What Book to Read?

Revolutionary Road was published in 1961 and is now regarded as an American classic. During his lifetime, Yates was a respected writer rather than a popular one; when he died in 1992, none of his seven novels and two books of short stories was still in print. However there has been a revival of interest in his work recently, not least since the release in 2008 of an acclaimed film based on the book staring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

It is 1955. Frank and April Wheeler and their two young children live on Revolutionary Road, so called because it runs up to Revolutionary Hill, where is located the down market Revolutionary Estate. This name, no doubt a reference to the American revolutionary wars, is being used ironically; there is nothing revolutionary about the road, the estate or the people who live there. They are the essence of the new American suburbia, young aspiring couples fleeing from New York’s expensive housing market. Frank and April are no different – but they think they are. They abhor what they see as ‘extreme suburban smugness.’ ‘It’s a disease,’ says Frank. ‘Nobody thinks or feels or cares anymore; nobody gets excited or believes there is anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.’ They feel they are ‘painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.’

The story begins with an amateur performance of a play. The Wheelers are involved in a local theatre group because they see it as a way of developing some ‘good, really serious community theatre’, in order to show that there is ‘a way of life beyond the commuting train and the Republican Party and the barbecue pit.’ April, who attended drama school, has a leading part. But ’the virus of calamity’ strikes and the performance is a disaster. Afterwards, Frank and April fight bitterly, as they often do. At this point April makes a suggestion that might offer them a new life. But can they do it? The book then tells how this suggestion and all that it involves affects their relationship. Two other couples, the Campbells and the Givings, offer a counterpoint to their story.

Some critics regard this story as an attack on the banalities of suburban life – see for example the blurb on the back of the Vintage edition. I don’t really think this is the case, since it’s not about the banalities as such, but rather what the Wheelers see as banalities. (This is not to suggest Yates approves of suburbia – the book’s ironic title shows he doesn’t.) But right from the start it is clear that both Frank and April, though more particularly Frank, are prey to massive self-delusion. Both of them believe they are in some way exceptional, and that Frank has some great, as yet untapped, potential. This was thwarted when April fell pregnant much sooner than they had expected, and Frank thinks that ‘everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do.’ (Why did they buy a house in the suburbs? It’s never really made clear.) He thinks of himself as an intellectual, but has deliberately chosen a job he considers unchallenging, so he can, as he says, ‘retain my own identity’. But what Yates describes is simply someone who is lazy and self-indulgent. He seems also to need a supplicant or compliant woman to make him feel ‘like a man’. Much of the story is told from Frank’s point of view, but always his view is tainted by self-deception. Yates’s writing is sometimes gently, but more often savagely ironic. The moments when Frank knows he’s being a phoney are perhaps the most disturbing of all.

I notice that one of Yates’s admirers, the humourist and writer David Sedaris, has said he ‘loves’ how the characters in the book deceive themselves. I take him to mean that he sees the irony as humorous. I have quite the opposite reaction. I find it really depressing. I can see that some of the set pieces, such as the first  visit to the Wheelers by the Givings and their ‘insane’ son John, who tells truths no one else dares mention, could be seen as comical – but only in the blackest sense. Frank’s tragedy is that he never gets beyond willing self-delusion. April’s tragedy is that she does, when she discovers ‘that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone’. Thus Yates makes his existential point about authenticity, though not, in the event, without a touch of melodrama.

Revolutionary Road was short-listed for the1992 National Book Award, alongside Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which won, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I can’t help making the comparison with Catch 22, a novel that sold ten million copies, and whose ironic title has passed into the language. Perhaps ironic treatment of war trumps ironic treatment of suburban relationships, or perhaps it’s just a better book.

You can read more about Yates – and see the elements of autobiography in Revolutionary Road – here.