummed out. It may encourage you to give a thought to how you might be kidding yourself. And that makes it a worthwhile read.
April 18, 2020
Imagine my surprise when I came across Stephen King's "Best Books of 2009" List (one not condescending enough to include solely those published this year), & saw that 2nd place belonged to Revolutionary Road. Glad I am not alone in feeling a strong deep sad empathy for this book. The story is EXTREMELY well told. The story, about young "revolutionaries" who end up doing exactly the opposite of what they've set out to do, is quite simple but very epoch-rich. It has different P.O.V.s, which deviates from the outstanding film, & the ending is more shattering & bitter than the one presented on the silver screen.
Academy-Award winning director Sam Mendes made a wise decision in giving April Wheeler a brighter limelight to contend with Frank's, the husband & sole protagonist of the novel. In the film, there is a constant wrestling match which is underlined by the fact that THESE ARE JACK AND ROSE from Titanic and we must instantly feel for them. Mendes is a genius, too, in the casting of his (ex)wife Kate Winslet, who is arguably the best actress of our generation. So while Mendes has the ability to play sly film director, almost-auteur, Richard Yates has much more to contend with. His meditation on the cost of real freedom is basically flawless. He plays with dialogue in the same awesome way that a dedicated playwright like Edward Albee did. He describes in simple ways just how awful the everyday can truly be for a bright, dedicated yet frail American in the 1950's. Makes a stark contrast with today's impediments on a marriage! After so many years it seems that sometimes people make jails for themselves with as little ease as they dream big dreams...
Academy-Award winning director Sam Mendes made a wise decision in giving April Wheeler a brighter limelight to contend with Frank's, the husband & sole protagonist of the novel. In the film, there is a constant wrestling match which is underlined by the fact that THESE ARE JACK AND ROSE from Titanic and we must instantly feel for them. Mendes is a genius, too, in the casting of his (ex)wife Kate Winslet, who is arguably the best actress of our generation. So while Mendes has the ability to play sly film director, almost-auteur, Richard Yates has much more to contend with. His meditation on the cost of real freedom is basically flawless. He plays with dialogue in the same awesome way that a dedicated playwright like Edward Albee did. He describes in simple ways just how awful the everyday can truly be for a bright, dedicated yet frail American in the 1950's. Makes a stark contrast with today's impediments on a marriage! After so many years it seems that sometimes people make jails for themselves with as little ease as they dream big dreams...
June 8, 2020
4.5 stars
“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”
Richard Yates takes a well-honed surgeon’s blade, painstakingly dissects a marriage, examines its tortuous viscera, and leaves it fully exposed for all to observe. The reader becomes a surgical assistant of sorts, a witness to the searing scrutiny of all that has been laid bare. As increasingly squeamish as I became, I was still held captive by the spectacle. The more I realized what Yates had accomplished, the more weak in the knees I became, the more impressed by his genius.
The attractive and promising young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, and their two children are the perfect image of a suburban family. You can almost see them standing there in front of the proper white house with the big picture window and the neatly manicured lawn. The illusion is burst, however, right from the start. We know it’s going to disintegrate when Yates draws an analogy by use of an amateur play that turns into a flop. April, once an aspiring actress, is at the center of the stage and Frank the adoring husband in the audience. The play begins on a high note and quickly goes downhill from there. By the end of the evening, both cast and audience depart with an air of humiliation.
“… time and again they read the promise of failure in each other’s eyes, in the apologetic nods and smiles of their parting and the spastic haste with which they broke for their cars and drove home to whatever older, less explicit promises of failure might lie in wait for them there.”
As things spiral downward and Frank and April’s marriage takes a turn for the worst, April steps in with a grand plan to move to Paris and begin a new life there. They know they don’t belong in the suburbs, Frank doesn’t deserve a tedious job at the company where his own father once worked, and April has her own lofty ambitions. They are a couple marked for success. Or are they? The marriage suddenly seems to be on the right path once again. They are hopeful for the transformative dream they plan to realize by the end of summer.
"Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman."
Yates not only gets inside his characters and reveals their most private ruminations (many of them quite arrogant, self-serving, and callous), he also writes some of the most convincing dialogue between couples and among friends and acquaintances that I have ever read. No doubt he was either an active participant or a keen observer of more than one marital altercation that had escalated to a feverish pitch! There’s really not a single likeable character in the entire novel. I think this was done with purpose. Richard Yates wanted to expose not just his central characters, but also the superficiality of the entire lot.
If there is one person with whom one could align, it would have to be the son of the Wheeler’s real estate agent. John Givings has been institutionalized following a breakdown, much to the embarrassment of Mrs. Givings who has her own image to uphold as real estate agent for this perfect suburban neighborhood. When her grand plan to introduce him to the Wheelers as a form of ‘therapy’ is put in motion, we realize that John is the mouthpiece for all that has gone wrong in this grand illusion of Revolutionary Road. He says what everyone wants to say, but won’t as a matter of propriety. He, more than anyone else, points out what has gone wrong with the American dream. With no filter whatsoever, John blurts out one brazen opinion after another. But even these truisms have a ring of sarcasm to them. We may not like this young man either, but he sure as hell offers a refreshing honesty that no one else seems to have.
“… maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.”
Revolutionary Road was written in 1961 and portrays the life of a 1950s young suburbanite couple, but it could really take place at any time. The fantasy and dissolution of the American dream is astutely sketched. Yates explores the illusion of marriage as a way out of a less than ideal childhood, as a way to achieve your independence and aspirations, and as an institution to be upheld no matter what the consequences. He places these fictions under the microscope and then dismantles them. This is a book that will make you uncomfortable; I squirmed throughout. However, I believe this is Yates’s intent, and he fully succeeded in achieving his goal. I couldn’t help comparing this book to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which I finished just a day before starting this one. Both are scathing portraits of marriages gone wrong, but Updike left me a bit of hope for Rabbit, that aggravating bastard! Frank Wheeler can take a hike and never come back for all I care.
“It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now on, whatever else his life might hold, there would be no more apologies.”
“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”
Richard Yates takes a well-honed surgeon’s blade, painstakingly dissects a marriage, examines its tortuous viscera, and leaves it fully exposed for all to observe. The reader becomes a surgical assistant of sorts, a witness to the searing scrutiny of all that has been laid bare. As increasingly squeamish as I became, I was still held captive by the spectacle. The more I realized what Yates had accomplished, the more weak in the knees I became, the more impressed by his genius.
The attractive and promising young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, and their two children are the perfect image of a suburban family. You can almost see them standing there in front of the proper white house with the big picture window and the neatly manicured lawn. The illusion is burst, however, right from the start. We know it’s going to disintegrate when Yates draws an analogy by use of an amateur play that turns into a flop. April, once an aspiring actress, is at the center of the stage and Frank the adoring husband in the audience. The play begins on a high note and quickly goes downhill from there. By the end of the evening, both cast and audience depart with an air of humiliation.
“… time and again they read the promise of failure in each other’s eyes, in the apologetic nods and smiles of their parting and the spastic haste with which they broke for their cars and drove home to whatever older, less explicit promises of failure might lie in wait for them there.”
As things spiral downward and Frank and April’s marriage takes a turn for the worst, April steps in with a grand plan to move to Paris and begin a new life there. They know they don’t belong in the suburbs, Frank doesn’t deserve a tedious job at the company where his own father once worked, and April has her own lofty ambitions. They are a couple marked for success. Or are they? The marriage suddenly seems to be on the right path once again. They are hopeful for the transformative dream they plan to realize by the end of summer.
"Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman."
Yates not only gets inside his characters and reveals their most private ruminations (many of them quite arrogant, self-serving, and callous), he also writes some of the most convincing dialogue between couples and among friends and acquaintances that I have ever read. No doubt he was either an active participant or a keen observer of more than one marital altercation that had escalated to a feverish pitch! There’s really not a single likeable character in the entire novel. I think this was done with purpose. Richard Yates wanted to expose not just his central characters, but also the superficiality of the entire lot.
If there is one person with whom one could align, it would have to be the son of the Wheeler’s real estate agent. John Givings has been institutionalized following a breakdown, much to the embarrassment of Mrs. Givings who has her own image to uphold as real estate agent for this perfect suburban neighborhood. When her grand plan to introduce him to the Wheelers as a form of ‘therapy’ is put in motion, we realize that John is the mouthpiece for all that has gone wrong in this grand illusion of Revolutionary Road. He says what everyone wants to say, but won’t as a matter of propriety. He, more than anyone else, points out what has gone wrong with the American dream. With no filter whatsoever, John blurts out one brazen opinion after another. But even these truisms have a ring of sarcasm to them. We may not like this young man either, but he sure as hell offers a refreshing honesty that no one else seems to have.
“… maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can.”
Revolutionary Road was written in 1961 and portrays the life of a 1950s young suburbanite couple, but it could really take place at any time. The fantasy and dissolution of the American dream is astutely sketched. Yates explores the illusion of marriage as a way out of a less than ideal childhood, as a way to achieve your independence and aspirations, and as an institution to be upheld no matter what the consequences. He places these fictions under the microscope and then dismantles them. This is a book that will make you uncomfortable; I squirmed throughout. However, I believe this is Yates’s intent, and he fully succeeded in achieving his goal. I couldn’t help comparing this book to John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, which I finished just a day before starting this one. Both are scathing portraits of marriages gone wrong, but Updike left me a bit of hope for Rabbit, that aggravating bastard! Frank Wheeler can take a hike and never come back for all I care.
“It depressed him to consider how much energy he had wasted, over the years, in the self-denying posture of apology. From now on, whatever else his life might hold, there would be no more apologies.”
March 17, 2022
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Revolutionary road, Richard Yates. New York: Bantam Books, 1962. 247 Pages.
Revolutionary Road (released December 31, 1961) is author Richard Yates's debut novel. Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. Seeking to break out of their suburban rut (and consequently blaming herself for all of Frank's "problems"), April convinces Frank they should move to Paris, where she will work and support him while he realizes his vague ambition to be something other than an office worker.
The promise of France brings the two together in love and excitement again, and Frank seemingly ends his relationship with Maureen. While April sees the emigration as an opportunity to escape their dull environment, Frank's plans are more driven by vanity of his own intelligence, which April panders to. When the dull and prim neighbor Mrs. Givings begins bringing her "insane" son John around to the Wheelers' house for regular lunches, John's honest and erratic condemnation of his mother's suburban lifestyle strikes a chord with the Wheelers, particularly Frank.
Their plans to leave the United States begin to crumble when April conceives their third child, and Frank begins to identify with his mundane job when the prospect of a promotion arises. After arguing over the possibility of aborting the child, Frank tries to manipulate April into seeking psychiatric help for her troubled childhood.
April, overwhelmed by the outcome of the situation, suffers something of an identity crisis and sleeps with her neighbor Shep Campbell, while Frank resurrects his relationship with Maureen. April attempts to self-abort her child, and in doing so is rushed to the hospital and dies from blood loss.
Frank, scarred by the ordeal and feeling deep guilt over the outcome, is left a hollow shell of a man. He and his children spent time living with their uncle, hence mirroring the youth of their mother.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه می سال2014میلادی
عنوان: جاده رولوشنری - فیلمنامه؛ فرزاد حسنی؛ تهران، افراز، سال1391، در248ص؛ شابک9789642438969؛ موضوع فیلمنامه های نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م
عنوان فیلم: جاده انقلابی؛ کارگردان: سام مندس؛ تهیه کننده: بابی کوهن؛ سام مندس؛ اسکات رودین؛ نویسنده: جاستین هیث؛ بر پایه همین رمان از: ریچارد ییتس؛ بازیگران: لئوناردو دیکاپریو؛ کیت وینسلت؛ کیتی بیتس؛ مایکل شنون؛ موسیقی: توماس نیومن؛ فیلمبرداری: راجر دیکینس؛ تدوین: طارق انور؛ توزیعکننده: پارامونت ونتیج؛ تاریخهای انتشار: روز بیست و ششم ماه دسامبر سال2001میلادی؛ مدت زمان فیلم: در119دقیقه؛ محصول: کشورهای آمریکا و بریتانیا؛ زبان: انگلیسی؛
کتاب و فیلم هر دو روایتگر زندگی یک زوج خوشبخت (فرانک و آپریل ویلر) است، که در دهه پنجاه سده ی بیستم میلادی در «ایالت کانکتیکات (جاده رولوشنری)» زندگی میکنند؛ این زوج به تدریج احساس میکنند که در زندگی زناشویی گرفتار شده اند، و شادمانی مورد نظرشان را نیافته اند و ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 25/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Revolutionary road, Richard Yates. New York: Bantam Books, 1962. 247 Pages.
Revolutionary Road (released December 31, 1961) is author Richard Yates's debut novel. Set in 1955, the novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. Seeking to break out of their suburban rut (and consequently blaming herself for all of Frank's "problems"), April convinces Frank they should move to Paris, where she will work and support him while he realizes his vague ambition to be something other than an office worker.
The promise of France brings the two together in love and excitement again, and Frank seemingly ends his relationship with Maureen. While April sees the emigration as an opportunity to escape their dull environment, Frank's plans are more driven by vanity of his own intelligence, which April panders to. When the dull and prim neighbor Mrs. Givings begins bringing her "insane" son John around to the Wheelers' house for regular lunches, John's honest and erratic condemnation of his mother's suburban lifestyle strikes a chord with the Wheelers, particularly Frank.
Their plans to leave the United States begin to crumble when April conceives their third child, and Frank begins to identify with his mundane job when the prospect of a promotion arises. After arguing over the possibility of aborting the child, Frank tries to manipulate April into seeking psychiatric help for her troubled childhood.
April, overwhelmed by the outcome of the situation, suffers something of an identity crisis and sleeps with her neighbor Shep Campbell, while Frank resurrects his relationship with Maureen. April attempts to self-abort her child, and in doing so is rushed to the hospital and dies from blood loss.
Frank, scarred by the ordeal and feeling deep guilt over the outcome, is left a hollow shell of a man. He and his children spent time living with their uncle, hence mirroring the youth of their mother.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سی و یکم ماه می سال2014میلادی
عنوان: جاده رولوشنری - فیلمنامه؛ فرزاد حسنی؛ تهران، افراز، سال1391، در248ص؛ شابک9789642438969؛ موضوع فیلمنامه های نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م
عنوان فیلم: جاده انقلابی؛ کارگردان: سام مندس؛ تهیه کننده: بابی کوهن؛ سام مندس؛ اسکات رودین؛ نویسنده: جاستین هیث؛ بر پایه همین رمان از: ریچارد ییتس؛ بازیگران: لئوناردو دیکاپریو؛ کیت وینسلت؛ کیتی بیتس؛ مایکل شنون؛ موسیقی: توماس نیومن؛ فیلمبرداری: راجر دیکینس؛ تدوین: طارق انور؛ توزیعکننده: پارامونت ونتیج؛ تاریخهای انتشار: روز بیست و ششم ماه دسامبر سال2001میلادی؛ مدت زمان فیلم: در119دقیقه؛ محصول: کشورهای آمریکا و بریتانیا؛ زبان: انگلیسی؛
کتاب و فیلم هر دو روایتگر زندگی یک زوج خوشبخت (فرانک و آپریل ویلر) است، که در دهه پنجاه سده ی بیستم میلادی در «ایالت کانکتیکات (جاده رولوشنری)» زندگی میکنند؛ این زوج به تدریج احساس میکنند که در زندگی زناشویی گرفتار شده اند، و شادمانی مورد نظرشان را نیافته اند و ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 05/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 25/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
January 5, 2019
Really Tough Love
Yates has a reputation as a chronicler of the smug years of post-WWII America. Perhaps. But as an artist, he is much more than a period sociologist. Yates’s understanding of the folie a deux which we call marriage is profound. The reasons two people find each other attractive are buried in experiences of which neither is conscious much less rationally able to think about.
