As any lover of the arts knows, an artist's reputation depends not only on what society thinks of their work, but also what they think of it over the passage of time, with many creative professionals' careers dipping up and down over the decades based on changing trends and tastes. Take American author Richard Yates for an excellent example; celebrated by the academic community when he first started writing in the early 1960s, he was considered in the vanguard of the nascent "postmodern" movement, mentioned in the same breath back then as such eventual masters as John Updike and Norman Mailer. (And by the way, I'm defining postmodernism here as developing at the same time and rate as the Vietnam War; so in other words, something only intellectuals were aware of when Kennedy first took office, but that had taken over the mainstream by the time Nixon was wearing wide lapels.) But unlike his peers, Yates' career ended up sputtering out about halfway through, with him eventually dying in the '90s on the cusp of obscurity, known if at all only by academes who specifically study the subject of postmodern literature; it wasn't until a series of such scholars started making a case for him in the 2000s that most of his work even went back into print, capped this year with an extremely high-profile Oscar-bait film adaptation of his very first novel, 1961's National Book Award nominated Revolutionary Road.I just read it myself for the first time this week, in fact; and now that I have, I can easily see not only why Yates was once considered on the forefront of very challenging highbrow lit in the early '60s, but why his work never broke out of the academic gutter while he was alive, and why it's so ripe to revisit at this particular moment in history. Because as many of us now know because of the details behind its film adaptation (it was directed by Sam Mendes, creator of the similarly themed American Beauty), Revolutionary Road turns out to be one of the very first artistic projects in history to have taken on the subject of the Big Bad Suburbs, a topic that eventually became a veritable hallmark of postmodernism and prone to hacky excess by the end of the movement. (That's also something to point out for those who don't know, that I consider postmodernism to have ended on September 11th, and that for the last decade we've actually been living through the beginning of a brand-new artistic age yet to be defined. The Age of Sincerity? The Earnest Era? Literature 2.0? The Obamian Age?)And indeed, it was important for the postmodernists to take on the subject of the crumbling suburbs, and of the utter sham they considered the entire concept of the "nuclear family" (a paradigm that was in fact to fall apart precisely during the postmodern years), exactly because it was the paradigm that their parents' generation embraced so whole-heartedly themselves, the sharp lines and unruffled feathers and black-and-white morality of Mid-Century Modernism. And ironically, even that was mostly a reaction to the mainstream paradigm of the generation before them, in this case the moral relativists of the Lost Generation and Great Depression of the 1920s and '30s, the gloomy sex-obsessed nihilists who brought about the ethical murkiness of World War Two and the Holocaust; the entire creation of the "nuclear family" paradigm after the war in the first place was as a direct reaction to those pulp-fiction years, an attempt by an entire society to say that there really is a series of black-and-white ethical values out there that really do apply to every person, not the world of infinite grays presented to us by the artists of the Weimar Era, the screenwriters of film-noir Hollywood and more. Of course, the tropes of Mid-Century Modernism too were found not to work, because humanity is simply more complex than this; and that's what this first wave of "post-Modernist" writers expressly became known for, for pointing out the growing cracks in this shiny plastic Eisenhower facade that most of America had voluntarily slapped on itself in the '50s and early '60s. And that's what led to the counterculture, which led to Watergate, which led to the second age of murky moral relativism that the '70s brought us; and society's reaction to that was once again the good-guy/bad-guy cowboy mentality of the Reagan years. And thus does the great wave of artistic history keep ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing.But, well, okay, you say, that covers half the mystery, of why Yates was so fawned over at the beginning of his career; but what about the other half, of why his work never caught on with the public in the same way as Updike or Mailer (or Vidal or Pynchon or DeLillo for that matter)? And after reading just one book of his now, I'm already starting to see the answer; because when all is said and done, Revolutionary Road is not necessarily a condemnation of the bland soul-killing suburbs themselves (although partly it is -- more on that in a bit), but rather is absolutely for sure a profound and overwhelming criticism of whiny, overeducated, self-declared intellectuals who feel they're "above" such pedestrian environments. It is in fact a big shock about the book, given traditional expectations that the ensuing Postmodern Age has created for such tales about the Big Bad Suburbs, and also given the glee in which movie stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio threw themselves into these roles for the film version; that Frank and Alice Wheeler, the poetry-reading Connecticut couple at the heart of our tale, are far from heroes in the traditional sense of the word, with Alice coming off more like a misguided dupe by the end and Frank more like an out-and-out despicable villain.And that's because Yates has a different message to convey about the suburbs than you might expect, a much more cynical message than that they're simply bland and soul-killing; he