Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
Revolutionary Road can be summed up as a depressing book written in beautiful, poetic prose. I hadn’t expected to enjoy it, but despite the darkness of the subject matter and the full awareness of how it was going to end up (tragically -that was clear from the first page), I was riveted. It is a rediscovered American classic which, I believe, has recently been made into a film. I can see why – the theme is as relevant in today’s celebrity/consumerist/keeping-up-with-the-joneses society as it was when it was written in the sixties.
April and Frank Wheeler are an average American couple. They are living the ‘American Dream’, with a suburban house, two children, Frank in a solid, dependable and untaxing job, and April keeping house and looking after the kids. The neighbourhood is an average suburban neighbourhood where everyone is polite and no-one breaks rank from the unspoken behavioural norms.
But April and Frank are dissatisfied, and the reason, as far as I could tell, was they had both been living a lie from the day they had met. What struck me about the story was how Yates managed to paint such a clear and realistic picture of two people who were so completely artificial and caught up in the game they were playing that it was a wonder they hadn’t crumbled sooner.
This is a story of arguments, hatred, disappointment and entrapment – both of the characters suffered these things and blamed the other. What I found interesting were the contrasts. Mr and Mrs Givings were at one end of the artificiality scale. Mrs Givings would never admit to being dissatisfied, would never want anything else, and was so deliriously happy and positive all the time (between gossiping and judging others) that it was impossible to know who she actually was. On the other end of the scale was their son, John Givings who was the only person in the entire book who was ‘genuine’, saying it how he saw it and recognising other people’s unhappiness stripped bare. However John was confined to a mental asylum. I couldn’t help but think that of all of the characters in the book, he was the one least deserving of that – but then again, he didn’t fit in to the fiction that everyone else lived by.
In the middle were Frank and April, and the tension that came from their feeling of disempowerment and entrapment was to spell their downfall. This is an incredibly tragic story, and the author has succeeded in making you feel the venom of the arguments, making you feel the blame and hopelessness of both, and putting you in a position where you can’t side with one or the other – they are simply both to blame.
Rating: 8/10
ISBN: 0099518627
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Year: 2007
Date Finished: 24 October 2009
Pages: 352