To call such attraction love is euphemistic. It may be, at best, an attempt to redeem or complete oneself that might eventually develop into love but only if the underlying reasons are resolved sufficiently and replaced. Subsequent decisions to bring children into such an indeterminate situation are likely based on equally fatuous thinking. It seems amazing therefore that the survival rates of marriage are as high as they are and that more of us are not functionally psychotic.
Yates raises the perennial if not eternal question of the nature and implications of commitment. I recall the distinction made when I was in the services between making a contribution and making a commitment: in one’s breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken has made a contribution; the pig is decisively committed. Does this anecdote express the reality or essential ethics of commitment? Are the reasons for making commitments, misguided or not, relevant to a continuation of a commitment? Do changed circumstances, including improved awareness of motives, abrogate the demands of previous commitments? Can 'Til death us do part' be anything more than irrational optimism and encouragement?
Personal sovereignty is analogous to national sovereignty. The implication would seem to be that treaties, contracts, agreements are never unconditional, never intended as eternal. There may be consequences of non-compliance with any of these, but acceptance of consequences is part of sovereignty - the share out of community property, loss of mutual friends, increased psychological and social tensions; and of course the fate of the next generation. The calculus of contract-termination may be complex but doesn't seem to imply any absolute moral constraints. On the other hand, can what we believe to be considered judgment be anything more than hapless struggle?
The alternative to withdrawal of commitment is what seems to fascinate Yates. We try to ‘work things out.’ In order to deny, or at least delay, the possibility of broken commitment, we tell each other stories. Stories about the past and how we arrived at the present could prove therapeutic by uncovering unconscious reasons and reasoning. But we tell stories about the future instead, about alternatives lives - in exotic locations, doing interesting work, with stimulating friends and colleagues. The stories promote hope but little else.
We hope these ‘ideals’ can compensate for any originating defects. But it’s likely that Yates is correct: these ideals simply reinforce the power of the neuroses already in play. A new script perhaps but the same denouement. There is no way to anticipate the psychological baggage we take on with our partner. The piper will be paid. Pain is inevitable. The issue is who pays and when. Unambiguously happy endings are not within the range of the possible.
Yates has a reputation as a chronicler of the smug years of post-WWII America. Perhaps. But as an artist, he is much more than a period sociologist. Yates’s understanding of the folie a deux which we call marriage is profound. The reasons two people find each other attractive are buried in experiences of which neither is conscious much less rationally able to think about.
To call such attraction love is euphemistic. It may be, at best, an attempt to redeem or complete oneself that might eventually develop into love but only if the underlying reasons are resolved sufficiently and replaced. Subsequent decisions to bring children into such an indeterminate situation are likely based on equally fatuous thinking. It seems amazing therefore that the survival rates of marriage are as high as they are and that more of us are not functionally psychotic.
Yates raises the perennial if not eternal question of the nature and implications of commitment. I recall the distinction made when I was in the services between making a contribution and making a commitment: in one’s breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken has made a contribution; the pig is decisively committed. Does this anecdote express the reality or essential ethics of commitment? Are the reasons for making commitments, misguided or not, relevant to a continuation of a commitment? Do changed circumstances, including improved awareness of motives, abrogate the demands of previous commitments? Can 'Til death us do part' be anything more than irrational optimism and encouragement?
Personal sovereignty is analogous to national sovereignty. The implication would seem to be that treaties, contracts, agreements are never unconditional, never intended as eternal. There may be consequences of non-compliance with any of these, but acceptance of consequences is part of sovereignty - the share out of community property, loss of mutual friends, increased psychological and social tensions; and of course the fate of the next generation. The calculus of contract-termination may be complex but doesn't seem to imply any absolute moral constraints. On the other hand, can what we believe to be considered judgment be anything more than hapless struggle?
The alternative to withdrawal of commitment is what seems to fascinate Yates. We try to ‘work things out.’ In order to deny, or at least delay, the possibility of broken commitment, we tell each other stories. Stories about the past and how we arrived at the present could prove therapeutic by uncovering unconscious reasons and reasoning. But we tell stories about the future instead, about alternatives lives - in exotic locations, doing interesting work, with stimulating friends and colleagues. The stories promote hope but little else.
We hope these ‘ideals’ can compensate for any originating defects. But it’s likely that Yates is correct: these ideals simply reinforce the power of the neuroses already in play. A new script perhaps but the same denouement. There is no way to anticipate the psychological baggage we take on with our partner. The piper will be paid. Pain is inevitable. The issue is who pays and when. Unambiguously happy endings are not within the range of the possible.
September 5, 2022
Once in a while, it happens, that you suddenly look around and feel completely bewildered, like you're looking at everything for the first time, and all you can do is ask yourself, "how in hell did I get here?"
It's what happens sometimes to people who have lived a while, carried along by the tide of life, who put faith in certain constructs and coloured nicely within the lines, only to wake up and realize they had been kidding themselves.
This book is all about the self delusion of Frank and April Wheeler, owners of a lovely white house with a picture window on Revolutionary Road. They feel superior, they think they're above the 1950s conformity and the sellout of the American Dream. But... they're not.
It seems no one is, except for John, the young man who occasionally leaves the asylum on a day pass. He sees things pretty clearly and doesn't censor himself, much to the horror of his aging parents.
Richard Yates' view of marriage and 1950s American life is incredibly bleak. He makes John Updike and Raymond Carver look positively hopeful, and in fact, they are. Those guys keep reaching out for connection, however imperfect, while Yates, on the other hand, identifies and captures the solitary experience unlike any other writer I've encountered. The simple act of a husband turning off his hearing aid as his wife, unaware, expresses her deepest pain, exemplifies how Yates sees us: alone.
It sounds depressing - and it is. But the artistry here exhilarated me. The absolute perfection of scenes: a roadside fight between husband and wife that results in a fist on metal, a wounded mistress whose breasts look like sad faces, a father trying to keep it together while small children pester him with the desire to "help" with an arduous task. It's nothing short of truth, a masterpiece.
Yates shows, with unflinching commitment, what happens when people look straight on at something, and how devastating that can be. It's terrifying to watch what we have built crumble around us. But I have to believe (and this is where I allow a crack of light to penetrate Yates' darkness) there can be something new and true built in its place.
It's what happens sometimes to people who have lived a while, carried along by the tide of life, who put faith in certain constructs and coloured nicely within the lines, only to wake up and realize they had been kidding themselves.
This book is all about the self delusion of Frank and April Wheeler, owners of a lovely white house with a picture window on Revolutionary Road. They feel superior, they think they're above the 1950s conformity and the sellout of the American Dream. But... they're not.
It seems no one is, except for John, the young man who occasionally leaves the asylum on a day pass. He sees things pretty clearly and doesn't censor himself, much to the horror of his aging parents.
Richard Yates' view of marriage and 1950s American life is incredibly bleak. He makes John Updike and Raymond Carver look positively hopeful, and in fact, they are. Those guys keep reaching out for connection, however imperfect, while Yates, on the other hand, identifies and captures the solitary experience unlike any other writer I've encountered. The simple act of a husband turning off his hearing aid as his wife, unaware, expresses her deepest pain, exemplifies how Yates sees us: alone.
It sounds depressing - and it is. But the artistry here exhilarated me. The absolute perfection of scenes: a roadside fight between husband and wife that results in a fist on metal, a wounded mistress whose breasts look like sad faces, a father trying to keep it together while small children pester him with the desire to "help" with an arduous task. It's nothing short of truth, a masterpiece.
Yates shows, with unflinching commitment, what happens when people look straight on at something, and how devastating that can be. It's terrifying to watch what we have built crumble around us. But I have to believe (and this is where I allow a crack of light to penetrate Yates' darkness) there can be something new and true built in its place.
May 14, 2019
watching this movie last night made me want to read the book immediately after. and it's not a terrible movie, it's just a little... hammy, and the tone is uneven - whether these people are meant to be seen as victims of the stultifying, euthanizing effects of suburbia, or if they are at root unlikable people who deserve to be taken down a peg for their arrogance and their conviction that their involvement in this thing we call "suburbia" is just playacting, not to be taken seriously. the book doesn't waver, not to me. i always read it as a story of awful people poisoning each other and blaming their wasted lives on each other instead of taking responsibility for their own shortcomings, which, being a generally unsympathetic person, i can applaud. and his writing - absolutely wonderful.
the real character in this novel of course, is suburbia. soul-sucking, dream-gutting suburbia that neutralizes all its inhabitants and blandifies the pointy, interesting bits. this isn't the lynchian or music for torching view of the suburbs/small-town charm, where the beneficence of suburbia is compromised by its seedy undertones. suburbia, here, is the aggressor, slowly draining its characters of any charms and releasing them back into their after-dinner drinks and their morning commute to the office. and woe if you think you are somehow special or "above it all", particularly if, like the wheelers, your aspirations outweigh your capabilities and your "specialness" is only ego. i grew up in a version of suburbia, and while it wasn't in the same time period, and it wasn't as bad as all this, the writing struck a chord in me and it's good that i am away. suburbia is a bitch, but at least they'll always have paris...
oh, wait.
come to my blog!
the real character in this novel of course, is suburbia. soul-sucking, dream-gutting suburbia that neutralizes all its inhabitants and blandifies the pointy, interesting bits. this isn't the lynchian or music for torching view of the suburbs/small-town charm, where the beneficence of suburbia is compromised by its seedy undertones. suburbia, here, is the aggressor, slowly draining its characters of any charms and releasing them back into their after-dinner drinks and their morning commute to the office. and woe if you think you are somehow special or "above it all", particularly if, like the wheelers, your aspirations outweigh your capabilities and your "specialness" is only ego. i grew up in a version of suburbia, and while it wasn't in the same time period, and it wasn't as bad as all this, the writing struck a chord in me and it's good that i am away. suburbia is a bitch, but at least they'll always have paris...
oh, wait.
come to my blog!
August 6, 2022
INGANNI DELL’ANIMA
Nonostante tra Frank e sua moglie April il protagonista sembri lui – Yates gli dedica più spazio e più tempo, tiene più spesso acceso il riflettore su di lui, lo mette un passo avanti – nonostante questo, è facile capire che il cuore di chi scrive batte per April, che lei è il vero motore della storia.
E anche Yates, come il suo grande maestro, avrebbe potuto, e probabilmente anche voluto, dire “April sono io”. O meglio, visto che Parigi è così rilevante in queste pagine – racchiude l’essenza dei sogni, la libertà, un mondo di infinite possibilità, leggerezza e intelligenza, classe e cultura – Yates avrebbe optato per la lingua del suo maestro ed enunciato: “April Wheeler c’est moi”.
E certo non è solo che Yates, perenne cantore di vite insoddisfatte, si genufletteva davanti a quel titano di Gustave Flaubert: è proprio che April è una novella Emma Bovary, trasportata cento anni dopo dall’Europa alla costa est degli Stati Uniti.
E siccome il mio cuore ha sempre battuto per Emma, il mio cuore batte anche per April.
E il mio cuore sta imparando a battere per Yates come non avrei mai immaginato. Sarà che i suoi numi tutelari letterari sono due scrittori che io ho oltremodo cari, Flaubert e Fitzgerald. Sarà che sto scoprendo, o riscoprendo, una precisione di scrittura rara e preziosa.
Se ci si aspetta la storia di un amore che si sgretola, di un matrimonio che va verso il collasso, di un’unione progressivamente più incerta, di una coppia che scoppia, si rimane satolli, tutto questo – e molto altro - c’è, non manca. Ma si rimane anche sorpresi perché invece è latitante la parte costruens, visto che sin dal principio è in corso quella destruens: l’amore è già sulla rampa d’uscita, la storia tra Frank e April è già molto avanti nella sua dissoluzione, entrambi si aggrappano e cercano invenzioni per salvare la situazione. Ma è facile capire che non ce la fanno, né ce la faranno: lei tira molto la corda nel primo weekend – lui quasi per ripicca, o perché si sente solo e trascurato cerca rifugio, consolazione e rivincita tra le braccia di un’altra – senza sapere nulla delle divagazioni del marito, anche April si concede la classica sveltina, nel parcheggio del dancing appoggiata alla macchina di lui mezza ubriaca.
Il velleitarismo dei loro tentativi – prima ancora di arrivare al progetto di trasferimento a Parigi – è palese nella scelta di April di riprendere vecchi studi di recitazione e di proporsi protagonista di un allestimento teatrale che per quanto serio e ragionato rimane amatoriale e dilettantistico. Frank partecipa con tutto il suo sostegno, non solo morale, ma anche pratico e concreto.
Intanto, gli Stati Uniti diventano man mano la terra del consumo e del consumismo, mentre il senatore McCarthy, nel tentativo di ripulire il paese da comunisti, simpatizzanti e rossi in genere, lo sta spingendo sempre più verso l’oscurantismo e il conformismo (leggi: bigottismo e bacchettoneria elevati a sistema di vita). La storia è ambientata nell’anno 1955 (il romanzo fu pubblicato nel 1961). Ma a prescindere dalle famigerata blacklist, Yates certo non nasconde che la strada della rivoluzione – quella iniziata (solo promessa?) nel 1776 – finisce a Revolutionary Road. La rivoluzione si è affossata in una villetta bianca di un suburbio residenziale che costringe i suoi abitanti a un pendolarismo esasperato (certo, anche settanta anni fa i mezzi di trasporto pubblici in quella parte di mondo funzionavano molto meglio dei nostrani settanta anni dopo), il tramonto di un’epoca, l’ultima fermata del sogno americano, il capolinea dell’illusione: se si salta la fermata, si è condannati alla normalità. La strada per l'inferno è lastricata di comode periferie residenziali.
Frank e April vorrebbero sottrarsi anche a questa cappa nazionale, oltre che mettere a segno una storia d’amore luminosa e vincente fuori dalle convenzioni.
Si sono notati a vicenda a una festa all’epoca del college: scocca subito una scintilla che loro credono sia la freccia di Cupido. Ma dubito si siano mai davvero amati: si sono colpiti, c’è stata una forma di riconoscimento. Ma non l’amore. Forse perché troppo presi ciascuno da se stesso. Forse perché troppo presi a recitare, lui ogni giorno nella vita, lei su palcoscenici amatoriali e dilettanteschi. Lo scambio di battute che segna il loro futuro recita come segue: lei gli chiede che vuole fare nella vita, lui si sottrae con un paio di risposte ironiche – allora lei lo incalza, non voglio sapere come ti guadagni da vivere, ma quali sono i tuoi veri interessi.