seems to argue that they're not only that, but that this is what most people deserve, and that such plebes can actually have a legitimately decent and happy life within such circumstances as long as they're willing to accept their plebian fate. For example, Yates goes out of his way to show that the young Frank isn't actually an intellectual, not from the stance of being academically trained for the subject, or even naturally talented enough to contribute something legitimately useful to the national conversation of deep thoughts; he's simply the most clever one out of the couple's circle of mostly brain-dead suburban friends, the guy who always seems to be in the center of the spotlight at every Friday-night neighborhood cocktail party. Place most men in such circumstances, Yates seems to argue, men with tiny little dreams and tiny little life expectations, and they will undoubtedly make a nice tiny little life for themselves with such material, undoubtedly become the guy in the neighborhood who always makes the most elaborate Halloween costumes, the guy always asked to head up school-play set designs and workplace book-discussion clubs.No no, Yates argues, the problem isn't with the people who are simply looking for such a life and not much more, nor the ones who definitively know that such a life simply isn't for them, and quietly decide to live different ones in inner cities without much fuss; no, the problem is with the whiny little "clever" ones, the ones exactly like Frank and Alice, who endlessly bitch and moan about their mouth-breather surroundings but then do nothing about it, who sanctimoniously pass judgment on their ranch-duplex-owning neighbors even while peering at them through the plate-glass windows of their own ranch duplex. That's how the book opens, in fact, with a disastrous premiere by the new neighborhood community theatre company, which wouldn't have been nearly as bad if celebrated as a simple act of creativity, instead of the failed experiment in bringing a highbrow sensibility to the meatsacks that the Wheelers had first pictured it as. It's a debacle for the young family, exacerbated by them being exactly snarky enough to laugh bitterly at the idea of it "at least being a fun experience anyway," and it leads the couple to realizing that something is truly wrong in their relationship, truly and seriously skewed from the unfocused bohemian vision the once Greenwich-Village-living couple had for themselves. (In fact, this is a running joke throughout the manuscript, how the couple wishes to live a creative lifestyle but can't think of anything creative to actually do. "Why is it only painters and writers who are allowed to find themselves?" they're constantly asking in a witty way during cocktail parties, yet another sign of the murky counterculture right around the historical corner.)But see, this is where the book gets truly interesting, and is the question that consumes most of its very quickly paced 450 pages; because is this unfocused bohemian vision the right one for the couple to have? Just what do the Wheelers want out of life, anyway? For example, it becomes obvious over the course of the novel that Frank doesn't actually mind the minutiae of Corporate America that terribly much, certainly not as much as he complains about, and that his problem is a much more universal one faced by most office workers in their late twenties, to simply have their ideas taken seriously and sometimes implemented, to slowly gain a bit of authority and respect among their co-workers for what they do. And in fact this is a big reason that I consider Frank so despicable to begin with, because he's a moral waffler who doesn't know exactly what he wants, who is too weak to simply sit down and make priorities and then consistently stick to them, even if that means occasional sacrifices. Just take the subject of whether the couple will ever have another child beyond the three that already exist, a running topic throughout the entire manuscript that becomes more and more important as it continues; notice how Frank's opinion on any given day is usually defined in relative opposition to whatever it is that the people around him want, how he will unthinkingly take on contradictory positions sometimes simply so that he can continue to have an excuse to argue with his wife, to feel like he's always "winning" in this hazy competition he sees them having.In this, then, as mentioned, Alice herself comes off less as a deliberate villain and more like an unfortunate victim; because despite her willingness to revel in the closed-door smugness over their neighbors that Frank so naturally loves, it's obvious that she's at least more ethically consistent over her unhappiness, that their half-baked scheme at the beginning of the book to "move to Paris in the fall" was something she at least took very seriously, not the excuse Frank sees it as to put off real introspection of his life for yet another three months. You can at least feel sympathetic for Alice throughout the course of Revolutionary Road, at least see her as the simple bohemian girl she sees herself as (itself a reaction to her own Scott-and-Zelda out-of-control Jazz-Age parents); it's Frank who's the grand, complex, maddening tragedy-in-waiting, and it's no coincidence that we follow his inner-brain thoughts more than anyone else's throughout.It's Frank who professes to despise his 9-to-5 job, yet loves that it can afford him a discreet marital affair played out in air-conditioned Manhattan hotel rooms; it's Frank who convinces his wife and their urbane best friends to start hanging out at the local crappy roadhouse for ironic enjoyment (yet another calling card of postmodernism, the act of enjoying crappy things for ironic reasons), yet is the first one to eventually start enjoying the place in a non-ironic way, and to become a legitimate regular there. Or in other words, he's one of