Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”
— Richard Yates, when asked about the central theme of his novels
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The best thing about “The American Dream” is that its duality is so perfect. On the one hand, The American Dream[1] is great in that it is, at root, an idea that has numerous dreams and incentives already built-in: you can buy that house; you can get that car; you can Have It All. And it does all of this in a (mostly) secular way—instead of praying to God or Jesus for the deliverance of things, you can simply worship an ideology and an economy- and market-based way of life. On the other hand, The American Dream[2] provides such fertile ground and fuel for outstanding counterpoints, opinion, writing, deconstruction, and commentary. This is based on a secular methodology too—why pray for answers when they’re right in front of everyone’s face, decodable by irony instead of archaic texts? Why blindly praise things and writings when there’s more to be learned by taking it apart?
And so because of the second way you can say the words “the American dream” you had many writers and voices beginning in the ’50′s starting to dissect things like the suburbs, marriage, promiscuity, and a litany of other things previously deemed taboo in mainstream American culture. (If you are reading this and you over the age of sixteen you probably already know this.) So, if I were to tell you that here is this book, and it’s called Revolutionary Road and it was published in 1961 and the story takes place in 1955 and it follows the crumbling marriage of Frank and April Wheeler and one of the satellite storylines of the novel revolves around abortion and the central storyline focuses on the crumbling of a marriage: you would probably be able to easily imagine—to some broad extent—what this novel will entail. You will probably be able to picture uncomfortable scenes involving fights between the Wheeler’s and Frank’s descent into irritability with his career, all amongst a backdrop commentary showing that life can sometimes suck in the suburbs; that the suburbs do not always live up to its projection and marketing of an idyllic zone of happiness.
And you would be correct in assuming and picturing those things. Yates is certainly not reinventing the wheel, from a thematic perspective, with this novel. But what he does do with this novel is fill it with some truly wonderful writing; writing that treads a very careful line, one that never comes too close to embracing all-out discomfort but one that feels realistic enough as to not ever feel terribly dated. For example, below is an excerpt from late in the book. April Wheeler is at a bar with the Wheeler’s friend Shep Campbell while her husband has driven Shep’s wife home (Shep’s car was blocked in at the parking lot so they agreed that Frank would take Shep’s wife home in his car and then Shep would drive April after his car was free). April and Frank had a huge fight earlier in the day and, while drunk, she has sex with Shep in the back of his car. Look at how Yates writes April’s inner monologue—it’s engrossing and complex, and parts of it will smack you in the face with its realism (a down-to-earth realism at that too; nothing so complex as to only be enjoyed literary circle members):
“So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.
“The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying ‘I love you’ and she was saying ‘Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.’
“What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying ‘I’m sorry, of course you’re right,’ and ‘Whatever you think is best,’ and ‘You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world,’ and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. [...] you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and ‘We’ve got to be together in this thing’ when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn’t know who you were.
“And how could anyone else be blamed for that?”
To be sure, this style of writing—this communion of omniscient and second person narratives—has become quite common when deconstructing characters’ thoughts, especially when it comes to the modern deconstruction of The American Dream (say it in whatever voice you deem fit). But look at the way Yates writes that passage: how April views Frank as a boy when she kisses him, the concision in how the dots are connected that shows the unraveling of their marriage. It’s wonderfully constructed and gets its point across easily. Its doom has poignancy. (Which makes me wonder why the hell anyone would even attempt to make this into a movie. Seriously, how do you capture the above excerpt and attempt to transfer it to film? Why even try? It seems like such a Sisyphean task.)
Speaking of movies, I am sure that we all have a few personal favorite movies that are personal favorites because the writing and/or the acting are so good and so brilliant that it doesn’t matter to us that the actual story of the movie is less than stellar. Two examples for me are The Shawshank Redemption and Sunshine Cleaning. From a dispassionate point of view, both movies have mundane stories: the former is about a wrongly accused man, the latter is about two women who clean up crime scenes. And from a dispassionate eye, the writing in both of these movies is not awe-inspiring. But… in the former you have Morgan Freeman’s presence (both in his acting and in his narration) and some transcendent scenes (the opera album/prison yard scene and anything involving Brooks after prison), and in the latter you have Amy Adams who owns just about every scene in a thoroughly relatable way (the scene where she sits next to the old woman on her porch is beyond touching). The writing in these movies is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the actors and the other intangibles that really sell it all, for me anyway. Whereas with books that are my personal favorites the opposite is true: if the writing is great enough, it can outshine the characters and the story to the point that I’m not really bothered if the story isn’t technically interesting.
And this is what Revolutionary Road did for me. The writing is outstanding, to the point that I don’t really care that Frank Wheeler, as a character, isn’t fundamentally interesting. I don’t really care that April is mostly kind of unlikable. And I don’t care about these things because the framework and the writing of the novel are so damn great. The novel begins with April in an acting troupe performing on their first night, and it ends with two different neighbors talking about the aftermath of what happened to April, how it effected Frank, and where he moved to. By framing it this way, you are asked to see the Wheeler’s through other people’s eyes. Just like you see your neighbors. Again, Yates did not invent this style of writing—he just did a helluva job executing it with this novel.
On the back of the edition of this novel that I have there is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut and it reads: “The Great Gatsby of my time… One of the best books by a member of my generation.” This is not hyperbole.
Revolutionary Road is not an uplifting book. It is about people who mortgage their dreams in exchange for overlooking everything that is around them. It is the type of book that probably won’t be an attractive read for many people. But if this story (or this review of it) has piqued any interest, buy the book. You will not be disappointed.
[1] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very ’50′s-sounding politician’s, or commercial actor’s, voice; very polished, with gleaming white teeth exposed.
[2] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very modern-sounding snarkiness and ironic detachment. You should mentally roll your eyes as you say it, and possibly even curse George W. Bush immediately afterwards while you’re at it if only because it feels sensible to do that too.