Tesoro, se avessi la risposta a questa domanda, scommetto che moriremmo entrambi di noia nel giro di mezz’ora.
E dopo aver riletto questa meraviglia, mi sono concesso di rivedere il film: splendido. Un superbo lavoro di trasposizione. O, adattamento. Dove non si perde nulla di questo quattrocento pagine, ma certo, scelte sono state eseguite per selezionare e condensare. Eppure, la sensazione che vince è che, nonostante le due ore scarse –risultato inimmaginabile di questi tempi: scommetto che se ci si riprovasse, si andrebbe per la miniserie o almeno un film di tre ore – non manca nulla. Cast prestigioso: tutti azzeccati, tutti bravi. Anche se, lui si mangia lei. Illuminante la partecipazione di quel fantastico attore che è Michael Shannon, e di quell’eccellente attrice a nome Kathy Bates.
Nonostante tra Frank e sua moglie April il protagonista sembri lui – Yates gli dedica più spazio e più tempo, tiene più spesso acceso il riflettore su di lui, lo mette un passo avanti – nonostante questo, è facile capire che il cuore di chi scrive batte per April, che lei è il vero motore della storia.
E anche Yates, come il suo grande maestro, avrebbe potuto, e probabilmente anche voluto, dire “April sono io”. O meglio, visto che Parigi è così rilevante in queste pagine – racchiude l’essenza dei sogni, la libertà, un mondo di infinite possibilità, leggerezza e intelligenza, classe e cultura – Yates avrebbe optato per la lingua del suo maestro ed enunciato: “April Wheeler c’est moi”.
E certo non è solo che Yates, perenne cantore di vite insoddisfatte, si genufletteva davanti a quel titano di Gustave Flaubert: è proprio che April è una novella Emma Bovary, trasportata cento anni dopo dall’Europa alla costa est degli Stati Uniti.
E siccome il mio cuore ha sempre battuto per Emma, il mio cuore batte anche per April.
E il mio cuore sta imparando a battere per Yates come non avrei mai immaginato. Sarà che i suoi numi tutelari letterari sono due scrittori che io ho oltremodo cari, Flaubert e Fitzgerald. Sarà che sto scoprendo, o riscoprendo, una precisione di scrittura rara e preziosa.
Se ci si aspetta la storia di un amore che si sgretola, di un matrimonio che va verso il collasso, di un’unione progressivamente più incerta, di una coppia che scoppia, si rimane satolli, tutto questo – e molto altro - c’è, non manca. Ma si rimane anche sorpresi perché invece è latitante la parte costruens, visto che sin dal principio è in corso quella destruens: l’amore è già sulla rampa d’uscita, la storia tra Frank e April è già molto avanti nella sua dissoluzione, entrambi si aggrappano e cercano invenzioni per salvare la situazione. Ma è facile capire che non ce la fanno, né ce la faranno: lei tira molto la corda nel primo weekend – lui quasi per ripicca, o perché si sente solo e trascurato cerca rifugio, consolazione e rivincita tra le braccia di un’altra – senza sapere nulla delle divagazioni del marito, anche April si concede la classica sveltina, nel parcheggio del dancing appoggiata alla macchina di lui mezza ubriaca.
Il velleitarismo dei loro tentativi – prima ancora di arrivare al progetto di trasferimento a Parigi – è palese nella scelta di April di riprendere vecchi studi di recitazione e di proporsi protagonista di un allestimento teatrale che per quanto serio e ragionato rimane amatoriale e dilettantistico. Frank partecipa con tutto il suo sostegno, non solo morale, ma anche pratico e concreto.
Intanto, gli Stati Uniti diventano man mano la terra del consumo e del consumismo, mentre il senatore McCarthy, nel tentativo di ripulire il paese da comunisti, simpatizzanti e rossi in genere, lo sta spingendo sempre più verso l’oscurantismo e il conformismo (leggi: bigottismo e bacchettoneria elevati a sistema di vita). La storia è ambientata nell’anno 1955 (il romanzo fu pubblicato nel 1961). Ma a prescindere dalle famigerata blacklist, Yates certo non nasconde che la strada della rivoluzione – quella iniziata (solo promessa?) nel 1776 – finisce a Revolutionary Road. La rivoluzione si è affossata in una villetta bianca di un suburbio residenziale che costringe i suoi abitanti a un pendolarismo esasperato (certo, anche settanta anni fa i mezzi di trasporto pubblici in quella parte di mondo funzionavano molto meglio dei nostrani settanta anni dopo), il tramonto di un’epoca, l’ultima fermata del sogno americano, il capolinea dell’illusione: se si salta la fermata, si è condannati alla normalità. La strada per l'inferno è lastricata di comode periferie residenziali.
Frank e April vorrebbero sottrarsi anche a questa cappa nazionale, oltre che mettere a segno una storia d’amore luminosa e vincente fuori dalle convenzioni.
Si sono notati a vicenda a una festa all’epoca del college: scocca subito una scintilla che loro credono sia la freccia di Cupido. Ma dubito si siano mai davvero amati: si sono colpiti, c’è stata una forma di riconoscimento. Ma non l’amore. Forse perché troppo presi ciascuno da se stesso. Forse perché troppo presi a recitare, lui ogni giorno nella vita, lei su palcoscenici amatoriali e dilettanteschi. Lo scambio di battute che segna il loro futuro recita come segue: lei gli chiede che vuole fare nella vita, lui si sottrae con un paio di risposte ironiche – allora lei lo incalza, non voglio sapere come ti guadagni da vivere, ma quali sono i tuoi veri interessi.
Tesoro, se avessi la risposta a questa domanda, scommetto che moriremmo entrambi di noia nel giro di mezz’ora.
E dopo aver riletto questa meraviglia, mi sono concesso di rivedere il film: splendido. Un superbo lavoro di trasposizione. O, adattamento. Dove non si perde nulla di questo quattrocento pagine, ma certo, scelte sono state eseguite per selezionare e condensare. Eppure, la sensazione che vince è che, nonostante le due ore scarse –risultato inimmaginabile di questi tempi: scommetto che se ci si riprovasse, si andrebbe per la miniserie o almeno un film di tre ore – non manca nulla. Cast prestigioso: tutti azzeccati, tutti bravi. Anche se, lui si mangia lei. Illuminante la partecipazione di quel fantastico attore che è Michael Shannon, e di quell’eccellente attrice a nome Kathy Bates.
September 18, 2017
On my fling-o-meter scale, Revolutionary Road is a well-traveled book, having been flung (why does this past participle sound so ungainly?) across the room several times. The initial trip occurred when Richard Yates gratuitously threw in this bit of over-writing in the first chapter:
At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays—always it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white , the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shriveled snow” (4)
It was the “hummocks of the earth” lying “naked and tender” among the “curds of shriveled snow” that made me yell fuck, and send the book airborne. During these outbursts, my golden retriever always gets up and heads toward a corner in the room, nose to the wall, like one of those doomed characters in the Blair Witch Project.
The book fails on many levels.
Characterization - It takes some doing to make Franzen's characters in the Corrections look warm and fuzzy by comparison. In RR, the protagonist, Frank Wheeler, offers no redeeming qualities. Our inability to identify with Frank or give a rat's ass what happens to him prevents the book from achieving its touted status as an American tragedy. It's a tragedy all right, but one of bad writing and poorly-executed characters, rather than pathos. Frank Wheeler may be the most self-absorbed, premeditated character ever created. This man could not pick his nose without first deciding what angle might best favor the nose picking and if it could be done in an off-hand, manly sort of way.
Throughout, these brittle, self-absorbed, snotty, angst-ridden (for no particular reason) characters drink and smoke copious amounts. Their aimless path, similar to the circular journey of characters in The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby is about the only aspect Yates has in common with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to whom he is equated, by David Hare, one of the gushing, drunken critics quoted on the book's back cover. However, I cared about Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Jake Barnes, and possibly even Brett Ashley. Yates' characters do not arouse my sympathy. Frank's obsessive fascination with his own psyche, April's confused and curiously unexplained actions, Shep's doglike devotion, and Milly's blankness work against what is, ostensibly, a character-driven novel.
Theme - As far as I could tell the only "characteristically American theme"--a carefully vague phrase used by another critic quoted on the book's back cover--exemplified is something like when "manhood was in flower." Frank and April's planned relocation to Paris is proposed by April, who in a crescendo of wifely devotion and guilt, declares herself a selfish bitch who's never given Frank the time he's needed to find himself and bring his genius to fruition. Their intended escape from suburbia brings Frank and April closer, ramping up their love life and uniting them with a sense of superiority as they gleefully break the “news” to their less enlightened friends.
The book’s lack of any sort of moral compass contributes to its failure. The manhood in flower theme is embarrassing, rather than noble. Consider the following, which the reader should somehow take seriously (!?). Here Frank picks through the women in his life, dissects their physical attributes, and declares them lacking—none of them worthy enough to lift him to manly triumph:
But as college wore on he began to be haunted by numberless small depressions….It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he’d known so far had given him the sense of unalloyed triumph. One had been very pretty except for unpardonably thick ankles, and one had been intelligent, though possessed of an annoying attempt to mother him, but he had to admit that none had been first-rate. Nor was he ever in doubt of what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he’d never come close enough to one to touch her hand. There had been two or three of them in the various high schools he’d attended, disdainfully unaware of him in their concern with college boys from out of town; what few he’d seen in the army had most often been seen in flickering miniature, on strains of dance music, through the distant golden windows of an officers’ club…” (23, emphasis mine).
But enough. The book took another trip across the room, and I felt like Dorothy Parker when she wrote, “at this point Tonstant Weader twowed up.”
Like Shakespeare’s fools, who often penetrate the layers of deceit and spout words of wisdom, John Givings, the crazy son of Helen Givings, theoretically serves to offer up moments of Truth. Helen Givings and her husband have put their son in a mental health facility, and Helen thinks it would be “good” for their son, John, to talk to other young people. Thus, the ill-fated Sunday visits at the Wheeler’s home. But John’s truths are less than dependable. At one point, John channels Ayn Rand. After first mocking April, John is impressed by her frank response and provides this Randean pronouncement:
[John:] stared at her for a long time, and nodded with approval. “I like your girl, Wheeler,” he announced at last. “I get the feeling she’s female. You know what the difference between female and feminine is? Huh? [No. But sadly we find out.:] Well, here’s a hint: a feminine woman never laughs out loud and always shave her armpits. Old Helen in there is feminine as hell. I’ve only met about a half dozen females in my life, and I think you got one of them here. Course, come to think of it, that figures. I get the feeling you’re male. There are aren’t too many males around, either” (201).
I picked up the just-airborne book and finished this sucker, but there isn’t much more to write. The book is a muddled, mawkish, maudlin tribute to some time and place I’d like to think never existed.
In sum, just picture a more existential martini-laden white collar version of the theme song to Archie Bunker:
Boy, the way Glen Miller played.
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!
Didn't need no welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!
And you knew where you were then!
Girls were girls and men were men.
September 5, 2008
What a wise book. Many rate it as depressing, and yes, it tells a very tragic story. But at the same time, it's also a tremendously funny book. It's just that its humor stings because it's based in the most human of weaknesses: Self-rationalization.
Frank and April Wheeler are the prototypical post-WWII suburban couple -- happy on the outside, endlessly frustrated on the inside. But author Richard Yates isn't interested in just dissecting the suburbs. Frank and April are painfully aware of their shallow surroundings, but they've always tried to convince themselves that they're better than this life.
Their frustration -- mainfested in arguments that are painfully realistic and bitter -- comes from a sense that they should be doing more, that they should accomplish something with themselves. But, as the failed local theater production that opens the story points out, they're also haunted by the fact that perhaps not only were they not meant to be great, but they were never on the road to greatness in the first place.
Scene after scene crackles with familiarity. There's the conversation with another couple that leads to awkward silence until the neighbors' troubles provide a desperately-needed topic of discussion. There's the description of how Frank came to get his job, a dead-on commentary on college graduates looking for financial stablity with little output. And there's April's heartbreaking lament about the validation she hoped to find for herself in the real world, and what she's found instead.
It's not that the Wheelers are unjustified in their decisions -- their backstories flesh out Frank's need not to be his blue-collar father, and April's desperate desire for a loving family. But their attitudes toward facing the world are hopelessly compromised by their insecurity. Neither is truly happy with themself, and April's harebrained idea about moving to Paris is just an excuse to avoid the real issue: It's not the suburbs that's draining the life from their marriage, it's them. In the end, April realizes they were never really in love with each other, just the idealized images they created for each other.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD has enjoyed a cult reputation for decades, but has often had a hard time gaining widespread acceptance. I think the reason for this is because it's filled with truth -- the kind that makes people nod in recognition and wince in embarassment. It achieves one of the highest goals of fiction: It makes you question yourself and the world you live in. It's not without hope -- even after the climactic tragedy, life goes on. It's just up to you to try and understand the book's lessons, and figure out if there's anything you've learned.
Frank and April Wheeler are the prototypical post-WWII suburban couple -- happy on the outside, endlessly frustrated on the inside. But author Richard Yates isn't interested in just dissecting the suburbs. Frank and April are painfully aware of their shallow surroundings, but they've always tried to convince themselves that they're better than this life.
Their frustration -- mainfested in arguments that are painfully realistic and bitter -- comes from a sense that they should be doing more, that they should accomplish something with themselves. But, as the failed local theater production that opens the story points out, they're also haunted by the fact that perhaps not only were they not meant to be great, but they were never on the road to greatness in the first place.
Scene after scene crackles with familiarity. There's the conversation with another couple that leads to awkward silence until the neighbors' troubles provide a desperately-needed topic of discussion. There's the description of how Frank came to get his job, a dead-on commentary on college graduates looking for financial stablity with little output. And there's April's heartbreaking lament about the validation she hoped to find for herself in the real world, and what she's found instead.
It's not that the Wheelers are unjustified in their decisions -- their backstories flesh out Frank's need not to be his blue-collar father, and April's desperate desire for a loving family. But their attitudes toward facing the world are hopelessly compromised by their insecurity. Neither is truly happy with themself, and April's harebrained idea about moving to Paris is just an excuse to avoid the real issue: It's not the suburbs that's draining the life from their marriage, it's them. In the end, April realizes they were never really in love with each other, just the idealized images they created for each other.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD has enjoyed a cult reputation for decades, but has often had a hard time gaining widespread acceptance. I think the reason for this is because it's filled with truth -- the kind that makes people nod in recognition and wince in embarassment. It achieves one of the highest goals of fiction: It makes you question yourself and the world you live in. It's not without hope -- even after the climactic tragedy, life goes on. It's just up to you to try and understand the book's lessons, and figure out if there's anything you've learned.
January 13, 2022
I don't usually feel sorry for wealthy white people with a pretty suburban house and two sweet kids... but I have to hand it to Yates-- he made living in that domestic situation on Revolutionary Road seem like a suffocating nightmare.
Two miserable selfish people making each other more miserable. Strangely compelling.
Two miserable selfish people making each other more miserable. Strangely compelling.
September 21, 2020
I love e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g about this book.