those smug, holier-than-thou 29-year-old white-collar 'creative class' weasels you always want to smack when you're around them, the kind who's a major contributor to the problems of that world but claims that he isn't, just because he has a subscription to MAKE magazine and contributes snotty parodies of his day job to AdBusters. Yeah, one of THOSE weasels, like I said, the kind who happily accept all the little perks of the bourgeois lifestyle while still feeling themselves ethically superior to the little acts of banal monstrosity such bourgeois commit on a daily basis, in order to maintain their bourgeois lifestyle.This is not an easy lesson for most middle-class book lovers to embrace -- that they're either too stupid to understand all the problems their vapid, culture-free lives are creating for society, or are smart enough and simply don't care -- and it makes it easy to see why books like these would be embraced by a doom-and-gloom '60s academic community even while being mostly rejected by the book-buying public. But on the other hand, what Yates warns about here in 1961 is exactly what happened during the Postmodern Age, and it's exactly this clueless vapidity in the '70s, '80s and '90s suburbs that led to the grand post-Bush messes we're facing right this second; and that's why right now might be the best time of all to revisit Yates' work, and to understand the lessons that he was trying to tell us now that we're a generation removed from the activities, now that we don't take his damnations quite so personally. Revolutionary Road turned out to be a better book than I was expecting, albeit a much darker one as well, and one much more critical of its exact target audience than you'd think an award-winner could get away with. It explains much about how America eventually became the trainwreck we now know it as, of how we could so profoundly lose touch with such concepts as personal accountability, personal responsibility; it's a shame that it took most of us nearly 50 years to realize this about Yates' remarkable book, but how great that we finally now have.
“Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.” – Revolutionary RoadFire up your cigarette. Drag deep. Flick ash. In 1955, cigarettes are as harmless as steaks that are pan-fried in butter. Skip the highball and drain three fingers of straight bourbon instead. You will need a ball of whiskey sloshing in your stomach to flash a plastic grin as you meet the sad characters of Revolutionary Road. Frank Wheeler hates his job, so his wife, April, convinces him to promise to abandon suburbia and his steady job for the dream of living as bohemians in Paris. When April married Frank, she thought him “exceptional,” but being married to an business executive was not what she imagined. She convinces Frank that he needs to become an artist in Paris, which is funny, because neither knows what kind of artist he is supposed to become (painter? writer? musician?). The Wheelers assume that they will figure out Frank’s destiny in Europe, because everyone knows that you can’t discover your true vocation in suburbia.The Wheelers imagine themselves as "revolutionaries"––members of “an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground...painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” Forced to live in the “imprisoning” suburbia (with friendly, safe neighbors in a “wasteland” of shade trees and green lawns), the Wheelers bemoan that “nobody thinks or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little mediocrity.” Most of Revolutionary Road’s characters stare at themselves in mirrors with a glint of recognition of mediocrity before they relapse into self-delusion. Self-reflection is a recurring motif. Frank and April are in desperate need of self-revelation and self-revolution. To quote another Yeats, “Surely some revelation is at hand.”The Wheelers believe in “Truth.” They believe that they possess the truth. But Frank and April are deluded. They are not revolutionaries. Indeed, they are ordinary, conventional mediocrities like most of us. They are deluded in the way that many revolutionaries are, they seize one truth, (the superficiality of some people) overemphasize it, and, by losing balance and perspective, lose the truth that they covet. The Wheelers and their friends speak ill of neighbors with an ease of "voluptuous narrative pleasure." They disdain their neighbors, coworkers, and even their own children. Even neighbors bearing gifts of plants cause them offense. The Wheelers and their friends hate ideas that many of us hold dear: sweetness; niceness; sentiment; optimism; security; cuteness; middle-class; morality, tenderness; courage; mildness. Above all, “sentimentality” is derided perhaps 30 times in 300 pages. To the Wheelers and friends ,these words are vulgar obscenities, equated with disease, rottenness, flabbiness, emasculation, effeteness, hopelessness, and emptiness. The Wheelers despair of meaning, “What in the hell kind of life was this? What in God’s name was the point or the meaning of a life like this?” This reviewer does not understand the Wheelers’ question. Billions of people who do find meaning in life but who dwell in grinding and dispiriting poverty would gladly swap with the self-absorbed Wheelers. Richard Yates writes with magnificent simplicity. According to Richard Ford's introduction, Yates was a very bitter somewhat misanthropic man. Some of my best friends are human beings and some of them live in suburbs, and I will defend them-- because I believe in human beings and in friendship--I'm quite sentimental about it.I have also reviewed two other books of Richrd Yates with similar themes. Eleven Kinds of Lonelinesshttp://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...The Easter ParadeMy review: [http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... August 14, 2012
What do You think about Revolutionary Road (2001)?
