I’ll be on 1080 the Fan in Portland Oregon tonight around 5:40 local time, and on AllNight with Jason Smith in the small hours. Tomorrow I’ll be on the Herd at 12:10 pm EDT. Look for my World Series preview piece on ESPN.com around midday.
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Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
The Wheelers have recently moved to a Connecticut suburb from which Frank commutes to an unchallenging, uninteresting job in Manhattan, and the move further away from city life and culture has only widened the cracks that were already appearing in their relationship. When April appears in a community theater production – which is, individually and collectively, a small disaster, a symbol of the thriving city culture they’ve abandoned for the superficial yet hollow suburbs – her contempt for her husband surfaces in her language and tone:
“Well,” he said, “the thing is, I already said we could. I mean I just saw them out there and I said we would.”
“Oh. Then would you mind going out again and saying you were mistaken? That should be simple enough.”
“Look,” he said. “Don’t start getitng this way. The point is I thought it might be fun, is all. Besides, it’s going to look kind of rude, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it?”
“You mean you won’t.” She closed her eyes. “All right, I will, then. Thanks a lot.”
Very little happens in Revolutionary Road; Frank has an affair, but it’s almost preordained, and the other significant events that have shaped the Wheelers’ lives exist only in flashbacks, until the Big Thing that leads to the book’s conclusion. The novel is instead driven forward by dialogue and Yates’ clever, meandering prose:
It looked, as John Givings had once said, like a place where people lived – a place where the difficult, intricate process of living could sometimes give rise to incredible harmonies of happiness and sometimes to near-tragic disorder, as well as to ludicrous minor interludes (“That’s All, Folks!”); a place where it was possible for whole summers to be kind of crazy, where it was possible to feel lonely and confused in many ways and for things to look pretty bleak from time to time, but where everything, in the final analysis, was going to be all right.
Yates appears to have taken his nomenclature seriously. Frank is excessively so, candid to the point of speaking against self-interest, as if his internal censor has been shut off permanently. April’s name is more ironic, as she feels like she should be in the springtime of her life but is trapped by an unwanted marriage and two children for whom she feels no affection. They live on the Revolutionary Road of the book’s title, referring both to the sexual revolution (which only accelerated after the book’s publication in 1960) and the economic revolution of postwar America, including the flight to the suburbs that ensnares the Wheelers and intensifies their alienation from each other and from society.
The ending to Revolutionary Road was, as I said above, quite predictable – Yates foreshadows the hell out of it – and I always find it hard to read about marriages of contempt and cruelty. I’m sure this relationship exists all over the place, and I have seen married couples speak to each other as Frank and April do, without love or tenderness, through gritted teeth meant to barely disguise the lack of respect, but it remains very hard to take even when it’s well-written.
Next up: I’m more than a third of the way through Tree of Smoke
I saw the movie version of this earlier in the year. It made me want to kill myself.
When can we expect your review of the new Dan Brown book?
I have not read revolutionary road but know all about it from Fem-college friends who espoused its greatness. I avoided it as I avoid Tim McCarver on TV as it has a post modern feeling of despair and the theme is the brutal failing of the American Dream. The avoidance of the book wasn’t because it lacked truth, but rather in my perfect naiveté, it is okay to know about the theme, but to be faced with it can be rather awful, depressing and bleek.
Havent read the book, saw the movie and thought it was just ok.
Random side question: have u read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. If not i recommend it, its one of my all-time favorites
I absolutely love Revolutionary Road, and I think The Easter Parade, another of Yates’ novels, is even better.
The Easter Parade is also about unhappiness, but it follows two sisters rather than one married couple.
The Power and the Glory was excellent.
I agree that the failure of the American Dream is a major theme – there’s a whole Frank-at-work strand in the book that I omitted from the writeup. I just couldn’t get past such a bleak look at marriage. It dominated the book for me.
Barry: $5.
Keith (and anyone else),
Slightly off topic, but I’m wondering if you’ve either read “Superfreakonomics” (or its predecessor) or saw the WSJ opinion piece / review today by Bret Stephens on the Global Warming chapter. Pretty interesting.
Link below:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704335904574495643459234318.html
Re: The point of “Tree of Smoke”
BAJ: Were there moments in your writing process where you worried the book wouldn’t work? If so, how did you press on?
DJ: Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask, it occurs to me I don’t have much interest whether any of my books work or not.
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2007_f_johnson_interv.html
Keith –
If you ever figure out the point of Tree of Smoke, I look forward to hearing it. I slogged through the whole thing, waiting for that “ah, now I get it” moment. For me, at least, it never came.
Though I did enjoy the Edward Lansdale-based character, if only because it reminded me of two of my favorite names: Ramon Magsaysay, and the Hukbalahaps.
If you’re a fan of Guinness, I’d highly suggest you try some other micro stouts/porters for comparison if nothing else. Troegs Dead Reckoning and Victory Donnybrook are among the best from the east coast (both from PA, Troegs is available up here in Davis and Porter, not sure about the Alewife store next to Whole Foods). Rogue’s Shakespeare out of Portland, OR is tremendous as well.
(Wolavers gives me heartburn for some reason.)
I found Yates’ novels to be too much unrelenting misery. But the short stories – I still think of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as maybe my favorite short story collection ever.
Mr. Law,
Just saw your tweet re: still be confused on Tree of Smoke. I love Denis Johnson. But I was surprised that won the National Book Award. Have to say, though, that it shares the quality I think you’ve mentioned w/ The Road, in that it stays with you and gets better after finished.
Now I’m going to go look, see if you’ve got James Salter on your list. “A Sport & a Pastime”.
boing boing ack,
Nevin