Start with the cover—the big red family car, the white suburban houses in the background, the silhouette of a tree and a tumble of fallen, autumnal leaves scattering the ground. Doesn’t it put you in the mood of the hopeful fifties in New England, in America? That is the setting of the book. We look at a couple of suburban families, three to be more exact. What happens over the course of almost a year? That is it; that‘s the story. Two are young families with young kids. The third is past middle-age with an adult offspring, certified as insane. He, the “insane”, is about the same age as the kids’ parents.
I love what the book says about conformity.
I love the dialogs. They are utterly perfect, so absolutely real. The prose captures to a T how couples interact--how we behave and the things we say to one another.
The book looks at life in New England communities in the fifties, but it speaks to us still today. I could site example after example of how it so well mirrors conjugal relationships—then and now. One must suffice. Isn’t it often the female of a couple that cares less about what others, those observing a verbal dispute, might think? Who says, “Lower your voice?!” The husband or the wife? Which of the two desires to keep disputes private?
The story illustrates the reality of the American Dream. We start on the surface; everything looks hunky dory, but what lies underneath? Cracks begin to show. Kids picnicking, playing on the lawn, frolicking under a sprinkler. A radio announcement advertises men’s clothing at rock-bottom prices. Parties, cocktails in hand and spouses eyeing a neighbor’s wife or husband. Clothing, the feel of the weather, the tension and atmosphere in the air, facial expressions and body poses are all minutely and expertly drawn. Emotions resonate—vibrating anger and cold detachment, attraction and sexual appeal. It is this that makes the book work so well for me. Life is drawn with a blend of the serious, the absurd and the ridiculous. Pathos and humor are intermixed.
Mental stability is a central theme. Is it only the insane who, lacking inhibition, dare to speak out against the emptiness of everyday lives--of going to a job you hate, of never daring to step out of line to honestly speak your mind? Why do we abdicate control of our lives to others? Why are people generally so scared of being different? Why are we so complacent, satisfied by so little?
Life is a mix of the serious and the funny and both are drawn here. The ups and downs of marriage—disagreements and arguments, loss of tempers, biting retorts, lashing out of bitter words and regrets and reconciliation. too. Then, with sore points visible, the book circles back and looks at why problems have arisen. What in the past has shaped the characters? People get married scarcely knowing who they are themselves, and then, when married, are expected to figure out how to deal with another, someone they know even less. These are the themes the book looks at, and I think it does this extremely well.
The audiobook is magnificently narrated by Mark Bramhall. Every single character sounds exactly as they should. He brings out what the author wants said, yet he never over-dramatizes. The young and the old, the male and the female, all the different character types are perfectly drawn. Five stars I have given the narration. It perfectly captures the nuances in the author’s prose.
I want to champion the book’s message, and I find it to be extremely well executed.
Start with the cover—the big red family car, the white suburban houses in the background, the silhouette of a tree and a tumble of fallen, autumnal leaves scattering the ground. Doesn’t it put you in the mood of the hopeful fifties in New England, in America? That is the setting of the book. We look at a couple of suburban families, three to be more exact. What happens over the course of almost a year? That is it; that‘s the story. Two are young families with young kids. The third is past middle-age with an adult offspring, certified as insane. He, the “insane”, is about the same age as the kids’ parents.
I love what the book says about conformity.
I love the dialogs. They are utterly perfect, so absolutely real. The prose captures to a T how couples interact--how we behave and the things we say to one another.
The book looks at life in New England communities in the fifties, but it speaks to us still today. I could site example after example of how it so well mirrors conjugal relationships—then and now. One must suffice. Isn’t it often the female of a couple that cares less about what others, those observing a verbal dispute, might think? Who says, “Lower your voice?!” The husband or the wife? Which of the two desires to keep disputes private?
The story illustrates the reality of the American Dream. We start on the surface; everything looks hunky dory, but what lies underneath? Cracks begin to show. Kids picnicking, playing on the lawn, frolicking under a sprinkler. A radio announcement advertises men’s clothing at rock-bottom prices. Parties, cocktails in hand and spouses eyeing a neighbor’s wife or husband. Clothing, the feel of the weather, the tension and atmosphere in the air, facial expressions and body poses are all minutely and expertly drawn. Emotions resonate—vibrating anger and cold detachment, attraction and sexual appeal. It is this that makes the book work so well for me. Life is drawn with a blend of the serious, the absurd and the ridiculous. Pathos and humor are intermixed.
Mental stability is a central theme. Is it only the insane who, lacking inhibition, dare to speak out against the emptiness of everyday lives--of going to a job you hate, of never daring to step out of line to honestly speak your mind? Why do we abdicate control of our lives to others? Why are people generally so scared of being different? Why are we so complacent, satisfied by so little?
Life is a mix of the serious and the funny and both are drawn here. The ups and downs of marriage—disagreements and arguments, loss of tempers, biting retorts, lashing out of bitter words and regrets and reconciliation. too. Then, with sore points visible, the book circles back and looks at why problems have arisen. What in the past has shaped the characters? People get married scarcely knowing who they are themselves, and then, when married, are expected to figure out how to deal with another, someone they know even less. These are the themes the book looks at, and I think it does this extremely well.
The audiobook is magnificently narrated by Mark Bramhall. Every single character sounds exactly as they should. He brings out what the author wants said, yet he never over-dramatizes. The young and the old, the male and the female, all the different character types are perfectly drawn. Five stars I have given the narration. It perfectly captures the nuances in the author’s prose.
I want to champion the book’s message, and I find it to be extremely well executed.
October 10, 2017
Yates is adept at picking apart the well-intentioned duplicity within couples, which both causes and prevents further hurt, misunderstanding and deception, and the chasm between thoughts/dreams and actions.
The competitive dynamics of suburbia are similarly exposed. Keeping up appearances is important, which is why, at the start of the novel, April is so upset at the debacle of the am dram.
Plot
This is the painfully insightful story of a youngish couple, with two small children, living in New England in the 1950s. Both have lingering hurt and dysfunction from their childhoods, which exacerbates the slow and painful disintegration of their relationship. April has the idea of a fresh start in Paris, where she will support Frank till he works out what he wants to do with his life. This exciting possibility and shared aim changes the dynamic of their lives.
Caution (but only a slight one)
Don't read this if you're in a long term relationship that is in difficulties, especially if you are stuck in a dull job as well: it may be too pertinent. That caveat aside, it's not a depressing book: as with all his books (which all have strong autobiographical elements) there is cold beauty in the pain of struggles with work, relationships, drink, and money.
Original Clichés
There are a few potential literary clichés used well and originally, so that each gives insight in a fresh way: .
Passages about Frank's work, and especially his cavalier approach to sorting his In Tray (pages 85 and 124) made a great metaphor for his approach to life, laden with overtones of Kafka - a tough target, hit with panache - much like the whole book.
Yates Revival
I read this just before the film came out because I wanted to see the film. Good call. I loved the book and enjoyed the film.
Apparently the resurgence of Yates' popularity predates that and was prompted by this excellent article about him and his works:
The Lost World of Richard Yates, by Stewart O’Nan, in The Boston Review, here.
The competitive dynamics of suburbia are similarly exposed. Keeping up appearances is important, which is why, at the start of the novel, April is so upset at the debacle of the am dram.
Plot
This is the painfully insightful story of a youngish couple, with two small children, living in New England in the 1950s. Both have lingering hurt and dysfunction from their childhoods, which exacerbates the slow and painful disintegration of their relationship. April has the idea of a fresh start in Paris, where she will support Frank till he works out what he wants to do with his life. This exciting possibility and shared aim changes the dynamic of their lives.
Caution (but only a slight one)
Don't read this if you're in a long term relationship that is in difficulties, especially if you are stuck in a dull job as well: it may be too pertinent. That caveat aside, it's not a depressing book: as with all his books (which all have strong autobiographical elements) there is cold beauty in the pain of struggles with work, relationships, drink, and money.
Original Clichés
There are a few potential literary clichés used well and originally, so that each gives insight in a fresh way: .
Passages about Frank's work, and especially his cavalier approach to sorting his In Tray (pages 85 and 124) made a great metaphor for his approach to life, laden with overtones of Kafka - a tough target, hit with panache - much like the whole book.
Yates Revival
I read this just before the film came out because I wanted to see the film. Good call. I loved the book and enjoyed the film.
Apparently the resurgence of Yates' popularity predates that and was prompted by this excellent article about him and his works:
The Lost World of Richard Yates, by Stewart O’Nan, in The Boston Review, here.
April 26, 2018
Rightfully a classic and will forever be one of my favorites. Damn, that's good writing!
The Navi Review | Twitter | Bookstagram
The Navi Review | Twitter | Bookstagram
September 21, 2017
One of my favourite novels, and easily one the greatest ever written, Richard Yates goes right for the necessary to work out who one really is. Summer, 1955, Frank and April Wheeler are living what to many would believe is the suburban American dream, wholesome friendly neighbours, and for Frank an undemanding job in Manhattan, all appears grand. But it isn't. The Wheelers might be young, beautiful and feel full of promise to the outside world, but they harbour little affection for each other.
Both Husband and wife are bored, with each other, with their lives.
April has a plan, to escape this emptiness, one that will enable Frank to quit his job and realise his potential while she works, of course those familiar with Yates's work will know that happy and fulfilling lives are not around the corner. As Richard Yates's masterly debut novel unfolds, we see self-deception deepen, and a marriage going to the dogs.
Revolutionary Road is a work of serious moral intent, and not to be taken lightly, not that that's even possible, though there are extremely amusing moments, they don't really equate to much.
It's gripping without resorting to melodrama (melodrama is one of my pet hates in books), the story is entirely at one with the characters' dilemmas. Yates, who died in 1992 had so much in common with the people he wrote about, that's why he is so darn good as a storyteller to the flipside of the American dream. This is one of the best novels ever written about the difficulty in living life accordingly. And the narrative is simply stunning.
Both Husband and wife are bored, with each other, with their lives.
April has a plan, to escape this emptiness, one that will enable Frank to quit his job and realise his potential while she works, of course those familiar with Yates's work will know that happy and fulfilling lives are not around the corner. As Richard Yates's masterly debut novel unfolds, we see self-deception deepen, and a marriage going to the dogs.
Revolutionary Road is a work of serious moral intent, and not to be taken lightly, not that that's even possible, though there are extremely amusing moments, they don't really equate to much.
It's gripping without resorting to melodrama (melodrama is one of my pet hates in books), the story is entirely at one with the characters' dilemmas. Yates, who died in 1992 had so much in common with the people he wrote about, that's why he is so darn good as a storyteller to the flipside of the American dream. This is one of the best novels ever written about the difficulty in living life accordingly. And the narrative is simply stunning.
May 22, 2017
This is definitely an "it's not you, it's me" book. The writing was lovely. I thought he captured the setting, tone, etc. extremely well. And I can imagine for its time, this book was pretty groundbreaking, and I can see why it's had a resurgence of popularity in the last decade or so. But honestly the storyline and theme of disillusionment in America, for me, is overdone. I've read a lot of books and plays (and this one definitely felt like something akin to an Albee or Miller play) that touch on this topic. But I can't fault the book just for doing something others have done. I've read a lot of books that are thematically similar but they all stand out for different reasons. My main issue with this book is that it didn't have any characters I could root for; not ones I could love or hate. They just sort of existed. We spent so much time in Frank's head, and I would've really rather spent more with April. She was a far more interesting character to me. When the author did jump around into other characters' minds, I was intrigued. But then we'd return to boring, old Frank who was basically a bitter middle class man that felt lost in life and trapped by his circumstances. Ho hum. That's sort of how I feel about this. I'd give Yates another chance because, like I said, great writing. But this one didn't do much for me.
May 4, 2017
“That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion—because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion—this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It's the great sentimental lie of the suburbs...”
This incisive, crushing portrait of a crumbling marriage stirred up a lot of emotions in me - heartbreak for the characters' plights, awe at the brilliance of the writing. But most of all it made me feel happy (and relieved!) to be single.
On the surface, the Wheelers are a perfect suburban family and the embodiment of the American Dream. Frank commutes from their beautiful home to a well-paid job in New York city while April looks after their two adorable children. But instead of being content, they feel trapped. They see themselves as better than their ordinary neighbours and the dull Connecticut surroundings. April devises a plan which will see the family move to Europe, so that Frank, a deep thinker, can find himself and they can leave this unfulfilling life behind. But fate and their own weaknesses conspire against them, and this dream soon turns into a horrible nightmare.
They are not a particularly likable duo, the Wheelers. Frank has an insufferably high opinion of himself and enjoys grandstanding with his latest philosophical musings. April meanwhile, is spoilt and self-important. And the thing is they don't even like each other - blazing rows are the norm and both of them are unfaithful over the course of the story. And yet Yates does a outstanding job of making us care for this complicated couple. He taps into those universal feelings of being misunderstood and underappreciated, as April tearfully admits:
There is an unsettling atmosphere from page one of the story when April's play turns out to be a disaster, and Frank's ham-fisted attempts to comfort her kick off a huge argument. We just know this will not end well for the Wheelers and our fears are confirmed when tragedy eventually strikes. Their harrowing predicament serves as a cautionary tale for anyone involved in a loveless, caustic relationship. It is a bleak and haunting book, full of rich insight and rightly hailed as a modern classic.
This incisive, crushing portrait of a crumbling marriage stirred up a lot of emotions in me - heartbreak for the characters' plights, awe at the brilliance of the writing. But most of all it made me feel happy (and relieved!) to be single.
On the surface, the Wheelers are a perfect suburban family and the embodiment of the American Dream. Frank commutes from their beautiful home to a well-paid job in New York city while April looks after their two adorable children. But instead of being content, they feel trapped. They see themselves as better than their ordinary neighbours and the dull Connecticut surroundings. April devises a plan which will see the family move to Europe, so that Frank, a deep thinker, can find himself and they can leave this unfulfilling life behind. But fate and their own weaknesses conspire against them, and this dream soon turns into a horrible nightmare.
They are not a particularly likable duo, the Wheelers. Frank has an insufferably high opinion of himself and enjoys grandstanding with his latest philosophical musings. April meanwhile, is spoilt and self-important. And the thing is they don't even like each other - blazing rows are the norm and both of them are unfaithful over the course of the story. And yet Yates does a outstanding job of making us care for this complicated couple. He taps into those universal feelings of being misunderstood and underappreciated, as April tearfully admits:
"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I’d suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they’d know it too. I’d be like the ugly duckling among the swans."
There is an unsettling atmosphere from page one of the story when April's play turns out to be a disaster, and Frank's ham-fisted attempts to comfort her kick off a huge argument. We just know this will not end well for the Wheelers and our fears are confirmed when tragedy eventually strikes. Their harrowing predicament serves as a cautionary tale for anyone involved in a loveless, caustic relationship. It is a bleak and haunting book, full of rich insight and rightly hailed as a modern classic.
February 2, 2018
Quando sei gentile
“È come se tutti si fossero tacitamente accordati per vivere in uno stato di perenne illusione. Al diavolo la realtà! Dateci un bel po’ di stradine serpeggianti e di casette dipinte di bianco, rosa e celeste; fateci essere tutti buoni consumatori, fateci avere un bel senso di Appartenenza e allevare i figli in un bagno di sentimentalismo ― papà è un grand’uomo perché guadagna quanto basta per campare, mamma è una gran donna perché è rimasta accanto a papà per tutti questi anni ― e se mai la buona vecchia realtà dovesse venire a galla e farci bu!, ci daremo un gran da fare per fingere che non sia accaduto affatto”.