well, i read the book ages ago and it left such an impression that when i signed up for bookface i stamped the sucker with a fiver. the gothsissy promises if i re-read it i'll knock off a few stars. whatever. i saw the movie last night and a word popped into my head: smimsicholy: a specific combination of smug-whimsy-melancholy seen in the work of certain 'important' artists and/or entertainers. yeah. if sam mendes is the cinematic anti-christ than this movie's his mastercheese. it's a laughable piece of bourgeois chest-beating. precious and maudlin and false. and it covers the unholy trinity (smug/whimsical/melancholy) while somehow managing to create even more of an abomination out of the sum of its parts. the bush era saw some very good american films and i think one of the best, and perhaps the one that will most define our time, is there will be blood. and i fear the obama age is gonna produce a lot of smimsicholic nonsense.i see that dave eggers (the king of literary smimsicholy) and his wife vendela vida (never read her but her name just reeks of it) wrote the screenplay for mendes' next movie. and it looks dreadful. check it:http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_f...revolting.i'm not really such a prick. this shit just makes me freak out a little bit.
—brian
Revolutionary Road is a masterpiece of realistic fiction and one of the most biting, scathing critiques I've ever read of 50s era American optimism and conformity.Bored with their dull, safe, suburban existence, Frank and April Wheeler – who've always felt they were destined for something great – attempt to carpe their diem, and make plans to move to Europe, where Frank can "find" himself. Still as sharp and relevant as it must have been when it was published over 50 years ago (!), Yates's book is brutal in its uncompromising look at our petty vanities and self-deceptions. Fine passages abound, from the opening sequence – set at the disastrous opening of a community theatre production of The Petrified Forest – to a series of awkward encounters with a neighbour's mentally disturbed son, who says what everyone's thinking but nobody admits.What's also fascinating about the novel is how Yates plays with narration. We switch POV several times, getting deep into the lives of the main couple, but also entering the minds of one of their neighbours – who's always lusted after April – and the town's successful female realtor. Flashbacks are handled gracefully, and symbols never feel forced. I found some of the writing around the 2/3 mark a little slack, perhaps because it deals with a certain subject that doesn't have the stigma it had back in the 50s, when the novel is set. And at times Yates's judgement of his characters – although honest and perceptive – feels a little too harsh. But this book deserves its place in the American literary canon.** Here's my review of his second book, the masterful collection of stories, Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness
—Glenn Sumi
On my fling-o-meter scale, Revolutionary Road is a well-traveled book, having been flung (why does this past participle sound so ungainly?) across the room several times. The initial trip occurred when Richard Yates gratuitously threw in this bit of over-writing in the first chapter: At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays—always it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white , the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shriveled snow” (4)It was the “hummocks of the earth” lying “naked and tender” among the “curds of shriveled snow” that made me yell fuck, and send the book airborne. During these outbursts, my golden retriever always gets up and heads toward a corner in the room, nose to the wall, like one of those doomed characters in the Blair Witch Project.The book fails on many levels.Characterization - It takes some doing to make Franzen's characters in the Corrections look warm and fuzzy by comparison. In RR, the protagonist, Frank Wheeler, offers no redeeming qualities. Our inability to identify with Frank or give a rat's ass what happens to him prevents the book from achieving its touted status as an American tragedy. It's a tragedy all right, but one of bad writing and poorly-executed characters, rather than pathos. Frank Wheeler may be the most self-absorbed, premeditated character ever created. This man could not pick his nose without first deciding what angle might best favor the nose picking and if it could be done in an off-hand, manly sort of way. Throughout, these brittle, self-absorbed, snotty, angst-ridden (for no particular