Have you read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates? Huh? You have? Then why the hell haven't you told me about it? What's your problem, anyway? And where has this book been all my life?
There's a movie version of Revolutionary Road on the way, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and directed by Sam Mendes. It's set to be released at Christmastime, and is widely expected to be a major player in the Oscar race. But here I have to betray this column's reason for being. F*** the movie. Read the book.
Published in 1961, Yates's first novel was more acclaimed than popular. It is a merciless, intense and pitch-black social satire – funny only in the most uncomfortable way, like being cleverly mocked by someone who sees clean through to your soul. The jacket pitches it as being about "the opulent desolation of the American suburbs," but Revolutionary Road is not another of those books that merely mocks the empty lives of well-to-do suburbanites. It's about our attitudes toward life and love and each other. Almost a half-century after it was published, it contains as much devastating insight into human nature as just about anything else I've ever read.
Imagine a book where you see the characters clearly as weak, insincere, pitiable, sometimes even repulsive – and yet also eerily familiar. Oh, maybe not familiar in the lives they lead or the things they do, but in the way they think, interact, rationalize, compete, calculate. Sometimes you regard these characters and see people you know; other times, you squirm in your chair because you see yourself. This isn't always pleasant, but it is incredibly engaging: a different kind of page-turner.
It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, an intelligent, upper-crust suburban couple who self-consciously yearn to escape what they see as a meaningless, soul-crushing existence. They don't belong in this boring, provincial, uncultured world of the white picket fence, the mindless 9-5 grunt, the inane weekend barbecues, the incurious louts with no values and no convictions and no idea of what's really important. So Frank and April impulsively decide to move to Paris, where April can get a job and Frank can "find himself" and finally live up to the potential everyone (including him) insists he has. But of course, Frank and April have problems that extend far beyond their uncultivated surroundings. Far from gallivanting off to France, they begin to chip away at their relationship and to cannibalize their own lives.
Frank is both hideously insecure and convinced of his own brilliance. Everything he says and does is calculated to impress and present him just so. At every moment, with every word and gesture, he's attuned to how other people see him and how they might respond. Sometimes he daydreams about people's reactions to a comment or a piece of news, imagining their praise, understanding and respect -- and is crushed when their actual response is indifference or disdain. Yates looks inside Frank's mind with brutal clarity. It's possible that the fact that I saw a little of myself in Frank says more about me than about the novel, and I hesitated before admitting it here. But it's the rare book that makes you want to be a better person, and Revolutionary Road did precisely that.
What? Oh, the movie. Yeah, there's going to be one. Sam Mendes certainly knows a thing or two about "the opulent desolation of the American suburbs," what with having American Beauty on his resume. The on-screen reunion of doomed Titanic lovers Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet will no doubt be the subject of numerous adoring magazine fluff pieces (though I wonder if DiCaprio will have the guts to make Frank Wheeler as venal, insecure and deluded as he needs to be). Heck, the movie might even be good, especially if it doesn't pull any punches with the bleak, upsetting ending. If nothing else, I'm looking forward to Kathy Bates' interpretation of the busybody real estate agent who intrudes on the protagonists' downward spiral. Oh, and what Mendes does with the book's wonderful opening: a mortifyingly bad community theater production of The Petrified Forest, starring April Wheeler.
But the genius of the novel lies in Yates's articulate, sarcastic voice: the way he describes these people he understands so completely, then (figuratively) peels their skins and turns them inside out. A few weeks ago I wrote about Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I actually felt might be improved by being stripped of McCarthy's authorial presence. I think the opposite is true here.
I know – this turned into a shameful starry-eyed rave. But Revolutionary Road was such a rare discovery for me. It's eye-opening, perspective-changing, extraordinarily powerful, and one of my new favorite books. I'm curious about the adaptation, don't get me wrong; Sam Mendes has never made an uninteresting film. But the novel is one hell of a tough act to follow.
[Footnote: For more on the novel and the adaptation, I commend to you this terrific Slate article by Yates' biographer.]
1. In sentence 1, i think you mean Richard Yates?
Anyway, sounds great, we are going to look for it!
Posted at 9:52PM on Jul 2nd 2008 by Robin