Richard Yates ha rivelato che nello scrivere Revolutionary Road ha cominciato dalla fine: la prima scena che ha scritto è stata quella decisiva e conclusiva. Forse per questo fin dalla prima pagina si ha la sensazione di qualcosa di imminente e inevitabile: come se la vita dei personaggi seguisse un copione già scritto, in qualche modo già accaduto: un futuro che attrae il suo passato. Yates decide di non raccontare una storia in libertà ma di muoversi in una condizione obbligata, costretta, condizionata. Quindi condivide con i suoi personaggi uno stato di prigionia e di vincolo, crea in una forma prestabilita alla quale deve adeguare la narrazione e l'avventura del lettore. Ma loro sono belli e spiritosi e calmi e gentili. Sono cigni, o si illudono di esserlo. E questo basta. L'autore newyorchese, sempre schietto e composto, ha voluto sottolineare il debito letterario e morale di questa vicenda con il Gatsby di Scott Fitzgerald e con la flaubertiana Emma Bovary, offrendo così uno sguardo approfondito e atipico rispetto ad una naturale e malinconica e disillusa adesione alla tradizione del realismo. Appartenenza della quale il testo è oggi da più parti considerato un simbolo, un capolavoro emblematico e un testimone inimitabile, come dalla considerazione che ne ebbero Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver e Richard Ford. La storia che Yates sceglie di raccontare suscita un disagio disarmante, un'immedesimazione dolorosa e una disperazione rabbiosa e ribelle, entra nella coscienza con le sue repressioni e negazioni e il risentimento, la svuota di ogni falsità e ipocrisia, ne rivela la materia fragile, irrazionale e inspiegabile. April Wheeler, protagonista del romanzo, è una donna di essenza amabile, misteriosa e orgogliosa e ambisce a vivere con pienezza e naturalezza, ma qualcosa dentro di lei la spinge inesorabile verso la follia, la paura, la violenza. Frank non si sente mai a casa, pensa di essere nato per errore, mente e tradisce: la capacità di misurare e suddividere il tempo ci offre una quasi inesauribile fonte di consolazione. Si tratta di una storia di famiglia, comune, semplice, quasi esemplare. Di cosa altro si può scrivere del resto, pensava Yates. Nella America degli anni cinquanta sembrava un dovere sociale essere felici e prosperare secondo il sogno condiviso di una nazione vittoriosa e giusta. Ma i Wheeler osano aspirare a qualcosa di diverso e meno mediocre, progettano una vita fantasiosa in Europa, a Parigi, vogliono evadere dalla monotonia della classe media e per questo forse, come in una tragedia shakespeariana, incontrano un destino maledetto e crudele, una silenziosa e perentoria catastrofe. Di fronte alle divinità del contemporaneo (culto del denaro, disimpegno, evasione), si permettono di essere irresponsabili e immaturi e di disprezzare l'ordinario: ineluttabile colpa, irreversibile condanna. Perdono così ogni credito agli occhi dell'altro, vengono smascherati, si scoprono incapaci di fare del bene reciprocamente. Appaiono così infelici e compromessi da non poter che assistere passivamente al crollo, al collasso di ogni cosa. Ecco la dura verità di fronte alla quale ci mette Yates: non c'è spazio per nessuna scelta, tanto meno per una rinascita o una salvezza, non sappiamo chi siamo, non conosciamo le nostre stesse emozioni. Il complesso residenziale di Revolutionary Hill non era stato progettato in funzione di una tragedia. Anche di notte, come di proposito, le sue costruzioni non presentavano ombre confuse né sagome spettrali. Era invincibilmente allegro [...]. Un uomo intento a percorrere di corsa queste strade, oppresso da un disperato dolore, era fuori posto in modo addirittura indecente”. Ma quello che Yates vuole dirci in un senso umanitario e con spirito etico è che ci sono così tante cose da ammirare e amare che siamo tutti tenuti a vivere la vita come se quello che facciamo avesse enorme importanza, al di là di tutto e sotto ogni aspetto. Non si smette di cercare la grazia in un altrove: la follia è l'incapacità di amare. Nella visione desolante delle cose, sia simbolica che letterale, ci deve essere sempre una possibilità da aprire per essere perdonato o avere il potere di perdonare.
“Il disperato vuoto. Cielo, c'è un sacco di gente che la parte del vuoto l'ha capita; laggiù dove lavoravo, sulla costa occidentale, non parlavamo d'altro. Ce ne stavamo seduti a chiacchierare del vuoto per tutta la notte. Ma nessuno ha mai detto disperato, era lì che ci mancava il coraggio. Perché ci vuole una certa dose di coraggio per rendersi conto del vuoto, ma ne occorre un bel po' di più per scorgere la disperazione. E secondo me, una volta che si scorge la disperazione, non resta altro da fare che tagliare la corda. Se si può, beninteso”.
“È come se tutti si fossero tacitamente accordati per vivere in uno stato di perenne illusione. Al diavolo la realtà! Dateci un bel po’ di stradine serpeggianti e di casette dipinte di bianco, rosa e celeste; fateci essere tutti buoni consumatori, fateci avere un bel senso di Appartenenza e allevare i figli in un bagno di sentimentalismo ― papà è un grand’uomo perché guadagna quanto basta per campare, mamma è una gran donna perché è rimasta accanto a papà per tutti questi anni ― e se mai la buona vecchia realtà dovesse venire a galla e farci bu!, ci daremo un gran da fare per fingere che non sia accaduto affatto”.
Richard Yates ha rivelato che nello scrivere Revolutionary Road ha cominciato dalla fine: la prima scena che ha scritto è stata quella decisiva e conclusiva. Forse per questo fin dalla prima pagina si ha la sensazione di qualcosa di imminente e inevitabile: come se la vita dei personaggi seguisse un copione già scritto, in qualche modo già accaduto: un futuro che attrae il suo passato. Yates decide di non raccontare una storia in libertà ma di muoversi in una condizione obbligata, costretta, condizionata. Quindi condivide con i suoi personaggi uno stato di prigionia e di vincolo, crea in una forma prestabilita alla quale deve adeguare la narrazione e l'avventura del lettore. Ma loro sono belli e spiritosi e calmi e gentili. Sono cigni, o si illudono di esserlo. E questo basta. L'autore newyorchese, sempre schietto e composto, ha voluto sottolineare il debito letterario e morale di questa vicenda con il Gatsby di Scott Fitzgerald e con la flaubertiana Emma Bovary, offrendo così uno sguardo approfondito e atipico rispetto ad una naturale e malinconica e disillusa adesione alla tradizione del realismo. Appartenenza della quale il testo è oggi da più parti considerato un simbolo, un capolavoro emblematico e un testimone inimitabile, come dalla considerazione che ne ebbero Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver e Richard Ford. La storia che Yates sceglie di raccontare suscita un disagio disarmante, un'immedesimazione dolorosa e una disperazione rabbiosa e ribelle, entra nella coscienza con le sue repressioni e negazioni e il risentimento, la svuota di ogni falsità e ipocrisia, ne rivela la materia fragile, irrazionale e inspiegabile. April Wheeler, protagonista del romanzo, è una donna di essenza amabile, misteriosa e orgogliosa e ambisce a vivere con pienezza e naturalezza, ma qualcosa dentro di lei la spinge inesorabile verso la follia, la paura, la violenza. Frank non si sente mai a casa, pensa di essere nato per errore, mente e tradisce: la capacità di misurare e suddividere il tempo ci offre una quasi inesauribile fonte di consolazione. Si tratta di una storia di famiglia, comune, semplice, quasi esemplare. Di cosa altro si può scrivere del resto, pensava Yates. Nella America degli anni cinquanta sembrava un dovere sociale essere felici e prosperare secondo il sogno condiviso di una nazione vittoriosa e giusta. Ma i Wheeler osano aspirare a qualcosa di diverso e meno mediocre, progettano una vita fantasiosa in Europa, a Parigi, vogliono evadere dalla monotonia della classe media e per questo forse, come in una tragedia shakespeariana, incontrano un destino maledetto e crudele, una silenziosa e perentoria catastrofe. Di fronte alle divinità del contemporaneo (culto del denaro, disimpegno, evasione), si permettono di essere irresponsabili e immaturi e di disprezzare l'ordinario: ineluttabile colpa, irreversibile condanna. Perdono così ogni credito agli occhi dell'altro, vengono smascherati, si scoprono incapaci di fare del bene reciprocamente. Appaiono così infelici e compromessi da non poter che assistere passivamente al crollo, al collasso di ogni cosa. Ecco la dura verità di fronte alla quale ci mette Yates: non c'è spazio per nessuna scelta, tanto meno per una rinascita o una salvezza, non sappiamo chi siamo, non conosciamo le nostre stesse emozioni. Il complesso residenziale di Revolutionary Hill non era stato progettato in funzione di una tragedia. Anche di notte, come di proposito, le sue costruzioni non presentavano ombre confuse né sagome spettrali. Era invincibilmente allegro [...]. Un uomo intento a percorrere di corsa queste strade, oppresso da un disperato dolore, era fuori posto in modo addirittura indecente”. Ma quello che Yates vuole dirci in un senso umanitario e con spirito etico è che ci sono così tante cose da ammirare e amare che siamo tutti tenuti a vivere la vita come se quello che facciamo avesse enorme importanza, al di là di tutto e sotto ogni aspetto. Non si smette di cercare la grazia in un altrove: la follia è l'incapacità di amare. Nella visione desolante delle cose, sia simbolica che letterale, ci deve essere sempre una possibilità da aprire per essere perdonato o avere il potere di perdonare.
“Il disperato vuoto. Cielo, c'è un sacco di gente che la parte del vuoto l'ha capita; laggiù dove lavoravo, sulla costa occidentale, non parlavamo d'altro. Ce ne stavamo seduti a chiacchierare del vuoto per tutta la notte. Ma nessuno ha mai detto disperato, era lì che ci mancava il coraggio. Perché ci vuole una certa dose di coraggio per rendersi conto del vuoto, ma ne occorre un bel po' di più per scorgere la disperazione. E secondo me, una volta che si scorge la disperazione, non resta altro da fare che tagliare la corda. Se si può, beninteso”.
December 16, 2023
Frensis Skot Ficdžerald je pisao o stvaranju američke elite(new money), ekspresni nastanak ekstremno bogatih između Velikog rata i Velikog pada berze 1929. Iza svog blještavila krio se neodrživi nagon za ubrzanim stvaranjem nečega što samo po sebi zahteva vreme- istorije.
Nakon Drugog svetskog rata javlja se novi dualizam u američkom društvu- Mekartiizam, histerični strah od "crvene najezde", sve u državi koja istovremeno socijalizam sprovodi doslednije nego ijedna druga do tada. U tom šizoidnom prostoru između činjenice i propagirane fikcije udenut je Ričard Jejts i "Put revolucije".
Sam naziv njegove biografije-" Tragična iskrenost"- idealna je sumacija Jejtsovog stvaralštva. Hroničar velike nade- američkog građanskog prosperiteta i porodičnog blaženstva, zatim još većeg američkog razočarenja pred dezintegracijom slike decenijama održavane kroz žarku želju da svi, u svakom trenutku deluju "OK".
"Honey, I'm home!", poput vradžbine, ili možda prizivanja, plasiran kroz popularnu kulturu, izrastao je u simboliku američkog sna. Frenk i Ejpril Viler simbol su trijumfa srednje klase, nuklearne porodice i porodične idile pedesetih godina. Sjaj suburbanizma u malom- automobili poput bombona, zeleni travnjak, kuća dovoljno velika da odaje uspeh ali nipošto dovoljno velika da sugeriše razlikovanje od okoline. Sve deluje sasvim "OK".
Iza fasade savršenosti struji reka nesigurnosti. Sumnja u sopstvene potencijale i ostvarenost istih; sumnja u istinsku želju za životom koji bi, sa aspekta društveno prihvatljivog, morali da žele, sumnja u to da li su "dobili drugo dete samo da bi dokazali da prvo nije bilo greška"; sumnja da su, pored vokalizovane vere u sopstvenu individualnost, samo jedna tačka u kolažu promotivne umetnosti za način života koji možda ni ne postoji.
Dva su glavna arhetipa kod Jejtsa:
1) Zaposleni muž čija muškost je rascepljena i nedorečena između mačoizma nekadašnjeg učestvovanja u ratu i sadašnje umreženosti u armiju tipova u identičnim odelima, sinova tek začete korporativne kulture, koji svaki dan sedaju na voz, putuju u grad na posao, konstantno se dolivaju alkoholom i vraćaju svako veče porodici, sve u službi da sve bude "OK".
2) Žena domaćica, brine o kući i deci, uvek je tu prisutna, nasmejana, pod punom šminkom, uvek savršena, uživa u svim slobodama koje mašina za veš i sudove istinski donose, konstantno se doliva alkoholom i dočekuje muža, sve u službi da sve bude "OK".
Taj muškarac, čija uloga u društvu doživljava tektonski potres u tranzijici između tradicionalnog i modernog, ta potisnuta domaćica, koja kasnije rađa feministinju i radikalnu feministkinju, nukleus su razdora čiji se se razvoj sve do danas može ispratiti.
Takav je bio Jejts, surovo iskren u vreme kada iskrenost nije bila poželjna. Slavljen na početku karijere, guran pod tepih većinu svog spisateljskog života. Dočekao je kraj kao strastveni pušač i alkoholičar, anonimus, vukući bocu kiseonika dok je išao da drži predavanja u radionici kreativnog pisanja, ulozi koju je istinski mrzeo.
Moje prvo susretanje sa Ričardom Jejtsom desilo se pre petnaest godina. Danas, kao i pre deceniju i po, mišljenje je isto- "Revolutionary Road" je sve što jedan roman može da bude i teži da bude. Stilski savršen, zanatski isklesan, potresan ali, pre svega, nužan i istinit.
Knjiga koju će čitati oni koji imaju sreće da je otkriju, a kada je pročitaju znaće i zašto.
Nakon Drugog svetskog rata javlja se novi dualizam u američkom društvu- Mekartiizam, histerični strah od "crvene najezde", sve u državi koja istovremeno socijalizam sprovodi doslednije nego ijedna druga do tada. U tom šizoidnom prostoru između činjenice i propagirane fikcije udenut je Ričard Jejts i "Put revolucije".
Sam naziv njegove biografije-" Tragična iskrenost"- idealna je sumacija Jejtsovog stvaralštva. Hroničar velike nade- američkog građanskog prosperiteta i porodičnog blaženstva, zatim još većeg američkog razočarenja pred dezintegracijom slike decenijama održavane kroz žarku želju da svi, u svakom trenutku deluju "OK".