reason) characters drink and smoke copious amounts. Their aimless path, similar to the circular journey of characters in The Sun Also Rises or The Great Gatsby is about the only aspect Yates has in common with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to whom he is equated, by David Hare, one of the gushing, drunken critics quoted on the book's back cover. However, I cared about Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Jake Barnes, and possibly even Brett Ashley. Yates' characters do not arouse my sympathy. Frank's obsessive fascination with his own psyche, April's confused and curiously unexplained actions, Shep's doglike devotion, and Milly's blankness work against what is, ostensibly, a character-driven novel.Theme - As far as I could tell the only "characteristically American theme"--a carefully vague phrase used by another critic quoted on the book's back cover--exemplified is something like when "manhood was in flower." Frank and April's planned relocation to Paris is proposed by April, who in a crescendo of wifely devotion and guilt, declares herself a selfish bitch who's never given Frank the time he's needed to find himself and bring his genius to fruition. Their intended escape from suburbia brings Frank and April closer, ramping up their love life and uniting them with a sense of superiority as they gleefully break the “news” to their less enlightened friends.The book’s lack of any sort of moral compass contributes to its failure. The manhood in flower theme is embarrassing, rather than noble. Consider the following, which the reader should somehow take seriously (!?). Here Frank picks through the women in his life, dissects their physical attributes, and declares them lacking—none of them worthy enough to lift him to manly triumph: But as college wore on he began to be haunted by numberless small depressions….It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he’d known so far had given him the sense of unalloyed triumph. One had been very pretty except for unpardonably thick ankles, and one had been intelligent, though possessed of an annoying attempt to mother him, but he had to admit that none had been first-rate. Nor was he ever in doubt of what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he’d never come close enough to one to touch her hand. There had been two or three of them in the various high schools he’d attended, disdainfully unaware of him in their concern with college boys from out of town; what few he’d seen in the army had most often been seen in flickering miniature, on strains of dance music, through the distant golden windows of an officers’ club…” (23, emphasis mine).But enough. The book took another trip across the room, and I felt like Dorothy Parker when she wrote, “at this point Tonstant Weader throwed up.”Like Shakespeare’s fools, who often penetrate the layers of deceit and spout words of wisdom, John Givings, the crazy son of Helen Givings, theoretically serves to offer up moments of Truth. Helen Givings and her husband have put their son in a mental health facility, and Helen thinks it would be “good” for their son, John, to talk to other young people. Thus, the ill-fated Sunday visits at the Wheeler’s home. But John’s truths are less than dependable. At one point, John channels Ayn Rand. After first mocking April, John is impressed by her frank response and provides this Randean pronouncement:[John:] stared at her for a long time, and nodded with approval. “I like your girl, Wheeler,” he announced at last. “I get the feeling she’s female. You know what the difference between female and feminine is? Huh? [No. But sadly we find out.:] Well, here’s a hint: a feminine woman never laughs out loud and always shave her armpits. Old Helen in there is feminine as hell. I’ve only met about a half dozen females in my life, and I think you got one of them here. Course, come to think of it, that figures. I get the feeling you’re male. There are aren’t too many males around, either” (201).I picked up the just-airborne book and finished this sucker, but there isn’t much more to write. The book is a muddled, mawkish, maudlin tribute to some time and place I’d like to think never existed.In sum, just picture a more existential martini-laden white collar version of the theme song to Archie Bunker:Boy, the way Glen Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade.Guys like us, we had it made.Those were the days!Didn't need no welfare state.Everybody pulled his weightGee, our old LaSalle ran great.Those were the days!And you knew where you were then!Girls were girls and men were men.
—Ellen