"Honey, I'm home!", poput vradžbine, ili možda prizivanja, plasiran kroz popularnu kulturu, izrastao je u simboliku američkog sna. Frenk i Ejpril Viler simbol su trijumfa srednje klase, nuklearne porodice i porodične idile pedesetih godina. Sjaj suburbanizma u malom- automobili poput bombona, zeleni travnjak, kuća dovoljno velika da odaje uspeh ali nipošto dovoljno velika da sugeriše razlikovanje od okoline. Sve deluje sasvim "OK".
Iza fasade savršenosti struji reka nesigurnosti. Sumnja u sopstvene potencijale i ostvarenost istih; sumnja u istinsku želju za životom koji bi, sa aspekta društveno prihvatljivog, morali da žele, sumnja u to da li su "dobili drugo dete samo da bi dokazali da prvo nije bilo greška"; sumnja da su, pored vokalizovane vere u sopstvenu individualnost, samo jedna tačka u kolažu promotivne umetnosti za način života koji možda ni ne postoji.
Dva su glavna arhetipa kod Jejtsa:
1) Zaposleni muž čija muškost je rascepljena i nedorečena između mačoizma nekadašnjeg učestvovanja u ratu i sadašnje umreženosti u armiju tipova u identičnim odelima, sinova tek začete korporativne kulture, koji svaki dan sedaju na voz, putuju u grad na posao, konstantno se dolivaju alkoholom i vraćaju svako veče porodici, sve u službi da sve bude "OK".
2) Žena domaćica, brine o kući i deci, uvek je tu prisutna, nasmejana, pod punom šminkom, uvek savršena, uživa u svim slobodama koje mašina za veš i sudove istinski donose, konstantno se doliva alkoholom i dočekuje muža, sve u službi da sve bude "OK".
Taj muškarac, čija uloga u društvu doživljava tektonski potres u tranzijici između tradicionalnog i modernog, ta potisnuta domaćica, koja kasnije rađa feministinju i radikalnu feministkinju, nukleus su razdora čiji se se razvoj sve do danas može ispratiti.
Takav je bio Jejts, surovo iskren u vreme kada iskrenost nije bila poželjna. Slavljen na početku karijere, guran pod tepih većinu svog spisateljskog života. Dočekao je kraj kao strastveni pušač i alkoholičar, anonimus, vukući bocu kiseonika dok je išao da drži predavanja u radionici kreativnog pisanja, ulozi koju je istinski mrzeo.
Moje prvo susretanje sa Ričardom Jejtsom desilo se pre petnaest godina. Danas, kao i pre deceniju i po, mišljenje je isto- "Revolutionary Road" je sve što jedan roman može da bude i teži da bude. Stilski savršen, zanatski isklesan, potresan ali, pre svega, nužan i istinit.
Knjiga koju će čitati oni koji imaju sreće da je otkriju, a kada je pročitaju znaće i zašto.
November 16, 2007
Revolutionary Road is a masterpiece of a genre that’s largely considered played out—the novel of suburban malaise. It’s a social novel about The Way We Live Now, only in this case Now is over 40 years ago and Yates’ take on the plight of the poor souls marooned in corporate/suburban America has long since been digested and superseded. It still persists to some degree—in films like American Beauty, novels such as Tom Perotta’s Little Children, and the brilliant TV show Weeds. But, American Beauty aside, contemporary takes on suburbia tend to be much less tragic and portentous.
Frank and April Wheeler, Yates 20-30-something protagonists are, in their own misguided way, dissidents struggling against certain stereotypically oppressive aspects of American life in the 50’s: conformity; the tedium and banality of life in the suburbs and the mid-century corporate workplace (they live in Connecticut, Frank works in New York); in April’s case, against a life of homemaking and childrearing. The problem is they don’t seem to have very good intellectual resources for waging the struggle. The practical, material resources are probably there—they are well educated (at least Frank is), intelligent, they make a good impression, while not rich they are far from destitute. But they are hampered by all kinds of romantic illusions, illusions that keep them from coming up with a plausible escape plan, or making the most of the hand they are dealt. They are tormented by the idea that they are not living up to their best selves (and this is true) but they have utterly self-deluding notions about what their best selves are or how to bring them into being. They are so afraid of being corrupted by their environment that they hold themselves aloof from the life around them. Their aversion is largely aesthetic, but the pop psychological and sociological theories they use to explain to themselves why they are alienated are inadequate to the task. They want to lead lives of significance, but the best they can do is to concoct a vague and implausible scheme of moving to France, where the plan is for April to work as a secretary while Frank sits around the apartment trying to figure out what to do with himself. I mean, if they want to do something worthwhile with their lives, Frank could become a teacher, or, at the other end of the scale, go to work for the kind of high-powered advertising firm portrayed in Mad Men (he graduated Columbia and has a way with words). April could have, at the very least, volunteered to work at the NAACP.
Yates is an extremely accomplished prose stylist. He’s a master of the vivid, transparent prose style that is the gold standard for writers of realistic fiction. He nails the details of life among the white middle class in the mid-to-late 50’s, while at the same time painting it as a more complicated and conflicted time than popular stereotypes would have you believe. He has an extraordinary ability to make you feel like you are deep inside the consciousness of his characters while at the same time watching them from a great distance. And the central dilemma his characters face—how to live a worthwhile life in a world that often conspires against it—is not one that will go out of fashion any time soon.
Frank and April Wheeler, Yates 20-30-something protagonists are, in their own misguided way, dissidents struggling against certain stereotypically oppressive aspects of American life in the 50’s: conformity; the tedium and banality of life in the suburbs and the mid-century corporate workplace (they live in Connecticut, Frank works in New York); in April’s case, against a life of homemaking and childrearing. The problem is they don’t seem to have very good intellectual resources for waging the struggle. The practical, material resources are probably there—they are well educated (at least Frank is), intelligent, they make a good impression, while not rich they are far from destitute. But they are hampered by all kinds of romantic illusions, illusions that keep them from coming up with a plausible escape plan, or making the most of the hand they are dealt. They are tormented by the idea that they are not living up to their best selves (and this is true) but they have utterly self-deluding notions about what their best selves are or how to bring them into being. They are so afraid of being corrupted by their environment that they hold themselves aloof from the life around them. Their aversion is largely aesthetic, but the pop psychological and sociological theories they use to explain to themselves why they are alienated are inadequate to the task. They want to lead lives of significance, but the best they can do is to concoct a vague and implausible scheme of moving to France, where the plan is for April to work as a secretary while Frank sits around the apartment trying to figure out what to do with himself. I mean, if they want to do something worthwhile with their lives, Frank could become a teacher, or, at the other end of the scale, go to work for the kind of high-powered advertising firm portrayed in Mad Men (he graduated Columbia and has a way with words). April could have, at the very least, volunteered to work at the NAACP.
Yates is an extremely accomplished prose stylist. He’s a master of the vivid, transparent prose style that is the gold standard for writers of realistic fiction. He nails the details of life among the white middle class in the mid-to-late 50’s, while at the same time painting it as a more complicated and conflicted time than popular stereotypes would have you believe. He has an extraordinary ability to make you feel like you are deep inside the consciousness of his characters while at the same time watching them from a great distance. And the central dilemma his characters face—how to live a worthwhile life in a world that often conspires against it—is not one that will go out of fashion any time soon.
December 14, 2018
L’intenzione (dichiarata) di Yates, era quella di scrivere un romanzo che avesse come madre Madame Bovary e come padre il Grande Gatsby. Il figlio Revolutionary prese decisamente il meglio da entrambi.
Già in “Ester Parade” mi aveva colpito il grado di emancipazione dei personaggi. Ripenso ai racconti di mio nonno, coetaneo di Yates che mi parlava di fame e miseria e non di velleità intellettuali e anticonformismo.
Yates in questo libro ha creato un impianto dove la pressione è costante. Quando uno dei tubi scoppia, chi legge si sente in colpa per aver contemplato fin dall’inizio quell’eventualità.
Sbalordiscono il rigore stilistico e la schiettezza, sbalordisce la facilità con la quale una scena di sesso diventa un esercizio di alta letteratura.
L’unico punto opaco sono i bambini della coppia protagonista, nella storia sono un pretesto, mai dei veri personaggi, sembrano bambole. E’ noto invece quanto siano ingombranti i bambini piccoli.
Chi ha dato cinque stelle a Franzen legga questo romanzo e si accorgerà che “Le correzioni”, in confronto, sono un meublè con vista sulla tangenziale
Già in “Ester Parade” mi aveva colpito il grado di emancipazione dei personaggi. Ripenso ai racconti di mio nonno, coetaneo di Yates che mi parlava di fame e miseria e non di velleità intellettuali e anticonformismo.
Yates in questo libro ha creato un impianto dove la pressione è costante. Quando uno dei tubi scoppia, chi legge si sente in colpa per aver contemplato fin dall’inizio quell’eventualità.
Sbalordiscono il rigore stilistico e la schiettezza, sbalordisce la facilità con la quale una scena di sesso diventa un esercizio di alta letteratura.
L’unico punto opaco sono i bambini della coppia protagonista, nella storia sono un pretesto, mai dei veri personaggi, sembrano bambole. E’ noto invece quanto siano ingombranti i bambini piccoli.
Chi ha dato cinque stelle a Franzen legga questo romanzo e si accorgerà che “Le correzioni”, in confronto, sono un meublè con vista sulla tangenziale
January 4, 2009
I've been putting off reviewing this book. I didn't enjoy reading it, and it wasn't because the characters were unlikeable, which they were. There are authors who can write great books about people the reader hates. This wasn't one of them.
I get the whole 1950s values/suburbia/trap that Frank and April found themselves in. I just didn't care. He was a whiny, immature, alcoholic. She was a bored suburban housewife whose only sense of identity was tied into how successful Frank may/may not be in life.
I think I mostly felt sorry for their children.
I'm tempted to tie this book in with a discussion of Roe v. Wade, but, once again, I just don't care.
I get the whole 1950s values/suburbia/trap that Frank and April found themselves in. I just didn't care. He was a whiny, immature, alcoholic. She was a bored suburban housewife whose only sense of identity was tied into how successful Frank may/may not be in life.
I think I mostly felt sorry for their children.
I'm tempted to tie this book in with a discussion of Roe v. Wade, but, once again, I just don't care.
July 15, 2019
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
I have to confess that every once in a while, reading news about what "conventional morality" makes people do to other people, I get into a quite real rage against Frank Wheeler, so many years after I read his story, his fictional psychological bullying of his wife, trampling her dreams with his feet as hard as he could. There are a few pages well into the second part of this heartbreaking story that still make me shudder. Those pages where April is fighting for her right to develop and grow out of the conformity prison that Frank wants to keep her in. She has a dream, and she is expecting a third child by accident. And Frank is fighting a campaign or a self-proclaimed war, using the meanest possible weapons of psychological warfare: playing on her "damaged womanhood" to convince her that she needs a psychiatrist instead of an abortion.
I know I am supposed to understand both positions, and to see the reciprocal trap they set for each other, the Wheelers, and how "mainstream opinions" are joining the standard marriage to the point of making it a polygamous affair - "what will the others think?" being a vital part of discussion within the conventional couplings of small town life. But I can't help thinking that April was right, and that Frank trampled her spirit with his feeling of ownership. Did he want that baby, or did he want to prevent another kind of life from happening? Whenever you hear the indignation in the voices of people thinking of abortion as murder, do they really want those babies? Are they thinking of life and freedom for a future human being, or are they thinking of punishment and control of a woman currently in trouble? Would they be willing to sacrifice all to the wellbeing of those babies they want to be born at any cost (for the pregnant woman)? Or do they want to chain the person whose pregnancy is a visible banner in the fight for traditional roles in society?
The Wheelers are an example of what we do to each other in the name of "love and happiness", of "morality" and "maturity".
I am with April: those are just words, and the responsible thing to do is to listen to your dreams and act upon them, not to let others trample on them, claiming it is for your own good.
All else is tragedy.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
I have to confess that every once in a while, reading news about what "conventional morality" makes people do to other people, I get into a quite real rage against Frank Wheeler, so many years after I read his story, his fictional psychological bullying of his wife, trampling her dreams with his feet as hard as he could. There are a few pages well into the second part of this heartbreaking story that still make me shudder. Those pages where April is fighting for her right to develop and grow out of the conformity prison that Frank wants to keep her in. She has a dream, and she is expecting a third child by accident. And Frank is fighting a campaign or a self-proclaimed war, using the meanest possible weapons of psychological warfare: playing on her "damaged womanhood" to convince her that she needs a psychiatrist instead of an abortion.
I know I am supposed to understand both positions, and to see the reciprocal trap they set for each other, the Wheelers, and how "mainstream opinions" are joining the standard marriage to the point of making it a polygamous affair - "what will the others think?" being a vital part of discussion within the conventional couplings of small town life. But I can't help thinking that April was right, and that Frank trampled her spirit with his feeling of ownership. Did he want that baby, or did he want to prevent another kind of life from happening? Whenever you hear the indignation in the voices of people thinking of abortion as murder, do they really want those babies? Are they thinking of life and freedom for a future human being, or are they thinking of punishment and control of a woman currently in trouble? Would they be willing to sacrifice all to the wellbeing of those babies they want to be born at any cost (for the pregnant woman)? Or do they want to chain the person whose pregnancy is a visible banner in the fight for traditional roles in society?
The Wheelers are an example of what we do to each other in the name of "love and happiness", of "morality" and "maturity".
I am with April: those are just words, and the responsible thing to do is to listen to your dreams and act upon them, not to let others trample on them, claiming it is for your own good.
All else is tragedy.
January 19, 2024
جاده انقلابی کتابی ایست از ریچارد ییتس ، نویسنده آمریکایی . او در این کتاب به داستان زندگی یک زوج جوان در آمریکا دهه 50 پرداخته . در دهه ای که با پایان یافتن جنگ جهانی ، اقتصاد آمریکا به سرعت رشد کرد ، سطح زندگی مردم بهبود یافت و البته مصرف هم به شدت بیشتر شد . با این وجود فرهنگ دههٔ 1950 در آمریکا را باید فرهنگ محافظهکار و سنتی دانست. در این دهه، ارزشهای سنتی مانند خانواده، مذهب و وطنپرستی هم چنان حاکم بود .
خانواده در دهه 50 در آمریکا :
خانوادهها در دههٔ 1950 آمریکا، به ویژه در طبقهٔ متوسط، به طور سنتی شامل پدر شاغل که نقش اصلی را در تأمین مالی خانواده داشت ، مادرکه خانهداری و تربیت فرزندان وظیفه اصلی او بود و فرزندان می شد . خانوادهها در این دهه به طور کلی از نظر اقتصادی وضعیت خوبی داشتند. پدران معمولاً شغلهای خوبی داشتند و درآمد کافی برای تأمین نیازهای خانواده را داشتند. مادران نیز معمولاً در خانه میماندند و از فرزندان مراقبت میکردند.
خانوادهها در این دهه به طور کلی به ارزشهای سنتی مانند مذهب، وطنپرستی و خانوادهسالاری اهمیت میدادند. آنها معمولاً در کلیسا یا سایر مراکز مذهبی شرکت میکردند و به کشور خود افتخار میکردند. اما کم کم در همین دهه ، دگرگونی های مهمی در نهاد خانواده در آمریکا به وجود آمد . یکی از مهمترین این تغییرات افزایش تعداد خانوادههای تکوالد به سبب طلاق و یا تولد فرزندان نامشروع بود . تغییربسیار مهم دیگر، افزایش تعداد زنان شاغل به دلیل عواملی مانند افزایش تحصیلات زنان و تغییر ن��رشها نسبت به نقش زنان در جامعه بود.
ویلرها را هم باید چنین خانواده ای دانست ، یک خانوادهٔ معمولی از طبقه متوسط و نسبتا موفق. آنها هم مانند بیشتر آمریکایی ها ، از رشد اقتصادی و افزایش مصرف بهره می برند . فرانک در شرکت معتبر و بزرگی مشغول به کار است ، کار او اگرچه خسته کننده است و نیازی به خلاقیت و نواوری خاصی هم ندارد اما همان چیزی ایست که او می خواسته . اما تا کی می توان یک کار خسته کننده در کنار ازدواج و سبک زندگی که آن هم خسته کننده است را با هم تحمل کرد ؟
محتوا داستان
نویسنده داستان خود را با یک نمایش تئاتر شروع می کند ، تئاتری که به یک فاجعه ختم می شود را شاید بتوان مانند سایه شومی بر زندگی ویلر ها دانست ، به تدریج و با پیش رفتن کتاب ، خواننده متوجه می شود که در پشت لبخندهای زیبا و مصنوعی و مهمانی های طولانی و خسته کننده ، روابطی پر تنش وجود دارد . روابطی که می تواند ازدواج و زندگی مشترک را به بن بست برساند .
ییتس زندگی مشترک دوستان و همسایه های ویلرها را هم شرح داده ، با وجود تفاوتهایی در سبک زندگی ، بن بست در روابط و ازدواج را در زندگی آنان هم می توان دید . روابط در خانواده کمپبل هم تعریف چندانی ندارد . گویی این گونه نویسنده ، بحران در روابط را میان خانواده های آمریکایی طبقه متوسط مشترک می داند .
اپریل که زودتر متوجه این بحران شده ، درمان را تنها در اقدامی انقلابی می بیند ، تصمیمی که اپریل می گیرد ، یعنی رها کردن همه چیز و رفتن به پاریس زیبا گرچه برای نجات زندگی مشترک و کاری سخت فداکارانه است اما خام و نپخته به نظر می رسد .
کتاب پایان تلخ و تراژیکی دارد ، زندگی که با ناامیدی و سرخوردگی ادامه پیدا کرده و بارها در خطر متلاشی شدن بوده گویی فرجام و سرنوشتی دیگرهم نمی تواند داشته باشد .
در دنیایی که ریچارد ییتس ساخته خبری از رویای آمریکایی نیست . او با مهارت و استادی مرگ رابطه ها را در زمانه ای سرشار از امید و پیشرفت به تصویر کشیده است .
خانواده در دهه 50 در آمریکا :
خانوادهها در دههٔ 1950 آمریکا، به ویژه در طبقهٔ متوسط، به طور سنتی شامل پدر شاغل که نقش اصلی را در تأمین مالی خانواده داشت ، مادرکه خانهداری و تربیت فرزندان وظیفه اصلی او بود و فرزندان می شد . خانوادهها در این دهه به طور کلی از نظر اقتصادی وضعیت خوبی داشتند. پدران معمولاً شغلهای خوبی داشتند و درآمد کافی برای تأمین نیازهای خانواده را داشتند. مادران نیز معمولاً در خانه میماندند و از فرزندان مراقبت میکردند.
خانوادهها در این دهه به طور کلی به ارزشهای سنتی مانند مذهب، وطنپرستی و خانوادهسالاری اهمیت میدادند. آنها معمولاً در کلیسا یا سایر مراکز مذهبی شرکت میکردند و به کشور خود افتخار میکردند. اما کم کم در همین دهه ، دگرگونی های مهمی در نهاد خانواده در آمریکا به وجود آمد . یکی از مهمترین این تغییرات افزایش تعداد خانوادههای تکوالد به سبب طلاق و یا تولد فرزندان نامشروع بود . تغییربسیار مهم دیگر، افزایش تعداد زنان شاغل به دلیل عواملی مانند افزایش تحصیلات زنان و تغییر ن��رشها نسبت به نقش زنان در جامعه بود.
ویلرها را هم باید چنین خانواده ای دانست ، یک خانوادهٔ معمولی از طبقه متوسط و نسبتا موفق. آنها هم مانند بیشتر آمریکایی ها ، از رشد اقتصادی و افزایش مصرف بهره می برند . فرانک در شرکت معتبر و بزرگی مشغول به کار است ، کار او اگرچه خسته کننده است و نیازی به خلاقیت و نواوری خاصی هم ندارد اما همان چیزی ایست که او می خواسته . اما تا کی می توان یک کار خسته کننده در کنار ازدواج و سبک زندگی که آن هم خسته کننده است را با هم تحمل کرد ؟
محتوا داستان
نویسنده داستان خود را با یک نمایش تئاتر شروع می کند ، تئاتری که به یک فاجعه ختم می شود را شاید بتوان مانند سایه شومی بر زندگی ویلر ها دانست ، به تدریج و با پیش رفتن کتاب ، خواننده متوجه می شود که در پشت لبخندهای زیبا و مصنوعی و مهمانی های طولانی و خسته کننده ، روابطی پر تنش وجود دارد . روابطی که می تواند ازدواج و زندگی مشترک را به بن بست برساند .
ییتس زندگی مشترک دوستان و همسایه های ویلرها را هم شرح داده ، با وجود تفاوتهایی در سبک زندگی ، بن بست در روابط و ازدواج را در زندگی آنان هم می توان دید . روابط در خانواده کمپبل هم تعریف چندانی ندارد . گویی این گونه نویسنده ، بحران در روابط را میان خانواده های آمریکایی طبقه متوسط مشترک می داند .
اپریل که زودتر متوجه این بحران شده ، درمان را تنها در اقدامی انقلابی می بیند ، تصمیمی که اپریل می گیرد ، یعنی رها کردن همه چیز و رفتن به پاریس زیبا گرچه برای نجات زندگی مشترک و کاری سخت فداکارانه است اما خام و نپخته به نظر می رسد .
کتاب پایان تلخ و تراژیکی دارد ، زندگی که با ناامیدی و سرخوردگی ادامه پیدا کرده و بارها در خطر متلاشی شدن بوده گویی فرجام و سرنوشتی دیگرهم نمی تواند داشته باشد .
در دنیایی که ریچارد ییتس ساخته خبری از رویای آمریکایی نیست . او با مهارت و استادی مرگ رابطه ها را در زمانه ای سرشار از امید و پیشرفت به تصویر کشیده است .
March 2, 2009
As any lover of the arts knows, an artist's reputation depends not only on what society thinks of their work, but also what they think of it over the passage of time, with many creative professionals' careers dipping up and down over the decades based on changing trends and tastes. Take American author Richard Yates for an excellent example; celebrated by the academic community when he first started writing in the early 1960s, he was considered in the vanguard of the nascent "postmodern" movement, mentioned in the same breath back then as such eventual masters as John Updike and Norman Mailer. (And by the way, I'm defining postmodernism here as developing at the same time and rate as the Vietnam War; so in other words, something only intellectuals were aware of when Kennedy first took office, but that had taken over the mainstream by the time Nixon was wearing wide lapels.) But unlike his peers, Yates' career ended up sputtering out about halfway through, with him eventually dying in the '90s on the cusp of obscurity, known if at all only by academes who specifically study the subject of postmodern literature; it wasn't until a series of such scholars started making a case for him in the 2000s that most of his work even went back into print, capped this year with an extremely high-profile Oscar-bait film adaptation of his very first novel, 1961's National Book Award nominated Revolutionary Road.
I just read it myself for the first time this week, in fact; and now that I have, I can easily see not only why Yates was once considered on the forefront of very challenging highbrow lit in the early '60s, but why his work never broke out of the academic gutter while he was alive, and why it's so ripe to revisit at this particular moment in history. Because as many of us now know because of the details behind its film adaptation (it was directed by Sam Mendes, creator of the similarly themed American Beauty), Revolutionary Road turns out to be one of the very first artistic projects in history to have taken on the subject of the Big Bad Suburbs, a topic that eventually became a veritable hallmark of postmodernism and prone to hacky excess by the end of the movement. (That's also something to point out for those who don't know, that I consider postmodernism to have ended on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've actually been living through the beginning of a brand-new artistic age yet to be defined. The Age of Sincerity? The Earnest Era? Literature 2.0? The Obamian Age?)
And indeed, it was important for the postmodernists to take on the subject of the crumbling suburbs, and of the utter sham they considered the entire concept of the "nuclear family" (a paradigm that was in fact to fall apart precisely during the postmodern years), exactly because it was the paradigm that their parents' generation embraced so whole-heartedly themselves, the sharp lines and unruffled feathers and black-and-white morality of Mid-Century Modernism. And ironically, even that was mostly a reaction to the mainstream paradigm of the generation before them, in this case the moral relativists of the Lost Generation and Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s, the gloomy sex-obsessed nihilists who brought about the ethical murkiness of World War Two and the Holocaust; the entire creation of the "nuclear family" paradigm after the war in the first place was as a direct reaction to those pulp-fiction years, an attempt by an entire society to say that there really is a series of black-and-white ethical values out there that really do apply to every person, not the world of infinite grays presented to us by the artists of the Weimar Era, the screenwriters of film-noir Hollywood and more. Of course, the tropes of Mid-Century Modernism too were found not to work, because humanity is simply more complex than this; and that's what this first wave of "post-Modernist" writers expressly became known for, for pointing out the growing cracks in this shiny plastic Eisenhower facade that most of America had voluntarily slapped on itself in the '50s and early '60s. And that's what led to the counterculture, which led to Watergate, which led to the second age of murky moral relativism that the '70s brought us; and society's reaction to that was once again the good-guy/bad-guy cowboy mentality of the Reagan years. And thus does the great wave of artistic history keep ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing.
But, well, okay, you say, that covers half the mystery, of why Yates was so fawned over at the beginning of his career; but what about the other half, of why his work never caught on with the public in the same way as Updike or Mailer (or Vidal or Pynchon or DeLillo for that matter)? And after reading just one book of his now, I'm already starting to see the answer; because when all is said and done, Revolutionary Road is not necessarily a condemnation of the bland soul-killing suburbs themselves (although partly it is -- more on that in a bit), but rather is absolutely for sure a profound and overwhelming criticism of whiny, overeducated, self-declared intellectuals who feel they're "above" such pedestrian environments. It is in fact a big shock about the book, given traditional expectations that the ensuing Postmodern Age has created for such tales about the Big Bad Suburbs, and also given the glee in which movie stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio threw themselves into these roles for the film version; that Frank and Alice Wheeler, the poetry-reading Connecticut couple at the heart of our tale, are far from heroes in the traditional sense of the word, with Alice coming off more like a misguided dupe by the end and Frank more like an out-and-out despicable villain.
And that's because Yates has a different message to convey about the suburbs than you might expect, a much more cynical message than that they're simply bland and soul-killing; he seems to argue that they're not only that, but that this is what most people deserve, and that such plebes can actually have a legitimately decent and happy life within such circumstances as long as they're willing to accept their plebian fate. For example, Yates goes out of his way to show that the young Frank isn't actually an intellectual, not from the stance of being academically trained for the subject, or even naturally talented enough to contribute something legitimately useful to the national conversation of deep thoughts; he's simply the most clever one out of the couple's circle of mostly brain-dead suburban friends, the guy who always seems to be in the center of the spotlight at every Friday-night neighborhood cocktail party. Place most men in such circumstances, Yates seems to argue, men with tiny little dreams and tiny little life expectations, and they will undoubtedly make a nice tiny little life for themselves with such material, undoubtedly become the guy in the neighborhood who always makes the most elaborate Halloween costumes, the guy always asked to head up school-play set designs and workplace book-discussion clubs.
No no, Yates argues, the problem isn't with the people who are simply looking for such a life and not much more, nor the ones who definitively know that such a life simply isn't for them, and quietly decide to live different ones in inner cities without much fuss; no, the problem is with the whiny little "clever" ones, the ones exactly like Frank and Alice, who endlessly bitch and moan about their mouth-breather surroundings but then do nothing about it, who sanctimoniously pass judgment on their ranch-duplex-owning neighbors even while peering at them through the plate-glass windows of their own ranch duplex. That's how the book opens, in fact, with a disastrous premiere by the new neighborhood community theatre company, which wouldn't have been nearly as bad if celebrated as a simple act of creativity, instead of the failed experiment in bringing a highbrow sensibility to the meatsacks that the Wheelers had first pictured it as. It's a debacle for the young family, exacerbated by them being exactly snarky enough to laugh bitterly at the idea of it "at least being a fun experience anyway," and it leads the couple to realizing that something is truly wrong in their relationship, truly and seriously skewed from the unfocused bohemian vision the once Greenwich-Village-living couple had for themselves. (In fact, this is a running joke throughout the manuscript, how the couple wishes to live a creative lifestyle but can't think of anything creative to actually do. "Why is it only painters and writers who are allowed to find themselves?" they're constantly asking in a witty way during cocktail parties, yet another sign of the murky counterculture right around the historical corner.)
But see, this is where the book gets truly interesting, and is the question that consumes most of its very quickly paced 450 pages; because is this unfocused bohemian vision the right one for the couple to have? Just what do the Wheelers want out of life, anyway? For example, it becomes obvious over the course of the novel that Frank doesn't actually mind the minutiae of Corporate America that terribly much, certainly not as much as he complains about, and that his problem is a much more universal one faced by most office workers in their late twenties, to simply have their ideas taken seriously and sometimes implemented, to slowly gain a bit of authority and respect among their co-workers for what they do. And in fact this is a big reason that I consider Frank so despicable to begin with, because he's a moral waffler who doesn't know exactly what he wants, who is too weak to simply sit down and make priorities and then consistently stick to them, even if that means occasional sacrifices. Just take the subject of whether the couple will ever have another child beyond the three that already exist, a running topic throughout the entire manuscript that becomes more and more important as it continues; notice how Frank's opinion on any given day is usually defined in relative opposition to whatever it is that the people around him want, how he will unthinkingly take on contradictory positions sometimes simply so that he can continue to have an excuse to argue with his wife, to feel like he's always "winning" in this hazy competition he sees them having.
In this, then, as mentioned, Alice herself comes off less as a deliberate villain and more like an unfortunate victim; because despite her willingness to revel in the closed-door smugness over their neighbors that Frank so naturally loves, it's obvious that she's at least more ethically consistent over her unhappiness, that their half-baked scheme at the beginning of the book to "move to Paris in the fall" was something she at least took very seriously, not the excuse Frank sees it as to put off real introspection of his life for yet another three months. You can at least feel sympathetic for Alice throughout the course of Revolutionary Road, at least see her as the simple bohemian girl she sees herself as (itself a reaction to her own Scott-and-Zelda out-of-control Jazz-Age parents); it's Frank who's the grand, complex, maddening tragedy-in-waiting, and it's no coincidence that we follow his inner-brain thoughts more than anyone else's throughout.
It's Frank who professes to despise his 9-to-5 job, yet loves that it can afford him a discreet marital affair played out in air-conditioned Manhattan hotel rooms; it's Frank who convinces his wife and their urbane best friends to start hanging out at the local crappy roadhouse for ironic enjoyment (yet another calling card of postmodernism, the act of enjoying crappy things for ironic reasons), yet is the first one to eventually start enjoying the place in a non-ironic way, and to become a legitimate regular there. Or in other words, he's one of those smug, holier-than-thou 29-year-old white-collar 'creative class' weasels you always want to smack when you're around them, the kind who's a major contributor to the problems of that world but claims that he isn't, just because he has a subscription to MAKE magazine and contributes snotty parodies of his day job to AdBusters. Yeah, one of THOSE weasels, like I said, the kind who happily accept all the little perks of the bourgeois lifestyle while still feeling themselves ethically superior to the little acts of banal monstrosity such bourgeois commit on a daily basis, in order to maintain their bourgeois lifestyle.
This is not an easy lesson for most middle-class book lovers to embrace -- that they're either too stupid to understand all the problems their vapid, culture-free lives are creating for society, or are smart enough and simply don't care -- and it makes it easy to see why books like these would be embraced by a doom-and-gloom '60s academic community even while being mostly rejected by the book-buying public. But on the other hand, what Yates warns about here in 1961 is exactly what happened during the Postmodern Age, and it's exactly this clueless vapidity in the '70s, '80s and '90s suburbs that led to the grand post-Bush messes we're facing right this second; and that's why right now might be the best time of all to revisit Yates' work, and to understand the lessons that he was trying to tell us now that we're a generation removed from the activities, now that we don't take his damnations quite so personally. Revolutionary Road turned out to be a better book than I was expecting, albeit a much darker one as well, and one much more critical of its exact target audience than you'd think an award-winner could get away with. It explains much about how America eventually became the trainwreck we now know it as, of how we could so profoundly lose touch with such concepts as personal accountability, personal responsibility; it's a shame that it took most of us nearly 50 years to realize this about Yates' remarkable book, but how great that we finally now have.
I just read it myself for the first time this week, in fact; and now that I have, I can easily see not only why Yates was once considered on the forefront of very challenging highbrow lit in the early '60s, but why his work never broke out of the academic gutter while he was alive, and why it's so ripe to revisit at this particular moment in history. Because as many of us now know because of the details behind its film adaptation (it was directed by Sam Mendes, creator of the similarly themed American Beauty), Revolutionary Road turns out to be one of the very first artistic projects in history to have taken on the subject of the Big Bad Suburbs, a topic that eventually became a veritable hallmark of postmodernism and prone to hacky excess by the end of the movement. (That's also something to point out for those who don't know, that I consider postmodernism to have ended on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've actually been living through the beginning of a brand-new artistic age yet to be defined. The Age of Sincerity? The Earnest Era? Literature 2.0? The Obamian Age?)
And indeed, it was important for the postmodernists to take on the subject of the crumbling suburbs, and of the utter sham they considered the entire concept of the "nuclear family" (a paradigm that was in fact to fall apart precisely during the postmodern years), exactly because it was the paradigm that their parents' generation embraced so whole-heartedly themselves, the sharp lines and unruffled feathers and black-and-white morality of Mid-Century Modernism. And ironically, even that was mostly a reaction to the mainstream paradigm of the generation before them, in this case the moral relativists of the Lost Generation and Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s, the gloomy sex-obsessed nihilists who brought about the ethical murkiness of World War Two and the Holocaust; the entire creation of the "nuclear family" paradigm after the war in the first place was as a direct reaction to those pulp-fiction years, an attempt by an entire society to say that there really is a series of black-and-white ethical values out there that really do apply to every person, not the world of infinite grays presented to us by the artists of the Weimar Era, the screenwriters of film-noir Hollywood and more. Of course, the tropes of Mid-Century Modernism too were found not to work, because humanity is simply more complex than this; and that's what this first wave of "post-Modernist" writers expressly became known for, for pointing out the growing cracks in this shiny plastic Eisenhower facade that most of America had voluntarily slapped on itself in the '50s and early '60s. And that's what led to the counterculture, which led to Watergate, which led to the second age of murky moral relativism that the '70s brought us; and society's reaction to that was once again the good-guy/bad-guy cowboy mentality of the Reagan years. And thus does the great wave of artistic history keep ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing.
But, well, okay, you say, that covers half the mystery, of why Yates was so fawned over at the beginning of his career; but what about the other half, of why his work never caught on with the public in the same way as Updike or Mailer (or Vidal or Pynchon or DeLillo for that matter)? And after reading just one book of his now, I'm already starting to see the answer; because when all is said and done, Revolutionary Road is not necessarily a condemnation of the bland soul-killing suburbs themselves (although partly it is -- more on that in a bit), but rather is absolutely for sure a profound and overwhelming criticism of whiny, overeducated, self-declared intellectuals who feel they're "above" such pedestrian environments. It is in fact a big shock about the book, given traditional expectations that the ensuing Postmodern Age has created for such tales about the Big Bad Suburbs, and also given the glee in which movie stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio threw themselves into these roles for the film version; that Frank and Alice Wheeler, the poetry-reading Connecticut couple at the heart of our tale, are far from heroes in the traditional sense of the word, with Alice coming off more like a misguided dupe by the end and Frank more like an out-and-out despicable villain.
And that's because Yates has a different message to convey about the suburbs than you might expect, a much more cynical message than that they're simply bland and soul-killing; he seems to argue that they're not only that, but that this is what most people deserve, and that such plebes can actually have a legitimately decent and happy life within such circumstances as long as they're willing to accept their plebian fate. For example, Yates goes out of his way to show that the young Frank isn't actually an intellectual, not from the stance of being academically trained for the subject, or even naturally talented enough to contribute something legitimately useful to the national conversation of deep thoughts; he's simply the most clever one out of the couple's circle of mostly brain-dead suburban friends, the guy who always seems to be in the center of the spotlight at every Friday-night neighborhood cocktail party. Place most men in such circumstances, Yates seems to argue, men with tiny little dreams and tiny little life expectations, and they will undoubtedly make a nice tiny little life for themselves with such material, undoubtedly become the guy in the neighborhood who always makes the most elaborate Halloween costumes, the guy always asked to head up school-play set designs and workplace book-discussion clubs.
No no, Yates argues, the problem isn't with the people who are simply looking for such a life and not much more, nor the ones who definitively know that such a life simply isn't for them, and quietly decide to live different ones in inner cities without much fuss; no, the problem is with the whiny little "clever" ones, the ones exactly like Frank and Alice, who endlessly bitch and moan about their mouth-breather surroundings but then do nothing about it, who sanctimoniously pass judgment on their ranch-duplex-owning neighbors even while peering at them through the plate-glass windows of their own ranch duplex. That's how the book opens, in fact, with a disastrous premiere by the new neighborhood community theatre company, which wouldn't have been nearly as bad if celebrated as a simple act of creativity, instead of the failed experiment in bringing a highbrow sensibility to the meatsacks that the Wheelers had first pictured it as. It's a debacle for the young family, exacerbated by them being exactly snarky enough to laugh bitterly at the idea of it "at least being a fun experience anyway," and it leads the couple to realizing that something is truly wrong in their relationship, truly and seriously skewed from the unfocused bohemian vision the once Greenwich-Village-living couple had for themselves. (In fact, this is a running joke throughout the manuscript, how the couple wishes to live a creative lifestyle but can't think of anything creative to actually do. "Why is it only painters and writers who are allowed to find themselves?" they're constantly asking in a witty way during cocktail parties, yet another sign of the murky counterculture right around the historical corner.)
But see, this is where the book gets truly interesting, and is the question that consumes most of its very quickly paced 450 pages; because is this unfocused bohemian vision the right one for the couple to have? Just what do the Wheelers want out of life, anyway? For example, it becomes obvious over the course of the novel that Frank doesn't actually mind the minutiae of Corporate America that terribly much, certainly not as much as he complains about, and that his problem is a much more universal one faced by most office workers in their late twenties, to simply have their ideas taken seriously and sometimes implemented, to slowly gain a bit of authority and respect among their co-workers for what they do. And in fact this is a big reason that I consider Frank so despicable to begin with, because he's a moral waffler who doesn't know exactly what he wants, who is too weak to simply sit down and make priorities and then consistently stick to them, even if that means occasional sacrifices. Just take the subject of whether the couple will ever have another child beyond the three that already exist, a running topic throughout the entire manuscript that becomes more and more important as it continues; notice how Frank's opinion on any given day is usually defined in relative opposition to whatever it is that the people around him want, how he will unthinkingly take on contradictory positions sometimes simply so that he can continue to have an excuse to argue with his wife, to feel like he's always "winning" in this hazy competition he sees them having.
In this, then, as mentioned, Alice herself comes off less as a deliberate villain and more like an unfortunate victim; because despite her willingness to revel in the closed-door smugness over their neighbors that Frank so naturally loves, it's obvious that she's at least more ethically consistent over her unhappiness, that their half-baked scheme at the beginning of the book to "move to Paris in the fall" was something she at least took very seriously, not the excuse Frank sees it as to put off real introspection of his life for yet another three months. You can at least feel sympathetic for Alice throughout the course of Revolutionary Road, at least see her as the simple bohemian girl she sees herself as (itself a reaction to her own Scott-and-Zelda out-of-control Jazz-Age parents); it's Frank who's the grand, complex, maddening tragedy-in-waiting, and it's no coincidence that we follow his inner-brain thoughts more than anyone else's throughout.
It's Frank who professes to despise his 9-to-5 job, yet loves that it can afford him a discreet marital affair played out in air-conditioned Manhattan hotel rooms; it's Frank who convinces his wife and their urbane best friends to start hanging out at the local crappy roadhouse for ironic enjoyment (yet another calling card of postmodernism, the act of enjoying crappy things for ironic reasons), yet is the first one to eventually start enjoying the place in a non-ironic way, and to become a legitimate regular there. Or in other words, he's one of those smug, holier-than-thou 29-year-old white-collar 'creative class' weasels you always want to smack when you're around them, the kind who's a major contributor to the problems of that world but claims that he isn't, just because he has a subscription to MAKE magazine and contributes snotty parodies of his day job to AdBusters. Yeah, one of THOSE weasels, like I said, the kind who happily accept all the little perks of the bourgeois lifestyle while still feeling themselves ethically superior to the little acts of banal monstrosity such bourgeois commit on a daily basis, in order to maintain their bourgeois lifestyle.
This is not an easy lesson for most middle-class book lovers to embrace -- that they're either too stupid to understand all the problems their vapid, culture-free lives are creating for society, or are smart enough and simply don't care -- and it makes it easy to see why books like these would be embraced by a doom-and-gloom '60s academic community even while being mostly rejected by the book-buying public. But on the other hand, what Yates warns about here in 1961 is exactly what happened during the Postmodern Age, and it's exactly this clueless vapidity in the '70s, '80s and '90s suburbs that led to the grand post-Bush messes we're facing right this second; and that's why right now might be the best time of all to revisit Yates' work, and to understand the lessons that he was trying to tell us now that we're a generation removed from the activities, now that we don't take his damnations quite so personally. Revolutionary Road turned out to be a better book than I was expecting, albeit a much darker one as well, and one much more critical of its exact target audience than you'd think an award-winner could get away with. It explains much about how America eventually became the trainwreck we now know it as, of how we could so profoundly lose touch with such concepts as personal accountability, personal responsibility; it's a shame that it took most of us nearly 50 years to realize this about Yates' remarkable book, but how great that we finally now have.
July 26, 2018
3 Stars
Alternate titles for this book include:
Not-So-Subtlety Talking About Masculinity
Gender Roles Suck
Everyone is Really Unhappy
Gatsby Thought He Had it Bad
Vonnegat once compared this to Gatsby, and I think that's incredibly accurate. If Gatbsy is about the American Dream in the 1920s, this is a fantastic disillusion of 'achieving' that dream in the 1950s.
Frank is a narcissist obsessed with preserving his own masculinity-- the secretary in the office wore that dress just to taunt him, damn it!
April was... hard to figure out? Her whole character arc revolved around her not even knowing who she was, so it was hard for me to feel connected to her at all.
It was very hard to rate this, because I appreciate what it was trying to say-- I just don't think I agree with it? The whole premise of people being stuck in 'mediocre lives' is inherently depressing and disregards a lot of the wonder in everyday life.
“No one forgets the truth; they just get better at lying.”
Alternate titles for this book include:
Not-So-Subtlety Talking About Masculinity
Gender Roles Suck
Everyone is Really Unhappy
Gatsby Thought He Had it Bad
Vonnegat once compared this to Gatsby, and I think that's incredibly accurate. If Gatbsy is about the American Dream in the 1920s, this is a fantastic disillusion of 'achieving' that dream in the 1950s.
Frank is a narcissist obsessed with preserving his own masculinity-- the secretary in the office wore that dress just to taunt him, damn it!
April was... hard to figure out? Her whole character arc revolved around her not even knowing who she was, so it was hard for me to feel connected to her at all.
It was very hard to rate this, because I appreciate what it was trying to say-- I just don't think I agree with it? The whole premise of people being stuck in 'mediocre lives' is inherently depressing and disregards a lot of the wonder in everyday life.
January 31, 2023
I repeat, this isn't Richard Yates's finest book, although is the only book by him many bother to read because it is the most well known (and it was a National Book Award finalist).
Yes, the sentences are pretty, and some of the figurative language too, and the dialogue is swell except when it isn't, when it's overdone, when Milly calls Shep Campbell 'Daddy' or Frank Wheeler lectures his wife on penis envy. At times the author as narrator is so overbearing, a man in love with the sound of his own words, that it is almost intrusive/distracting.
Suburbia is soul crushing, misogyny is king, and children are such a buzz kill, yada, yada, yada. Funny how in the sixty years since this book's publication its themes have become a cliché, thanks to books like Little Children and shows like Mad Men, which owe plenty to this novel. What this book does contain is the best strategy for achieving as little as possible in a paper pushing job, and it always makes me chuckle.
The ending was stunning and did make up for some of the rest of it, but Frank Wheeler remains annoying and disgusting--is this a credit to Richard Yates's skill as a writer? Hopefully he meant for him to be...let a woman choose what to do with her own body, for God's sake.
Yes, the sentences are pretty, and some of the figurative language too, and the dialogue is swell except when it isn't, when it's overdone, when Milly calls Shep Campbell 'Daddy' or Frank Wheeler lectures his wife on penis envy. At times the author as narrator is so overbearing, a man in love with the sound of his own words, that it is almost intrusive/distracting.
Suburbia is soul crushing, misogyny is king, and children are such a buzz kill, yada, yada, yada. Funny how in the sixty years since this book's publication its themes have become a cliché, thanks to books like Little Children and shows like Mad Men, which owe plenty to this novel. What this book does contain is the best strategy for achieving as little as possible in a paper pushing job, and it always makes me chuckle.
The ending was stunning and did make up for some of the rest of it, but Frank Wheeler remains annoying and disgusting--is this a credit to Richard Yates's skill as a writer? Hopefully he meant for him to be...let a woman choose what to do with her own body, for God's sake.
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